Seeing the World with Low Latent Inhibition (LLI)
On Being Different...
Mekus had never considered himself different from the next guy. In his opinion, he was just a regular guy. He made friends quite quickly because he understood people and their motivations very well. But it worried him that among all the people he knew, he could not profoundly connect with many of them.
As a result, he had only just one person whom he considered a friend. The other people, while they considered him a friend of theirs because of how well he understood them and how he treated them, were not his friends because they did not comprehend him. As a result, in the midst of a crowd, Mekus was alone.
Mekus never wanted to be better, worse or different from anyone else. But the rate at which he got into trouble with his parents, suggested to him that there was at least something wrong with him, his parents or both. Dallas, his little brother, got along well with their parents so Mekus figured that he must be the problem. But he worked so hard for things to remain normal.
He understood that his parents often had the best intentions for him, but they usually expected him to do whatever they said without questioning the logic of it. He failed to understand why they would tell him what to do when he was perfectly capable of deducing the best and most logical thing to do, by himself. For this behaviour, they labelled him stubborn, arrogant and tried to correct him. They failed.
As Mekus grew, he started getting the same feedback from all the people around him. They considered him disrespectful of authority and arrogant. Mekus was a teenager when he started realising that he was every bit like the next guy except for the way he processed information, the way he responded to new and old stimuli and the way he experienced the world.
He felt frustrated in his effort to correct the impression folks had about him but his constant question to get to the cause of every event and behaviour did not help him in this quest. He was always asking why, why, why.
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For instance, he was on a bus travelling home from school when a man selling herbal medicines came on board. The man mentioned a series of illness that the single drug could cure. Amongst these were the ulcer, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, gastroenteritis, obesity, malaria, and typhoid. The rest of the passengers did not see anything wrong with this. However, Mekus battled himself to ignore him and keep his opinions to himself. But, when the man repeated his prescription, Mekus just said, "If anyone who suffers a single ailment takes this drug, then he would have overdosed."
The seller became very angry and verbally abused Mekus throughout the remaining part of the journey. Mekus arrived at that conclusion because of the way he processed information. Apart from knowing those diseases, what caused them, how they developed, the drugs that treated them, how the drug acted to affect the treatment and a lot of other information concerning the diseases, he also knew that some of those medicines conflicted with the others.
Furthermore, it was unlikely that any single individual could suffer all the listed diseases at the same time. Therefore, he naturally concluded that treating someone who had even one disease less than the total recorded, would amount to administering an overdose of the drug if the drug worked as advertised. The nonverbal clues the seller left behind already informed Mekus that the man was lying.
Low Latent Inhibition - The Difference
Mekus did not know what was different about him until he stumbled on an article about Low Latent Inhibition (LLI)
To understand what low latent inhibition is, we have first to examine the words, inhibition and latent:
- Definition of inhibition
1 a: the act of inhibiting: the state of being inhibited
b: something that forbids, debars, or restricts
2: an inner impediment to free activity, expression, or functioning: such as
a: a mental process imposing restraint upon behaviour or another mental process (such as a desire)
b: a restraining of the function of a bodily organ or an agent (such as an enzyme). source
- Definition of latent
: present and capable of emerging or developing but not now visible, obvious, active, or symptomatic a latent infection
— latently adverb source
Latent Inhibition is a technical term used to describe the fact that familiar stimuli takes longer to acquire meaning than new stimuli.source
The definition above means latent inhibition is the ability of the brain to filter out previously experienced stimuli so that we don't experience the stimuli as a fresh one. Latent inhibition is necessary to protect the brain from being overwhelmed by the enormous amount of information captured continuously by the senses and fed to it.
It is due to latent inhibition that you would often fail to notice the details of the doorknob at the entrance of your bedroom each time you pass through. If however, you see the features of the doorknob, the design, the way it works, the various parts and the way they fit and work together, then you probably have latent inhibition that is less than average.
People with LLI have difficulty with teaching or making speeches or they make very long ones because their brains usually churn out information and connections between events much faster than they can speak.
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Every person has latent inhibition. Having low latent inhibition means that the person receives every stimulus (old and new) the same way. Therefore this person gets a constant flow of information from the environment such that if they have low IQ, this level of processing overwhelms their brain, thereby exposing them to several mental illnesses including schizophrenia and autism.
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People who have high enough IQ to process this deluge of data coming from the environment, usually possess above average intellect and this is often a formula for creative genius.
Such people can come to startling conclusions about what they have experienced because each time they see an object, say a machine, they absorb all the details about the object as if they are seeing it for the first time and they ask such questions as, why was it designed this way? Why not any other way? What does it have this shape? They can learn something new about the object each time they see it because they remember all the questions they asked the first time and the answers to those questions. Accordingly, the questions they would ask the second time around would be based on the previous responses.
People with LLI do not often get along with people because they can analyse situations much faster than most people, so they get bored very fast with standard conversations. They usually come off as arrogant due to their impatience with people discussing events which conclusion appeared evident to them. They also require more tact in dealing with people because people lie and people with LLI can easily see through lies due to their ability to pick up all the non-verbal parts of the communication.
Doctors have mistakenly diagnosed most people with LLI, as people with ADHD and a bunch of other diseases. LLI is not a disease: it is only a condition some people are born with. Therefore many people do not know they have it. They just have more wholesome experience, intellect and creativity, while they struggle with getting along with people with normal latent inhibition.
If you would like to learn more about LLI, or if you suspect you have LLI, you may join the LLI Facebook Page.
All images were obtained from this source.
I hope this has been informative for you. I'd like to thank you for reading.
It's your boy Kels,
@churchboy
interesting post churchboy. I suppose you posted this from church :)
Thank you @gentleshaid. I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Or did you not know I should be in my father's house? :)
But seriously, I wrote it lying in bed, on my phone.
I really love this post. This may be unrelated. I came across your profile on @adsactly How does one become an author there? I hope this is not so intrusive.
Hello there. This is not intrusive at all. Adsactly admin would normally contact writers whose content they like and ask them to write for Adsactly. Thanks for stopping by. All the best.
Thanks for answering this. I appreciate.
You're welcome.