You See Four; I See Twenty-Eight - A Follow-up

Last week, in a piece entitled, You See Four; I See Twenty-Eight, I explained how a fair number of us perceive the world differently than the majority. Partly because our brains are less than efficient at filtering out information, we connect the dots in ways that variously come across as visionary or uncanny or totally weird, depending on point of view.

We also tend to get overloaded fairly quickly, which puts our brains in danger of flipping out or shutting down.

One way of looking at this is that while most people think linearly, we non-linear people tend to instantly arrive at conclusions - say 28 - while our linear counterparts are still logically and laboriously working their way to four. Often, we are too far ahead of the rest of the world for our own good. In my piece, I described what I considered a normal - though emotional - response to 28. But the company I was in saw my actions as an irrational over-reaction to the four she was perceiving.

Small wonder we non-linears tend to get marginalized.

From my point of view, the rest of the world is occupied by plodding two-year-olds unable to see the obvious. But when I rationally react to what I see, well guess who gets written off as the two-year-old? It doesn't help that I have bipolar, either, which is obviously linked to non-linear thinking. Mental illness is hardly a prerequisite for thinking non-linear, but - take my word for it - if you're constantly reacting to 28 when the rest of the world is bumbling along at 4, then you most assuredly will be taken for crazy. Prepare for a challenging life ahead.

One of my commenters, CT, could very much relate, and wondered whether I had looked into the issue of "sensitives." Not really, so I started looking. On a site called the-auras-expert.com, I came across this:

Highly sensitive persons (HSP's) have heightened sensitivity to their environments. If you're a highly sensitive person, your nervous system literally picks up more information than the average person about what's going on around you. As HSP's receive heightened sensory input, you can easily get overloaded by too much stimulation. HSP's can also be more sensitive on other levels. ...

As an HSP, it is important to become aware of your situation so you can learn to manage it. In this fast-paced world of over-stimulation, you need to learn to make choices that are healthy for you, even if others might not understand or relate.

As I responded to CT: While I could relate to this, I make no claim to psychic powers or paranormal abilities. I am "sensitive" only in regard to: 1) I pick up more information than others on what's going around me (or rather my brain doesn't filter it out). 2) Because of this, I can intuitively come up with answers long before others logically reach the same conclusion. 3) I can also find creative solutions that others would never even consider.

If this were all there was to it, of course, I would be a mental superman and very well off on account of it. Unfortunately, number 4) comes into the picture, namely I get overwhelmed by events around me very easily, which has made navigating through life a considerable challenge.

I assume a lot of you can identify with this. As to the overlap between intuitive and psychic, from a blog post last Sept:

"How intuitive are you?" I asked you in a poll I conducted during the month of August. There were seven possible answers - ranging from "psychic" to "sorry," and you were allowed to fill in as many as you like. One hundred fifty of you came up with 316 answers, or two each, presumably not ones that represented polar opposites.

The extremes provide some indication of where you stand. Nearly one in four of you (35, 23%) answered that you were "borderline or full-on psychic, or at least it seems that way." In contrast, less than one in ten (13, 8%) responded with, "Sorry, I'm totally rational and logical."

I highly doubt that we would find so many with psychic tendencies in the general population. I also suspect that a lot less of you would share this kind of information with your psychiatrist. We've all had experiences that we can only describe as uncanny and inexplicable. Some of us have them with greater regularity.

Moving on to straight-up intuition: Four in ten of you (64, 42%) indicated that "my thoughts and ideas seem to come out of nowhere" while more than half (83, 55%) reported that "I often read people and situations like a book." This represents our bipolar advantage - creativity and seemingly otherworldly mental abilities - as well as our curse - racing thoughts and distractibility.

So, as I explained to CT: It looks like we're talking about a spectrum where intuition and perception overlap into psychic or what seems like psychic.

I've had a lot of uncanny weird stuff happen to me - such as having a vivid dream about an earthquake the day before I experienced my very first earthquake. But these are random chance occurrences. If this were a power I could control, I'd be rich.

All I can say is thank god I don't have a higher sensitivity. Imagine my brain going off every time the earth twitched. I'd be a nervous wreck, especially now that I live in California. My guess is that long ago my brain learned to tune out this stuff, assuming I had this sensitivity in the first place.

CT also had another point:

The majority of time I think nearly exactly the way you describe, with the possible exception I might also get "stuck" on 28 or keep looping back to it.

