S1E5 – The Intellect. Islamic Psychology And Neuroscience Explained By A Psychiatrist

It's mental wealth with Dr. tk Harris.

So we've learned about the knifes, we've understood that it's the source of our emotions and a lot of our energy and our instincts, if you like, and how its nonverbal and how it has various drives that make up a person. Next, we're going to look at the power of the intellect. And so we take a look again at our original triangle. The intellect is the second part of our three part model of the brain.

The word intellect or acle refers to the ability to think for oneself, to look for truth and to look for facts and to use logic to apply oneself to life's challenges. Different people have different strengths in their intellect. Some may be very good with words, others with numbers, and others might be very good with their hands or with making things.

your intellect is a good balancing force in your life, especially when compared to the knifes the knifes gives you intuition and feeling. And the intellect looks for facts and truths, often taking a bit longer, but coming to a fair conclusion. Together, the two of these things inform your heart, which is where you exercise your final judgment.

The intellect thinks in a way that is systematic, it's very logical, thinking things through in a step by step way. It wants to be clear about the facts and evidence of a situation rather than opinions or feelings. For example, if somebody is smiling at you and making good eye contact, the knifes might take to them and attribute them as having nice qualities. But the intellect would be more interested in their actual character and what they say and do rather than just what they look like.

With your intellect, you get a pleasant sense of satisfaction from doing things in the right way. without distractions, the intellect prefers to be patient, waiting for things and delaying gratification until the final payoff or final reward. The intellect enjoys abiding by rules and laws. And by getting stuck into things by planning them step by step. The intellect also enjoys collaborating with others when you have shared rules and when you have a bigger aim that you could achieve together. And it also enjoys helping others without the need to be recognized or rewarded for it. The intellect is unconcerned with issues such as status or wealth or superiority. It enjoys

challenges, but it's not particularly concerned about winning or losing

the weaknesses of the intellect, that it's not designed to work well. When strong emotions are present. It's also unaware of danger. It often misses nonverbal things like facial expressions or body language. The neffs is better at that because it picks up on the signs and signals which your intellect would miss. The intellect also gets overwhelmed when there are too many options when it is not clear which way is the right way. The intellect requires a lot more conscious effort than enough's. This is because it always takes longer to gather proper facts and evidence and to think about things in a deeper way. The neffs uses the language of feelings and instincts, but the

intellect uses facts and evidence, it takes longer, but it's more likely to get to the truth. Let's look at some of the qualities of the intellect. Using this picture. One of its qualities is step by step reasoning. When it goes wrong, you can become oblivious to everything else, missing the point when there is something more urgent or more important happening, which you should be turning your attention to. At an extreme example, a man who's busy working on a math problem might ignore the fact that his house is on fire. The intellect is also capable of simple morality, knowing what's right and wrong. Keeping to a code of conduct. However, its moral reasoning is not quite as wise as

your heart. Sometimes the answers are not clear, and you have to listen to your heart to find a way forward that involves a bit of compromise. Finally, the intellect is concerned with facts. The reason for this is in order to solve problems you need to be accurate. But when the intellect cannot find the right way forward, it can become overloaded and keeps gathering facts beyond usefulness. Many people can relate to this when they perhaps go shopping for something complex like a computer and find themselves baffled by all the different choices and ultimately don't buy anything. There are several other qualities of the intellect which we can explore. You can find more detail in the

books that I've written and the link is in the description below. The knifes leads us to judge people by appearance and first impressions. This can be helpful in an emergency, but not when we are properly trying to get to know someone. The intellect is more interested

In a person for their actual qualities than their appearance, so is there a middle way forward? Indeed there is. Islam is quite realistic in taking the world as we find it. So while some might say that outer appearances don't matter, Islam would say it does. And in fact, we can look to the Sunnah of the prophet to see how important such things are. The Prophet always took care of his appearance, and always use things such as fragrances and gifts to endear himself to people, both new and familiar. When you take care of your appearance and take care of these certain things, it comes other people's knifes, and they spend time getting to know you better, because you have got past

their initial judgments. Intellectual tasks come in all shapes and sizes. Some problems are posed by the knifes and the intellect solves everyday problems from the nuts. For example, if you're a hungry, the nuts would rather you just went and grabbed some food. But the intellect would be more sensible, and perhaps plan what food you ate, to keep you nourished well and within your budget.

The intellect thrives when we keep it engaged, doing something that shows our value and fits our role. This is related to mental well being.

I would like to take a moment just to thank everybody who's turned up to subscribe to like and to watch these videos. I hope you find them useful. Please put your comments in the comments section. If there are questions that you want answered about mental health, or anything to do with a mind and I'll take note of these things. In the meantime, please spread the word because I know there are many Muslims out there who can't afford to buy books and other materials and they deserve access to mental health as much as anyone else. In part two of the intellect video we'll look in greater detail at different parts of the intellect and how we can use it in our greater aims in life to be

better people or to fulfill our religious and family obligations. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video inshallah.