ADD Intuition

Hidden thoughts

For many people their intuition is often accurate, insightful, intelligent and sometimes quite surprising. They realise that they know something, feel a particular way or have a particular view without being aware of ever having previously thought about it. But it seems that the non-conscious, un-conscious or subconscious (as I will refer to it from now on) brain has given the matter a great deal of thought.

“Has anyone ever told you that you are amazing? Well you are. You process vast amounts of information. You effortlessly delegate most of your thinking and decision-making to the masses of cognitive workers busily at work in your minds basement. Only the really important mental tasks reach the executive desk, where your conscious mind works. When you ask, “what are you thinking?” your mental CEO answers, speaking of worries, hopes, plans and questions, mindless of all the lower floor laborers.”  from Intuition by David G. Myers

Divine force or clever brain

Some people believe that intuition is a spiritual gift, something out of the ordinary something that connects them to the divine. They say that intuition could not possibly be derived from what they already know, feel, smell, see or hear. I do not see it this way. While it may be that our brains are indeed divine - they are so amazingly sophisticated, complex and quite incredible - intuition is just a facet of our brains normal functioning. Intuition is mental, complex parallel processing based on sensory inputs, memories, stored concepts and ideas in order to make short-cuts, estimations, deductions and connections.

Part of the confusion comes from believing that the conscious mind is “all there is” to the mind. In fact nearly all our brain power is devoted to subconscious processing. We do not consciously balance on a beam, recognise faces, drive cars or even speak out loud. It is a mistake to see the conscious as the only controlling force of our mind. From experiments with brain scans, we know that parts of the brain responsible for action become active before the conscious part of the brain even registers the action. The subconscious brain has completed the action even before the conscious mind comes to arrogantly conclude that it was really its decision all along! Really all the conscious has done is observe what took place.

There is a great deal of experimental evidence to confirm the fact that mental processing takes place in parallel, subconsciously throughout the brain. Many people can recall a time when they were driving a car and found themselves at the destination with being conscious of driving there. There are extraordinary cases of people with brain injuries who cannot consciously see an object and yet can do so subconsciously. When asked if they can see a stick they say no, but when asked whether the stick is held horizontally or vertically they “guess” correctly all the time. There are a number of excellent books on the subject including “Intuition” by David Myers, “A Mind of Its Own” by Cordelia Fines and “Strangers to Ourselves” by Timothy Wilson. These are listed in the book section and are great if somewhat disturbing reads.

ADD Differences

Many people with ADD believe themselves to be very intuitive. Authors who write about ADD  gifts or positive traits almost always list intuition amongst them. Do people with ADD have more intuitive minds than others? I think the answer is yes they do, because of three aspects of ADD.

1. ADD minds run fast. These fast or hyper-rates do not necessarily apply to all sections of the mind but in certain sub-sections (medulla, cerebellum, thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdale, frontal lobes, temporal lobes, motor cortex etc) depending on the specific kind of ADD and the individual our brains run fast. Hence the “H” that I really don't like in ADHD does in fact apply to all people with ADD but it doesn't stand for physical Hyperactivity (running around impulsively) it stands for Hyperactive processing in the brain. So certain sub-sections of the brain may be parallel processing information, thoughts and ideas far more quickly than for in a Neuro-Typical brain. Some of these areas may concern peripheral vision, body language interpretation, recall, prediction, areas that may well aid insightful intuition.

2. ADD minds love connections. Many people with ADD see themselves as “big picture” thinkers. With less dominant left-brain functions, the right brain functions inevitably become more dominant. The right brain is home to emotions, pattern-recognition, intuition, creativity, and loves connections; the left brain is linear and works on rules, facts and figures. Consequently ADD people “see the wood for the trees”, in fact they can't see the trees as trees are mere boring details!  The ADD mind strives to make connections between multiple fundamental concepts. When a new ideas or fact is considered the ADD mind fits it to the previously collated and connected library of information already stored in memory. This connected-library continues to grow and develop with age and may help explain why children with ADD are initially slower to learn than Neuro-Typical children. If the information does not fit or is not congruent with the “big-picture” then the ADD mind struggles to accept it, each new piece of information must be connected to all other related information. Multiple connections in a big-picture mind explains why ADD scientists (such as Einstein or Edison) have breakthrough insights and invent, and explains how ADD comics make absurd humorous observations and connections.

3. ADD minds are more opaque. Finally the third factor, that perhaps more often gives us a feeling of intuition in ADD: our minds are more opaque to our conscious. A key aspect of ADD is that our regulation of the neuro-chemicals dopamine and nor-adrenaline (nor-epinephrine) is different from Neuro-Typicals. In some parts of brain there is more and in some parts less of these essential chemicals critical for speed of processing but also for inter-brain communication. The major “problem” in ADD is that our communication with the “Future-centric, Grown-up, Boredom-control, Rule enforcement”, Frontal Lobes - is weaker. This results in “undesired behaviour” such as excess of “in the moment pleasure seeking”, poor planning and disrespect for other people's rules. It also means ADD people don't get stuck in boring tasks, can break patterns to invent and create and do tend to be late! But it is not just a communication issue with the frontal lobes, different parts of brain communicate more or less effectively with one another, and inevitable with the conscious too. This lack of inter-communication between the components of the brain does not however mean that these sections are not independently processing or even hyper-processing. It does mean however that the conscious may have fewer glimpses at the thinking that is going on in these sub-sections or sub-conscious parts.

Clever Subconscious

This same subconscious process operates when the phone rings and we intuitively know who is calling, our subconscious hears the ring well before our conscious does, the subconscious connects all the available information together, who calls you most often, at what times, who might have a reason to be calling now and the subconscious makes an intelligent deduction then as to who is calling. It is not divine prompting but rather our amazing subconscious brain making a very clever guess.

When we intuitively “read” another person's emotions or thoughts, this too comes from our subconscious at work. It rapidly processes body-language, intonation and language clues, it accesses memories of the person and other peoples past reactions and situation; and it then connects all the clues, rules and memories to deduce their mood. Our conscious believes it knows how the person feels “without even thinking about it”, but the reality is that our subconscious has been working rapidly in parallel on piecing it all together.

Over-rated Conscious

I think intuition is fantastic, not guaranteed to be right but often the result of a great deal of deep thinking. It is more that our conscious is overrated (or so says my dumb conscious mind?!). The conscious isn't really in charge of much and this lack of real power in our conscious mind is why denial and rationalisation have such significant places in our lives. When the subconscious decides upon an action that is counter to our conscious wishes, we are left in the uncomfortable position of not feeling in control of ourselves. So the conscious simply denies that the action has taken place or simply attempts to rationalise and justify the action in hindsight. “I needed the wine because I was stressed”, “I didn't really drive that quickly” or “I failed because I was tired".

So try to get your conscious to start seeing itself, as not much more than a spotlight trained on one part of our current subconscious thinking. Get it to accept that it has limited control of decision making, it simply observes the result of decisions made by the subconscious and only then justifies why the decision was made. Have it resign itself to the fact that it is just not very influential. If you are ADD then it has even less influence than if you were Neuro-Typical. As someone with ADD, accept that your conscious mind has a tougher struggle to deny your subconscious' wishes but embrace the fact that you have Great Intuition...