Tell me about it. All week following my 28 personal encounter, I was fixated on 28, unable to see my way to 72. This has to do with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the various feedback loops that run through it. We see this in people with OCD. The ACC won't let them let go of a thought.

Sometimes, getting stuck on 28 is good, especially if you're Steve Jobs holding up the iPhone GS28 - uh 4. But being John McManamy trapped in his own shit - well, that's bad.

This whole non-linear thing is a work-in-progress for me, but as I explained in response to a comment by Nanci:

After all these years, I think I finally may have cracked my case wide open. Yes, the bipolar explains a lot of my thinking and feeling and behavior, but underlying everything is the non-linear stuff. The overload manifests as anxiety and bipolar (which explains the bipolar-creativity connection). And when I over-react for no apparent reason, I need to be thinking: Is this my racing mind distorting reality or is this a non-linear insight that everyone else is too stupid to see?

Questions, questions. Have a happy 28th of July - uh Fourth.

You See Four; I See Twenty-Eight

Psychiatry tells us that we typically over-react to situations. We over-think things, we panic, we get overwhelmed. Our brains respond by flipping out or shutting down. We behave badly, and then we're left dealing with the consequences.

"Normal" people don't think and act this way is the message. "They" respond rationally.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is based around this proposition. Someone says, "I'll call you later." But we often interpret that to mean, "I'm not interested in you." Then our runaway brains take over, churning out all kinds of crazy destructive thoughts.

"What did I do wrong?" "The bastard!" "Why does this always happen to me?" - Take your pick. Not surprisingly, we end up anxious and depressed and miserable. The person calls, just like he said he would. We respond by snapping his head off.

Congratulations. We've just fulfilled our own prophecy. Now that person really truly isn't interested in us.

CBT is based on mindfully observing these self-defeating thoughts and taking corrective action. We train our brains to interpret, "I'll call back later" as a sign of interest. And how does it feel when a person is interested in us? A lot better than the load of crap our out-of-control brains used to be spinning out, thank you very much.

Naturally, I'm a big fan of CBT and mindfulness. But a new twist came up yesterday. Let me explain:

Something happened in a social interaction with a good friend on Sunday. Her friend was being a jerk, and the only way I could respond without making a scene was by making a scene - I left.

Naturally, the friend thought I had overreacted - made a big deal out of nothing - and from her point of view she was absolutely right. So, yesterday, I tried to explain what was happening from my point of view.

Such and such happened, I began, which meant such and such was going to happen. Clear as day, right?

She didn't see how my first such and such connected to my second such and such.

A light bulb went off. How could she? I reasoned. She was thinking linearly. I don't, even though I have a law degree. I'm non-linear. A lot of us with mental illness are. I've been blogging a lot on this recently. Basically, it works like this: People inclined to high creativity, perception, and intuition tend to have brains that are less than efficient in filtering out the world around us.

Everything lands on our intrays, in effect. Very little goes in the wastebasket. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions in abundance. The positive side of this is that when we manage to connect some of these seemingly unrelated inputs into novel points of view we look like geniuses, or, at worst, a bit weird and eccentric.

The negative side is that is we easily get overwhelmed. Our brains respond by flipping out or shutting down.

Fortunately, I already had shared some of this with my friend. She knows me - kind of. She's seen my brain in action. She knows I have a gift. But I had also been quick to tell her that I have paid a very high price for this gift. A very high price. She's very sympathetic, but nevertheless, here I was, in her presence, being judged, forced to make my case:

It's like this, I replied. You and So-and-So are thinking, "one-two-three-four." I'm already on "twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight." I already know what is going to happen before you do.

They see four. I see twenty-eight. They think I'm responding inappropriately to four. Really, I'm responding as they would to twenty-eight. Probably with a lot more restraint. At least I was able to mindfully observe my brain undergoing a meltdown. At least I was able to vacate the scene before I said things that I would regret.

Unfortunately - for me - I could not stop the chain reaction in my brain. I drove off with the full knowledge that my day was ruined, that for the next several hours the agony of ten thousand hells would play out inside my skull. My only measure of control was to try to endure those hours with some degree of equanimity.

As I said, I pay a very high price for my gift.

