Our brains are just amazing in the way a supercomputer is.
We can take all experiences, situations, environmental limitations, relevant personalities, past outcomes, and other relevant data and do what a friend of mine calls “running scenarios” to predict with some scary accuracy what could happen to something we value, us or those around us in most cases.
When we stop you and mention something like that, we’re usually trying to save you some stress or time based on what we see going on, and what we don’t see but extrapolate. It’s never for any other reason except that we care and want to help. You’d be amazed at how many people insist on doing it their way anyway, which tends to end up going the way we expected it to. It’s very hard not to point that out when it does go just as we thought. We’re not gloating – we’re bummed we weren’t able to stop it knowing it was coming. That can be frustrating, to say the least. It’s why at times we don’t want to know – so we don’t torture ourselves feeling like we could have done something.
I did some looking into this with other females of the type of course, mostly in the group – discussing situations they encountered where they visualized how something would turn out that they were witness to or involved in, and it seems for most of us it’s not something conscious. We will actually question how we visualized it to go the way it actually did. It really seems like a random premonition. But it isn’t.
The cool thing is our brains run scenarios we are aware of, but it also does this unconsciously, in the background at all times. Our brains are so adept at doing this, that it happens when we sleep (several of us thought we predicted something that came to fruition in a dream, but likely instead our brains were “running scenarios” for all information we gathered up to that point even while we were sleeping). So we’re not predicting anything, but rather…our minds are alerting us to the most logical scenario based on all factors so that we can prevent or be prepared for or even adjust to the highest probability.
This past spring, I spun music for a fellow classmate who turned 50 (well, we all did in the past year, fun fun). From the time I arrived at this venue and started setting up, I had a very nagging feeling that my equipment would be at risk of damage, and I even suspected who would be the person to do it. I kept dismissing this as a weird silly thing my brain was doing that didn’t make sense, but it didn’t go away and it even became a distraction. This went on for a couple of hours. Of course at some point in the night, the person I worried would drop something on my equipment dropped an entire drink into my audio mixer. I saw the whole thing unfolding almost exactly as I feared it would in slow motion…sure, some would say I caused this by projecting it, but I really think I was highly intuitive to the mishap based on all the data I had to work with.
I know now that I need to really pay attention to stuff that nags at me like this. If I try to dismiss it twice and cannot, I’ll assume it’s a high probability risk and treat it as such. From there if I can’t prevent it, I need to at least get my mind around it so I’m not caught off guard and I can quickly right the situation/do damage control. No one but me is to blame should I ignore my instincts. And that’s the good part, for me. I am master of my own destiny with this talent.
The downside is that this can backfire and cause our minds to start over processing information to the point where it causes anxiety and stress, and plenty of us do this to the point of seeming paranoid to those around us if we ever voice our concerns. For example, if you have a fear of roller coasters being in a park full of them might cause you to come unglued even if you never get on one. You can drive yourself insane being in the vicinity of one with so many other stimuli such as people and time of day and heat and anything else you can come up with that might cause a simple amusement park ride to seem like a death trap. You can do this with many situations you can’t control – and if you have anxiety or depression anyway, it’s really not healthy.
It’s for this reason that we really need to figure out how to use this to our advantage and to learn when to shut it off or disable it (or channel it so that it doesn’t drive us bananas). Many of us lose most of our sleep nightly due to either reviewing stuff we can’t change or running lists and scenarios of what has yet to happen. But once we can fine tune it to our advantage, it’s so damn close to being telepathic that it’s a true superhero skill.
Since we generally never need to learn something twice the ability for us to process information based on what information we’ve been given about future events and what we have applied over the past years to similar situations is pretty insanely accurate. At work this is an amazing skill – we can bring the efficiency of a process up to a very productive level without much effort. We also don’t trip over how we feel about all of it, as our peers tend to, so it doesn’t get in the way of us getting things done better and faster, even if we have to fine tune our own part of the equation to do it – we don’t take it personally, and in fact we generally welcome constructive criticism, as we WANT to improve our skill set, so for us it’s all good.
We are misinterpreted frequently as know it all, cynical, even negative or control freaks, but I’m telling you – if you have a problem you need a second opinion on, and a solid answer that will fix it, put your pride aside and take it to an INTJ (male or female). Outside of the feelings you have about the situation, you won’t regret giving it to us. Prepare to give a lot of excess information about the issue, and bring a pad and pencil, because our answer will be calculated, long winded, detailed and extremely accurate. But it will be one of the most logical common sense answers you’ll get and it will probably end your problem.
Rare INTJ Females: We Welcome You! 