The Connectivity Trap – When Psychology Misreads Mental Strength

People who experience frequent déjà vu, premonitions, and striking coincidences also tend to be more creative, emotionally resilient, and better at handling stress. The finding directly contradicts clinical assumptions that such experiences signal mental disorders. Documents show we may have misunderstood what these phenomena represent.

The Puzzle in the Data

In 2023, Dr Olav S. Palsson conducted two large-scale surveys using a psychometric tool known as the Thought Impact Scale, developed to assess the alignment between conscious thought and subconscious influence. The results revealed a consistent and provocative finding. Individuals with the highest connectivity scores, those reporting the most frequent influence of intuitive, non-rational, or subconscious processes on their everyday awareness, also reported a notably higher rate of anomalous experiences.

These experiences spanned a wide range: persistent déjà vu episodes, spontaneous premonitions about future events, striking synchronicities (meaningful coincidences with no apparent causal link), and a general sense of being guided by something beyond linear reasoning. In many psychological or clinical contexts, such reports would be flagged as possible signs of cognitive distortion, dissociation, or psychosis.

But Palsson’s findings took a surprising turn. The same group scoring high for subconscious connectedness also reported higher levels of creative output, better emotional self-regulation, and stronger resilience to life stressors. These are not fringe psychological traits; they are core indicators of what most psychological frameworks define as healthy adaptation and flourishing mental health.

One statistic stood out starkly. Over 80 per cent of respondents in the high-connectivity group reported experiencing repeated anomalous events. This was not a marginal or outlier group; it represented a statistically significant cross-section of the population with no direct correlation to clinical distress or dysfunction.

‘Four in five adults report at least one recurring anomalous event.’

The implications stretch beyond semantics. If these experiences are common and often helpful, why do doctors still see them as warning signs of mental illness?

Inside the Thought Impact Scale

To understand the implications of these findings, it is essential to examine the instrument used. The Thought Impact Scale. This psychometric tool assesses how much individuals perceive and respond to their subconscious thoughts and processes. It measures factors such as the frequency of intuitive insights, the impact of dreams on waking life, and the perceived connection between inner mental states and external events. The “subconscious connectedness” factor, central to Palsson’s findings, gauges explicitly the perceived strength and fluidity of communication between an individual’s conscious and subconscious mental realms.

Researchers have tested the scale for reliability across different populations. Palsson’s surveys used sample sizes in the thousands, which strengthens the statistical weight of his findings.

Like all self-report questionnaires, the scale has limitations. People might overreport or underreport their experiences, either consciously or unconsciously. The concept of “subconscious connectedness” also relies on individuals accurately assessing their own internal states, which can be difficult to verify.

Even with these problems, the scale captures aspects of mental experience that mainstream psychology usually overlooks. With thousands of participants showing consistent patterns, the findings deserve attention.

When Manuals Call Healthy Brains Unwell

The central paradox emerges when comparing the findings from the Thought Impact Scale with established diagnostic criteria, particularly those outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR).

The DSM-5-TR is a foundational text for psychiatrists and psychologists. It lists experiences like derealisation, depersonalisation, and unusual perceptions as potential symptoms of dissociative disorders or schizophrenia spectrum disorders. These are the same experiences reported by individuals with high connectivity.

According to the DSM-5-TR, experiences such as unusual perceptions, magical thinking, and dissociative episodes are often indicators of disorders like Schizotypal Personality Disorder or Dissociative Identity Disorder, particularly when accompanied by distress or functional impairment.

Key criteria include:

• “Odd beliefs or magical thinking that influences behaviour”
• “Unusual perceptual experiences, including bodily illusions”
• “Suspicion or paranoid ideation”

These descriptors often appear, almost verbatim, in high-connectivity profiles from the TIS surveys. But, in the clinical context, such traits become diagnostic red flags, often with life-altering implications for individuals assigned a psychiatric label.

Crucially, the DSM does include a caveat: doctors should only diagnose when symptoms cause significant distress or impairment. Yet, in practice, anomalous reports often trigger suspicion by default. A person who claims to have experienced a powerful synchronicity or sensed a future event is more likely to be pathologised than studied, especially in Western clinical environments.

