Introduction to Impulse Intelligence

Instead of writing a long-winded Impulse Intelligence exposé, I chose a different approach. I took my middle-grade fiction book, originally written to engage the reader in a story, and turned it into the starting point for a conversation about Impulse Intelligence. Then I excavated it.
 I used the following questions to evaluate each chapter and uncover its treasures: impulses, impulse behaviors, and their influences.
 For each chapter, I asked:

  • Does it introduce a new conceptual distinction?

  • Does it deepen something already established?

  • Does a Flickerling interaction reveal something we haven’t explicitly excavated yet?

  • Does it advance the student’s understanding of emotion → impulse → choice/behavior?

  • Does it provide material for an exercise or application?

  • Or is it primarily story, humor, characterization, or reinforcement we’ve already covered?
    If a chapter was primarily story, humor, characterization, or reinforcement we had already covered, we shipped it.
    And importantly, we did not force every chapter to teach something new. If a chapter didn’t contain conceptual material worth excavating, we said so and moved on.
    Sixteen small chapters give us enough material to discover whether the book’s conceptual architecture is actually there—not manufacture it.
    That task is complicated by one of the literary devices I created for the story: the personification of impulse.
    The Flickerlings are not emotions. They are personified impulses—pesky, unruly crusaders that rush into the moment and throw their el-e-moments, something like tantrums, except that these are flashes of reactionary ideas about what should happen next.
    The story contains four different subspecies of Flickerlings, each corresponding to a different reactionary impulse phenomenon. They rush into the moment, compete with one another, and engage in power struggles to seize control of the Moment Wheel—the turning point where a character decides what to do next.
    That literary device makes the excavation both more complicated and more revealing. What might look, on a surface reading, like a funny little creature causing trouble can actually be carrying information about what is happening between emotion and behavior.
    So we go looking.
     Not to force the theory into the story.
     To see what the story already contains.

We’re so used to the collapsed model of human behavior (emotion = behavior “I was mad so I hit him)—thinking emotion leads straight to behavior—that we don’t see or explore the impulse in between.
Seeing, exploring, and owning the impulse matters. It gives us a place to make a choice about our behavior without having to deny, change, or justify the emotion we feel.
 It also gives us a chance to understand ourselves—to recognize our strengths, our character, our intelligence, our humanity, and our capacity for empathy—and to grow as a person.
By abandoning the collapsed model (emotion = behavior) for the Impulse Intelligence model (emotion → impulse → behavior):
The emotion remains yours.
The impulse becomes visible.
The behavior becomes a choice.
The understanding becomes yours.
Making the impulse visible gives us a more accurate way to understand human behavior—and that understanding extends from ourselves to others and ultimately to how we understand and portray human beings in literature.

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