What in the world was she thinking?

You know exactly whom I’m talking about. And you, surely, share my sense that Sarah Louise really wasn’t really thinking yesterday when she gave her “why I’m resigning” speech to the geese and others in Alaska. At least, she wasn’t thinking as we typically define the word. “Thinking” in a conventional sense is not one of Gov. Palin’s mental and emotional strong suits.

So what has been going on in her head the past few days? Nothing much out of the ordinary, actually. Sarah Louise has pretty much been acting and reacting true to her natural information processing style. At least that’s the way it looks to this thinkologist.

Admittedly, all my information on the subject has come via news reports. I watched her resignation speech in its entirety on MSNBC. And hung on every word. It was not only fascinating political theatre. It was also a riveting display of (more or less) equal parts of personal hubris, made-up-as-she-goes self justification and don’t-be-surprised-if-I-surprise-myself-by-the-end-of-this verbal dexterity. By the end, I was giggling. Boy, I thought. This is boffo stuff! This person has just driven 95 percent of the American political world and all who report or comment on it momentarily insane.

But it really shouldn’t have.

Sarah Palin’s thought processes are as about as predictable as summer sunburn. At Brain Technologies/Brain Me Up!, we have a name for people who share the majority of her “thinking” characteristics. Actually, we have several names, depending on which of our models is being discussed. The most evocative and instructive name is from our Asset Report® model. It couches the Sarah Palins of the world as “instinct players.” They operate pretty much on raw feelings. When they feel the urge to act, they need the surge from having acted, immediately. It’s a drug cocktail their brain gets hit with, and a powerful one—triggering their need for instant gratify-satisfaction.

We know a lot of about the instinct players of the world, and I won’t burden you with all that here. Those quick-to-react thinking qualities often translate into amazing problem-solving abilities, and there are almost invariably sizable reservoirs of positive, entertaining, vitalizing energy in the Sarah Palins of the world.

But suffice it to say that instinct players also can do damage to the fabric of events. For one thing, they can leave a lot of blood in the pool. In large part, that’s because they are usually such natural gotcha players. Bless their hearts, they really can’t help it, at least easily, casually. The feelings of vulnerability never go away, and their whole life has an undertone of defensiveness, super-alertness and—yes—poorly camouflaged paranoia. Because the instinctual urge to withdraw (“get out”) from complex environments or drawn-out circumstances is always lurking, they often need a strong tribal-like “us against the rest of the world” magnetizing context (like the family) to keep them from verging toward the life of a misanthrope, hermit or at best perennial party-pooper.

And so on.

What can we expect next from Sarah Palin? For sure, it is a waste of time and energy to ask her. She doesn’t have a plan. She’s clueless. Instinct players simply do not experience the future as something out in front of them that would benefit from a little a priori design. She’ll know the future when she smacks into it head-on, where she will be making still other electrifying, self-serving, us-against-the-world type speeches. Count on it. And if you like playing with fire or at least being a gasoline bearer for the queen, then fill out an application for the Sarah Palin Express, whatever it turns out to be, wherever it turns out that it is headed, whoever gets incinerated on the journey.

And don’t be surprised if Sarah Louise Palin has an exciting, even successful, future ahead of her in American national politics.

With the right timing, the right luck, the right instincts and sufficient dumbness from the opposing party playing right into their hands, we’ve seen before what not-always-right-in-their-heads-but-always-true-to-their-hearts instinct players can do in the Republican Party.

George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan lived by their instincts far more than their analytical abilities. Not that you should expect Sarah Palin to read up on how they parlayed their “thinking” style into the American presidency. We already know that Gov. Palin is not real bookish. But you can bet that the resemblance already has more than one GOP kingmaker watching with great interest to see what happens next with Alaska’s best known homemaker.

I’m going to be watching, too. “The West Wing” never aired anything like this.