The gap between theory and practice raises a key question: Can doctors distinguish between genuine mental health issues and unusual but healthy ways of thinking? The experiences recorded by the TIS aren’t distressing to most people. Many participants found them enriching or empowering. Without better guidelines, these experiences often get wrongly labelled as disorders.

What Neuroimaging Reveals

Over the past two decades, neuroscientists have mapped the connections between different brain regions. One network has particularly caught their attention: the Default Mode Network, also known as the DMN. The DMN comprises several interconnected brain areas that become active when we daydream, reflect on ourselves, or let our minds wander.

Research has shown that individuals with increased DMN connectivity often demonstrate heightened creativity and problem-solving ability. These same connectivity patterns have also been implicated in particular mental health conditions, such as depression or schizophrenia. The ambiguity lies in interpretation: does enhanced connectivity indicate vulnerability or heightened capability? The answer may depend on the individual’s cognitive context and support structures.

A 2023 twin study added an even stranger twist. Researchers put identical twins in separate, soundproof rooms and monitored their brain activity. When one twin concentrated hard on a particular thought, the other twin’s brainwaves sometimes mirrored the pattern despite being completely cut off from each other. Scientists are still debating the results, but they suggest that direct brain-to-brain communication may actually occur.

Elsewhere, neuroscientists have examined déjà vu through the lens of temporal lobe activation. The temporal lobes, especially the hippocampal region, are involved in memory consolidation and the processing of familiarity. Researchers have linked brief overactivity in these areas to déjà vu-like sensations, both in patients and healthy people.

Taken together, these studies suggest that anomalous experiences may be manifestations of intensified internal processing rather than signs of cognitive breakdown. When viewed through the right lens, heightened neural integration could signify a brain that is operating in a more associative, perceptive, and interconnected way. The framework, not the function, determines whether we interpret this as genius or disorder.

Societies that Normalise the Strange

While Western psychiatry often interprets anomalous experiences as symptoms of underlying pathology, other cultural frameworks offer strikingly different interpretations. Around the world, many societies have long integrated such phenomena into communal, spiritual, and healing practices. Some cultures even value them as markers of insight or spiritual calling.

For instance, in shamanic traditions across Siberia, the Amazon basin, and parts of Mongolia, individuals who report visions, prophetic dreams, or sensory anomalies are often identified as potential shamans. Their experiences are not suppressed or medicated; instead, they are mentored, trained, and provided with tools to interpret and manage these states. These traditions view anomalous cognition not as a malfunction but as an initiation. A calling to serve the community.

Similarly, the Zār spirit possession rituals in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt treat dissociative states as meaningful and potentially healing. Women often experience prolonged episodes of altered behaviour, voice shifts, or trance states that these cultures interpret as spirit contact. Instead of treating these experiences as illnesses, communities hold ritual ceremonies that involve drumming and dancing. These practices validate the experience and often bring lasting psychological relief.

Transcultural psychiatry studies show that the extent of distress these experiences cause depends mainly on how the person’s culture interprets them. If the person understands their experience through a socially supported narrative, they are more likely to adapt positively and avoid long-term psychological harm. Conversely, when such events are interpreted solely through a lens of illness or abnormality, they are more likely to provoke fear, confusion, and self-stigma.

‘In cultures with strong meaning frameworks for anomalous experiences, rates of distress and impairment are significantly lower.’

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has documented how cultural training influences auditory hallucinations. In the United States, voices reported by individuals with psychosis are often critical or hostile. In India and Ghana, But the same voices are more likely to be described as helpful or benign, sometimes even familial. This indicates that meaning-making frameworks significantly influence subjective experience and its associated psychological consequences.

A Short History of Pathologising Wonder

How did strange mental experiences become automatically linked with mental illness in Western thinking? The answer lies in how psychiatry itself has changed over the decades. In the early to mid-20th century, parapsychology was a legitimate field of study. Researchers like J.B. Rhine at Duke University ran controlled experiments on telepathy, mind-reading, and moving objects with thought. These studies were initially controversial, but they followed scientific methods, and academics seriously discussed them in reputable journals.

But the institutional stance began to harden in the post-war period. The 1980 introduction of the DSM-III marked a decisive break with earlier, more interpretive models of psychiatry. In an effort to increase diagnostic consistency, the manual adopted a symptom-based approach, abandoning psychoanalytic and spiritual frameworks. While this improved reliability, it also created a flattened view of mental experience: one that had little room for subjective meaning, altered states, or non-consensus realities.

