Pros and Cons

The advantages and disadvantages of living life with low latent inhibition listed on this page are based on my own personal experience and the experience of others I know who also have LLI. It is important to remember that although those with LLI do share several consistent advantages and disadvantages, the fact that it is a personality trait rather than a set syndrome or condition means that there are also many variables which influence how somebody with LLI experiences life.

The variables include but are not limited to personality type, IQ level, other psychological factors (such as OCD), upbringing, education and environmental influences. Many of these advantages and disadvantages have been discussed in greater detail detail in the Facebook awareness group and the forums, and I would encourage anyone seeking further information to explore both.

Pros

• Increased awareness of your surrounding environment and noticing things around you nobody else usually does such as noises or movements. For example you may be engaged in conversation with someone but you can hear and understand several conversations around you between other people that you’re not actually having to focus on , or you recognize patterns or trends in sounds that nobody else does.
• Being able to learn new things extremely quickly, especially if you are interested in the subject. You notice that you grasp or understand things much quicker than other people and on a much deeper level.
• You are able to reach the same depth of conversation and make the same advanced connections in something you are only mildly interested in as somebody without low latent inhibition who is extremely passionate and knowledgeable in the given area.
• You may find that you are often able to answer questions before they have actually been asked, because it always feels like you’re a step ahead in terms of where conversations are going.
• You can understand people’s intentions and are always asking yourself what the reason or the point is in things, including why people ask you the questions they do. Instead of a conversation progressing from point 1 to points 2, 3, 4 and finishing at 15, you may find that it’s more like you actually go from point 1 to points 7, 12, 15.
• You are always adapting to the environment you find yourself in and are never stuck for choices no matter how complex a situation may be.
• You are extremely creative because your mind is often able to make distinct connections between things that seem totally unrelated to anybody else.
• You automatically and without hesitation find yourself breaking down everything in order to get to the root cause or the starting point and are able to naturally understand what the reason behind almost anything is.
• You see reason and logic in things that others do not and constantly make leaps in logic to an extremely accurate degree.
• You are able to read people and situations extremely well and see through lies, deception or ill intent. You are extremely perceptive and cannot be manipulated easily.
• When preparing for a situation you often find yourself going over as many possible scenarios as possible and try to prepare for the possibility of each of them occurring.
• You have a very strong natural comprehension for cause and effect. This can apply to people, actions, pretty much anything. You know that if ‘x’ should occur then ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘d’ will occur as a result. You are able to consider an incredible number of variables, dependant upon the initial action.
• Sometimes it seems as though you’re operating on a different frequency to those around you who don’t have low latent inhibition. It’s almost as though you are able to operate on what seems almost like an invisible level, which provides you with a very strong ability to control and influence your surrounding environment without other people noticing that you’re doing so.
• You have an incredibly strong intuition. Your instincts are hardly ever wrong and it may feel as though you can predict a lot of things before they happen. This doesn’t mean you can see into the future or read minds, but rather that you are able to use more stimuli to piece together logical conclusions that make it seem to those around you as though you can actually see into the future. You’re actually able to see things that they don’t because your brain is processing stimuli that their brains are not, and that stimuli to them, doesn’t exist.
• You are able to create associations between people/items/objects and the stimuli that goes with them in very advanced ways or ways in which other people can’t. For example in your place of work you may be able to tell exactly who’s moving around the building from the sound of their footsteps or the way in which they walk without you actually seeing that person.
• You may be an extremely good driver, with a very strong ability to perceive hazards and apply the cause and effect advantage as mentioned above in pretty much all driving scenarios.

Cons

• It can be incredibly hard to get to sleep at night because your thoughts are racing. It’s very hard to stop asking yourself questions that lead to answers which spawn other questions.
• You may have been misdiagnosed with a form of autism or with ADHD/ADD, or professionals may not have actually been able to tell you what exactly is ‘different’ about you.
• You can find yourself very easily overwhelmed in busy situations. By ‘busy’ situations I mean either when facing a lot of external stimuli such as noises, sounds, sights etc or when facing a lot of internal stimuli such as the consideration that “if this happens then that will happen, which will cause this to happen, but maybe that happening wouldn’t be as good as this happening” and it can feel as though you are stumbling over your own thoughts.
• You can go off on tangents very easily which can often confuse other people around you.
• You can very easily forget your train of thought due to many other trains of thought all spanning off the original thought. This means that you’ll spend a lot of time trying to remember what it was you were just thinking and then frantically tracing back your order of thoughts until you manage to get to the source.
• You absolutely despise following rules that stifle your creative ability, or especially where you are told to follow a rule that you believe should not apply to you as the rule is based on people who have certain limits to their ability in ways that you do not.
• You dislike or disliked school due to the way in which things were taught. They seemed far too linear and bland and didn’t offer you enough of an intake or enough information to interest you.
• You can be very intolerant of those around you, especially people who take longer to think of things than you do, or when having to become part of a team where you feel the other team members hold you back.
• You absolutely hate limits and conforming to anything in general. It feels as though conforming to anything completely strips you of your own unique intuition and way of seeing things.
• You can become very easily frustrated when you have spotted a connection in something that to you is perfectly logical, but nobody else understands that connection.
• You can often feel very lonely as though nobody understands you or nobody ever will, because the way you see the world and the way your mind processes things is completely unique and in a league of it’s own, something you would very much like to feel a connection to somebody else with.
• Some people will turn to narcotics or chemicals because it feels as though it helps them escape from or dulls down the constant influx of stimuli, for example alcohol or marijuana.
• You may have a very addictive personality, probably due to the fact that you like familiar stimuli and that doing new things or going new places guarantees that you will be bombarded by a whole host of stimuli that you wont want to have to process.
• You may suffer from social anxiety, or high levels of anxiety in general.
• You may get annoyed by very quiet and discreet sounds/noises that are hardly noticeable to anybody else yet really seem to drive you crazy.
• Driving may be extremely hard and off putting as you’re not able to fully concentrate on anything, you feel as though there are too many distractions.

Although I’m sure there are many other pros and cons that could be added to the list, I have tried to focus on the main points that seem to have the greatest number of people over the last few years highlight them. If you feel that there should be any more included in the main list then please add a comment at the bottom of this article or send an e-mail to lowlatentinhibition@hotmail.com.

Dale Webb