We have spent more than a century trying to measure how intelligently humans think. Perhaps we should also ask how intelligently humans sense.
We readily talk about intellectual intelligence. We measure cognitive abilities, reasoning, memory and problem-solving. We have developed ideas of emotional intelligence and social intelligence. Yet every human experience begins, in some form, with information.
We see. We hear. We smell. We taste. We touch. We sense temperature, pain, movement, balance and the position of our bodies. We also perceive signals arising from inside the body: heartbeat, breathing, hunger, fatigue, tension and other internal states.
And human beings do not experience this information identically.
Some people notice sounds that others barely register. Some detect minute changes in tone of voice, light, texture, smell or movement. Some experience particular sensory environments intensely; others require considerably stronger stimulation before noticing them. Some have unusually precise awareness of what is happening inside their own bodies.
We know these differences exist but we predominantly discuss them in terms of sensitivity, processing and impairment.
What if we also considered them in terms of intelligence?
We propose that we begin exploring a concept we call sensory intelligence.
From sensory sensitivity to sensory intelligence
Sensory intelligence should not be confused with sensory sensitivity. Sensory sensitivity already has a substantial research literature.
In 1997, psychologists Elaine and Arthur Aron introduced Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) as a measurable individual characteristic. Their research suggested that people differ systematically in how sensitively they process environmental information and that this could not simply be reduced to introversion or emotionality. (PubMed)
Subsequent research has developed the idea considerably. A major review by Greven and colleagues describes sensory processing sensitivity within the broader framework of environmental sensitivity: individual differences in how strongly people perceive and process, and consequently respond to, environmental influences. (DOI)
This is important work but sensitivity and intelligence are different questions. A microphone can be extremely sensitive. That does not mean it makes intelligent use of what it detects. So sensory intelligence would need to encompass more than how much sensory information a person receives or how intensely it is experienced. It would concern what a person can do with that information.
A proposed definition
We suggest a provisional definition:
Sensory intelligence is an individual’s capacity to detect, differentiate, interpret, integrate and use sensory information from the external environment and internal bodily states.
That definition deliberately contains several distinct abilities.
Detection: What information do I notice?
Differentiation: How finely can I distinguish between sensory inputs?
Interpretation: Can I understand what the sensory information signifies?
Integration: Can I combine information from different sensory channels and place it in context?
Regulation: Can I manage my response to sensory information?
Application: Can I use sensory information effectively in judgement, creativity, decision-making or action?
These dimensions need research and validation. We are not suggesting that we already possess an established psychometric construct called sensory intelligence. We are suggesting that existing research gives us sufficient reason to investigate whether we should.
Intelligence begins with information
Consider what we traditionally call intelligence. A person receives information, identifies distinctions and patterns, integrates that information with previous knowledge and uses it to reach conclusions or act.
Sensory processing precedes much of this, shaping how we perceive and interpret information from the world around us. It can be seen in the chef who distinguishes subtle variations in taste, smell and texture, the musician who detects fine differences in pitch and timing, or the doctor who notices a small change in a patient’s appearance, voice or breathing. Similar forms of sensory discernment are evident when an engineer detects a change in the sound of a machine, an athlete rapidly integrates information about movement and position, an artist perceives fine variations in colour and light, or a parent recognises the slightest alteration in their child’s cry. These abilities draw upon different sensory and cognitive processes and should not be casually collapsed into a single scientific construct, but together they illustrate how profoundly sensory information contributes to human capability.
But they raise an important question:
When does sensory difference become sensory capability?
Looking outside as well as inside
One particularly developed field of research concerns interoception, perception of the internal state of the body.
Researchers have already discovered that this is not a simple matter of being either good or bad at sensing one’s body. Murphy, Catmur and Bird, for example, argue that individual differences in interoception require distinctions between what is measured and how it is measured, including accuracy, attention, objective performance and self-report. (Springer)
More recent work treats interoception as explicitly multidimensional, involving neural, behavioural, subjective and higher-order processes. Importantly, different aspects of interoception can relate differently to cognition and emotion. (ScienceDirect)
That complexity may provide an important clue that perhaps sensory intelligence is not one ability at all. Just as intellectual intelligence can be decomposed into different cognitive abilities, sensory intelligence may consist of a profile of sensory capabilities.