In parallel, governmental research into anomalous cognition took an unusual detour through classified channels. The US government’s Stargate Project, active from the 1970s to the mid-1990s, investigated remote viewing and psychic phenomena for military intelligence. Though results were mixed and the government eventually shut down the programme, declassified documents reveal that officials regularly recruited and trained high-functioning individuals for tasks involving focused intention, target identification, and non-local perception.

Yet despite its formal existence and budgetary support, Stargate was never fully integrated into mainstream science. Once declassified, academic psychiatry largely ignored its findings, having developed little tolerance for any model outside the biomedical norm.

This institutional pivot away from exploring consciousness in its full range has had lasting consequences. It became professionally risky to study anomalous experiences, regardless of the evidence. Researchers have found that obtaining funding to be more challenging. Medical education excluded discussions of spiritual or non-linear cognition. The prevailing narrative became one of dysfunction: if a person reported an experience outside the shared consensus reality, they were increasingly assumed to be ill.

Who Gains from Keeping Anomalies Classified as Illness?

The persistence of anomaly-as-pathology may reflect more than just clinical caution. Four overlapping forces help explain why experiences such as déjà vu, synchronicity, and intuitive insight remain confined to the margins of acceptable psychology:

Institutional protection: The medical establishment derives authority from clear diagnostic boundaries. A condition must be recognised, classified, and ideally treated. If anomalous experiences cannot be reliably measured or explained within current models, they pose a challenge to that authority. The simplest institutional defence is to dismiss them as delusional or irrelevant.

Economic interests: Pharmaceutical companies and insurers operate within a system that rewards the codification of disorders. Treatments, reimbursements, and research grants are tied to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes. When an experience lacks a billing category, it also lacks market value. Expanding definitions of illness can, at times, serve economic incentives rather than patient well-being.

Cultural control: Labelling anomalous cognition as illness neutralises its disruptive potential. Premonitions, visionary states, or sudden moments of profound insight may challenge dominant worldviews. By casting these events as symptoms, society avoids confronting their implications. Pathology, in this sense, becomes a tool of containment.

Paradigm resistance: Scientific models tend to reinforce themselves. Anomalous data that contradicts prevailing assumptions is often excluded rather than examined. Thomas Kuhn, in his study of scientific revolutions, observed that anomalies rarely overturn dominant paradigms until alternative frameworks become impossible to ignore. Until then, data without a home is often declared an error.

None of these dynamics necessarily involves bad actors or deliberate suppression. More often, they reflect structural inertia: systems designed to reinforce their own rules and regulations. Yet the cumulative effect is profound. By keeping certain cognitive experiences in the realm of the pathological, entire dimensions of human awareness may remain underexplored and misunderstood.

Where the Evidence Ends, New Questions Begin

Palsson’s research raises more questions than it answers. The data clearly shows a link between subconscious connectedness, strange experiences, and better mental health outcomes. But we still don’t understand how these pieces fit together.

The biggest mystery is what’s causing what. Do weird experiences like déjà vu and premonitions somehow boost creativity and resilience? Or is there something about certain brains that produces both unusual experiences and psychological benefits? The studies so far can’t separate cause from coincidence.

What is missing from the public record are the internal debates within psychology and psychiatry regarding these findings. Individual researchers are producing compelling work, but how much of this insight is being discussed in clinical training or professional conferences? Those conversations, if they’re happening, remain largely hidden.

The evidence challenges us to consider whether our definitions of “normal” cognition are too narrow. If experiences we currently flag as anomalous are linked to optimal psychological functioning, what does that say about human potential? The data suggests this question deserves sustained inquiry, not continued dismissal.

Sources

Sources include: DSM‑5‑TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2022); Olav S. Palsson, national survey data on subconscious connectedness (2023); Rabeyron et al., visionary artists study linking anomalous experience and creativity (2024); Standish et al., functional connectivity in monozygotic twins (2023); Cardeña et al., prevalence and classification review (2014); declassified CIA Stargate memoranda and evaluations (1970s–1995); cross‑cultural ethnographies on shamanic and Zār practices (1980s–2020s).