Schizophrenia: an untrustworthy spidey sense

After I wrote yesterday's post, I went to bed, and as I was falling asleep, I reflected on the oddity that schizophrenics believe, with absolute conviction, things that fall way outside consensual reality. The mind/brain faultily attaches its imprimatur of approval to delusional thoughts, so that the schizophrenic gets a feeling of certain knowledge associated with marginal thoughts. In a normally functioning individual, the mind sets a much higher bar for what gets this same level of certitude. (E.g. confirmation by others.) Searching through my own experience for something similar, it occurred to me that I occasionally get what might be called "flashes of insight," where I become absolutely certain of something at the edges of consensual reality. It's very rare, but I might see two people interacting on the street and suddenly be absolutely certain they had just been fighting. More commonly, but still rarely, I will be reading a book or watching a movie, and suddenly feel that I know *exactly* what the author was trying to communicate. I say that these experiences are at the edge of consensual reality because the level of conviction that I have in them outweighs the available evidence to a considerable degree, and particularly in the case of reading, it is actually impossible to know whether I am really "getting" what the author was saying. These experiences have never had an oppressive or paranoid quality. They've always felt good, like I just solved a puzzle. They feel like that moment when you are struggling with a mathematical proof, and suddenly everything clicks into place and you see clearly what's going on. While I like to think these little flashes of intuition are often on the mark, I know of at least one case where I was definitely wrong, so it's not an infallible spidey sense. This adds to my suspicion that my "flashes of insight" are part of a continuous spectrum with schizophrenia's large scale delusions. I'll have to be on the lookout for this phenomenon next time it happens to me to see if I can analyze it more closely when it occurs.