New Theory on Blink, Psychics, and Dream Interpretation

"Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings--thoughts and impressions that don't seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It's thinking--its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with thinking.'" -Malcolm Gladwell, about Blink

I feel the need to disclose that I've never really been much for psychics and the supernatural and anything related to it - somehow after Miss Cleo went to prison, it all lost its luster for me. However, throughout my life various people have claimed to have psychic connections to me or that I had a powerful aura or some other penchant towards the supernatural. I've always dismissed it despite being exposed to far more people with some sort of psychic claim than most people (most of these people having been my mom's friends or general family friends and connections). I'm an academic, I went to a school heavily dominated by those going to med school or concentrating in engineering... the typical background for a cynic/non-believer/empiricist.

So last week when I had a weird feeling about my parents dog and then had a couple of dreams about her, I wasn't necessarily all that worried. I started to have insomnia again, but figured that was more a result of the unpleasant content than because I actually believed it was all true... but nonetheless, last week I told my mom I'd had these worries and at one point even texted my mom to ask if Wilma was okay, figuring that if I got a text back from her at 3am (when I texted), that she was awake and something was wrong... and if there was radio silence, I was golden. No response and I figured I was in the clear. But I had this bad feeling/bad dream a time or two more and various meetings were canceled and timing happened to work out that last week was one of the least busy I've had in awhile, so I figured I'd take a road trip to Atlanta and see Wilma nad my parents. Turns out, Wilma got sick right after I freaked the first time, but the vet thought it was just a sinus infection made worse by her existing cancer and radiation... my parents more or less told me about this and I relaxed, but then when timing worked out and I was just feeling weird about everything anyways, I told my parents I'd be home that day and my mom confessed that Wilma was in emergency surgery... so, long story short (or shorter, because trust me, these weird feelings and such could be discussed for much longer), I had feelings about an event and they turned out to be scary accurate, despite a lack of knowledge of the events.

I'm most definitely NOT claiming to have any psychic powers or anything along those lines, and in fact, think that I've come up with a new idea/theory about how existing research and ideas can explain this phenomena in a fairly rational, empirical way. I was thinking about affective forecasting and general "gut instinct" research - namely that from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink - and how humans can make very good decisions with gut instinct and without conscious thought in split seconds (you can read more about it here, in an interview with the author, among other places - it's a pretty popular pop psychology book). However, the caveat is that we make good decisions when we have enough experience and background knowledge that we can subconsciously evaluate those experiences and combine them to make predictions and assess potential outcomes. Thus, we are good at gut feelings and split-second decisions when we are "experts" in the situation or field of the decision - such as the CEO of a company who has been in his position for ten years and he has a feeling about a particular business decision. But, we are not good when we don't have the experiences and knowledge to evaluate the situation - even if we don't know we could have this knowledge or that we have this knowledge in the "expert" situation. For example, a new CEO with little experience in the field/company might not be able to make good decisions using a "gut instinct" because he cannot think back to similar situations he has experienced or knowledge he has about the people and situation and use those to subconsciously evaluate alternatives.

So what does this have to do with being psychic? Well, I think that it's this sort of subconscious decision-making and evaluating that happened to me/for me/within me. I knew Wilma was sick and that things had been happening and my parents were being evasive about everything and so my subconsious was simply telling me to go home and visit Wilma because she was sick and is terminal, not necessarily because anything specific was happening to her. The fact that these feelings and additional bad events overlapped is coincidence. And odds are that bad things have and will continue to happen to poor Wilma because she has terrible luck and because she has had a terrible reaction to the radiation. And the fact that any of this was connected to dreams is just more evidence that the subconscious is involved. After all, one theory of dreams and states of consciousness is that we simply explore various ideas and thoughts from the unconscious/subconscious mind while we sleep... sometimes playing with ideas in a sort of working of the Rubik's cube. And that's what happened here...

Maybe I'm just freaked out about this because my mom is so convinced that I have some sort of psychic vision or connection to Wilma and that clashes with both my personal beliefs about the universe and what is real and tangible as well as my very self-concept (as an empiricist, rational person... mostly devoid of and inept with feelings). But nonetheless, am I making a big leap so I can sleep at night? Is this theory even remotely plausible or legitimate?

Commonalities in Hardship

I've had multiple conversations about this recently and I think I've been particularly interest because of my scholarly interest in resilience (and related constructs such as hardiness, psychological capital, etc.) as well as in finding benefits from having experienced stressful and/or traumatic experiences, so I figured I'd write about it here and see what you guys thought...

Basically, I was talking to a fellow grad student that I like a lot and we were talking about how we both tend to really like and be friends with other people who have had something terrible happen to them or have had to overcome something. Those are the types of people we feel most comfortable relating to and sharing problems with and those that just "get" us. It was then easy for us to generate examples of people that we didn't like - some of them mutually disliked grad students - who have everything handed to them. Those most despised frequently try to explain that they do have problems, like when they spent their monthly allowance too quickly or didn't get to go to both South Africa and Ireland (just one). They oftentimes tell this to people like me and my friend who struggle to pay for everything on our own and have for the better part of a decade.

So my question is this: Are we (some of us) attracted to others who have overcome something because they are simply similar to us (like is attracted to like, birds of a feather flock together), which is a well-established psychology principle? Or is it that the experience of overcoming something fundamentally alters your personality and viewpoint in some way? As in, suddenly getting a C on a test seems like no big deal because you're trying to make rent this month OR you feel like you can confide and trust someone who knows what it is to struggle, to be less than perfect... And to that point, does the size of the obstacle we overcome matter? Because the truth is that we are all individuals and we do experience situations differently (all of us don't react the same way to the same situation) and thus, might it take different size obstacles to yield the same results? Is there a basic threshold or minimum level of difficulty needed to get to the point where you are more laidback and accepting of others or just reap the benefit of hardship?

So what do you think?