A life of the (intuitive) mind
BY Susan Smalley
Imbalance has taken on new meaning in the 21st century. Information
overload, pagers, beepers, e-mail, blackberrys — life is a
constant “filling up” of more and more and more. Time
has expanded in our minds to a point where we no longer know what
is physically possible to accomplish, and so we are left with double-booked
schedules, back-to-back meetings, projects initiated and never completed.
As scientists, clinicians and academicians, we are “losing
it” when it comes to taking care of ourselves. Some of us
squeeze in the daily exercise routine or even the infrequent lunch
for leisure — but we never take both feet off the treadmill
of going, going, going in our academic lives.
We all want to stop and maybe regain a moment of the inspiration,
passion, creativity and compassion that brought us into academia.
But as the white rabbit said to Alice, “I’m late, I’m
late, for a very important date. No time to say hello, goodbye,
I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.” We think
there’s no time to say hello or goodbye to one another or
pause before we talk with a patient or teach a class.
The treadmill continues after work ends. We rush home to be the
parent we know we can be, actively involved in our children’s
lives. We also strive to be the organized homemaker, someone who
has it “all together.” But let’s face it. We don’t.
As we expand our knowledge of technology, genetics, neuroscience
and medicine, we seem to move further away from the intuitive mind,
the process of inner discovery. Real healing will begin when we
reopen ourselves to this inner discovery and couple it with the
vast external discovery currently under way.
Intuition is a nonrational process of entering into knowledge. It’s
difficult to measure, but neuroscientists and psychologists are
beginning to investigate processes like insight, creativity and
curiosity, which are related to intuition. A parallel line of research
in mind-body medicine is an investigation of “mindfulness,”
the “moment-by-moment awareness of one’s experiences.”
Both mindfulness and intuition have been described as key components
to creativity, wisdom and well-being. Further, mindfulness is proving
to be a powerful component to healing across a wide range of physical
and mental conditions.
So two lines of investigation — the scientific exploration
of creativity and intuition, and the scientific investigation of
mindfulness and its role in well-being — seem to be converging.
This reflects our society’s need to investigate, experience
and understand our inner landscape — the intuitive mind —
and its convergence with the external landscape of reason.
The most interesting outcome of balancing reason and intuition is
that time takes on a limitless quality wherein creativity, connection
and compassion permeate all aspects of life. I am convinced that
merging intuition and reason in research and education is crucial
to promoting well-being in the genomic era — never mind the
irony of using scientific reductionism to demonstrate the importance
of inner reflection.
For too long, education, science and medicine have focused solely
on the ration-
al mind. The time has come to open up again — to bring the
intuitive mind back into balance with the rational mind in our work,
home and play.
Smalley, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences,
is co-director of the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics at NPI.
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