I wasn't asking my friend to understand me. Only that she not judge me. In effect, we occupy two different worlds. Or, rather, we see the same world very differently. But the hard cold reality is that the world we share is run by the linear people. The more adept I am at conforming to their expectations the happier I will be. I've learned to be pretty good at this.

In fact, this was what I really valued about our friendship. In her presence I felt that I actually belonged in her world. In the course of the precious time we spent together, I could forget that I was a person that her world was ready to write off as mentally ill.

Then came the brutal hard cold reminder.

Fortunately, I think I salvaged the friendship, but I know she will never look at me the same way again. People like me react to things others don't see. These people, naturally, think we're crazy. At least I know my friend is at least trying to see things from my point of view. A cognitive behavioral therapist sure as hell wouldn't.

More Thoughts on the Linear and Non-Linear People

In my last blog piece, I asserted there are two types of people, linear and non-linear. This topic came up in two talks I gave last month at the Kansas State DBSA conference. It also ties into a closely-related peanut butter-tofu theme I introduced at the conclusion of my first talk. So let's jump in, conclusion first:

Why don’t I conclude with a short reading from the book I’m working on?

Anyone NOT familiar with Star Trek? The people not familiar, of course, they're not going to raise their hands. That's like asking a room full of psychiatrists, "Anyone here with a mental illness?"

So, I'll read from the draft of the book I'm working on, which, as you will recall, is entitled, "Raccoons Respect My Piss, But Watch Out for Skunks." (Oh, I'm going to fight with the publisher to keep that title.)

So ...

No doubt, you recall the now-classic scene in the movie Star Trek where I attempt to explain the concept of peanut butter to an incredulous Spock.

"Peanut butter is not logical," Spock keeps telling me.

"You of all people would know that peanut butter is logical," I retort. "And if your mother truly loved you, you would feel the same way about peanut butter that I do."

Spock is valiantly trying not to give in to his anger. Although he identifies as a Vulcan his deceased mother was human. Earlier in the movie, his Vulcan father informed him he had a choice between two paths in life, his rational Vulcan self or his emotional human self.

Neither is right or wrong, father informs son. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Head or heart. Informed decision or gut.

So, here we are - Spock and me - on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. The Romulan renegade Nero has just destroyed Spock's planet and Earth is next. But first, time for a sandwich (priorities are priorities).

Spock keeps trying to explain that Cardassian tofu is logical.

"Yeh," I reply, "but it tastes like shit." I mean, seriously, have you ever seen a happy Cardassian?

"What does happiness have to do with it?" Spock shoots back at me.

***

That's my point. And there we go. We're peanut butter people trying to fit into a tofu world governed by Vulcans.

Now, probably you don't know what any of that means, but I like to leave people confused, I like to irritate, so maybe a pearl of wisdom might pop out.

So in the meantime, as I always tell people, enjoy the peanut butter. (Now you're really going to write on your evaluations I'm crazy.)

After my second talk, the other three speakers and I formed a discussion panel that took questions from the audience. The very first question involved bipolar and creativity. This was my answer:

If I can add something to that, Evelyn. I kind of jokingly referred to the linear people and the non-linear people. It's a idea I got from Nancy Andreasen, who does a lot of work studying creativity at the University of Iowa. She's the first one to do studies into this, and she's doing brain scan studies on creative people right now. Basically, our brains are organized in different ways that encourage us to think outside the box, and sometimes this means we don't test well doing linear tasks.

If there's a multiple choice question, sometimes all four answers look right to me. Because in a non-linear way, I can say, oh yeh, two plus two does equal six. Because if you do it this way and this way - can't you see that?

Or then they ask something stupid. And it's like - wait a second - there's a lot of ambiguity to this question. And that makes me look stupid, because: "Can't you understand the question?" "No, because there's too many possibilities with the answers here."

I've had to learn as part of my own social development - linear people think, "1,2,3,4,5, ..." I go, "1,2,28." And if I come up with a 28 answer in a group of people, they're going to think I'm weird. So I have to dial my 28 answer back to 6. Then it looks like I'm a little bit creative and lively.

Seriously, we're peanut butter people living in a land of tofu. And we have to learn to adapt to tofu, unfortunately. But the world gets its gifts through the peanut butter people.

I think you know where I'm going with that ...

To which my fellow panelist, Kansas WRAP coordinator Karen Cook, added:

"The question is how do you keep from being tofu - and stay peanut butter."