Someone might have extraordinary auditory discrimination but relatively ordinary visual processing. Another person might have exceptional interoceptive awareness but little sensitivity to smell. Someone else might detect huge quantities of environmental information but find integrating that information difficult.
The relevant question therefore may be:
“What is your sensory intelligence profile?”
Neurodiversity changes the question
This becomes particularly interesting when considered through a neurodiversity lens. Sensory differences are prominent in descriptions of autism and other minority neurotypes. They are frequently discussed because they can among other create genuine difficulties such as noise becoming overwhelming or lighting intolerable. Many of us also experience that textures can make clothing or food extremely difficult.
Those experiences matter and should not be romanticised but there is a danger in studying human variation predominantly through clinical populations: we tend to measure difference where it causes difficulty.
We may therefore have become much better at identifying sensory impairment than sensory capability. For example a person who hears sounds that other people cannot comfortably perceive may be described as hypersensitive. But what if that same perceptual resolution enables exceptional musical discrimination.
A person who detects tiny variations in texture may find some clothing intolerable but possess an extraordinary ability to work with materials.
Someone who processes an unusually large amount of visual information may become overwhelmed in a supermarket while detecting patterns that other people miss entirely.
The same underlying characteristic could potentially produce advantage, disadvantage or both, depending upon context. Research into sensory processing sensitivity already points towards this interaction between sensitivity and environment rather than treating greater sensitivity as inherently pathological. (PubMed)
Sensory intelligence would take the next step and ask not only:
What overwhelms you?
but also:
What can you perceive?
And:
What can you do with what you perceive?
The problem with measuring humans through deficits
This connects to a much larger problem in our understanding of human variation. Clinical science necessarily asks questions about impairment. Medicine needs to know what causes distress, disability and reduced functioning. If our principal instruments for understanding neurological minorities originate in clinical settings, we risk constructing a map of human variation disproportionately from the places where people struggle.
Imagine assessing intellectual ability using a questionnaire consisting largely of questions such as:
Do complicated problems distress you?
Do you struggle when asked to think quickly?
Do intellectual demands leave you exhausted?
We would learn something about cognitive difficulties.
We would learn remarkably little about intelligence.
Yet our understanding of sensory variation has often developed through questions concerning discomfort, overload, avoidance and dysfunction. Leading us to think that maybe we have only mapped half the territory.
Sensory intelligence and the higher-resolution human
This connects to a broader question emerging within neurodiversity that perhaps human neurological variation is not becoming greater. Maybe our resolution for observing it is increasing. Imagine looking at humanity through a low-resolution camera:
NORMAL ——————————————— ABNORMAL
Increase the resolution and we begin to see:
A — B — C — D — E — F — G — H — I — J
Nothing necessarily changed in the population but our observational resolution changed. Sensory intelligence could become one element of that higher-resolution picture of humanity. Rather than beginning with diagnostic categories and asking how one group differs from another, we could begin with the human population and ask:
How do human beings differ in what they detect, distinguish, integrate and use?
We could then investigate how those differences intersect with autism, ADHD and other neurotypes, without assuming beforehand that sensory variation belongs primarily to neurodivergent people.
What would we actually measure?
For sensory intelligence to become scientifically meaningful, it would have to move beyond an attractive idea to being operationalised and tested. A research programme might examine objective and subjective performance across areas including:
vision; hearing; smell; taste; touch; proprioception; vestibular processing; interoception; sensory discrimination; multisensory integration; pattern detection; sensory memory; contextual interpretation; and the ability to translate sensory information into effective decisions or actions.
Researchers would then need to establish whether these abilities cluster together sufficiently to justify the overarching concept of sensory intelligence. That is precisely why this should be a research question rather than a claim. It may turn out that there is no single sensory intelligence, but rather a collection of relatively independent sensory intelligences. That finding would be equally valuable.
From deficit to human capability
The concept also has practical implications. Among others ducation tends to privilege particular ways of acquiring and demonstrating information. Workplaces are commonly designed around assumptions about acceptable levels of sound, light, interaction and stimulation. Recruitment processes privilege some forms of information processing while inadvertently suppressing others etc etc.
Our definitions of talent may therefore partly reflect the environments we have constructed to detect it. If humans possess meaningful differences in sensory capability, organisations might be overlooking forms of intelligence simply because we have never systematically looked for them. That would make sensory intelligence relevant not only to neurodiversity but to education, employment, design, creativity, ageing, leadership and potentially our understanding of intelligence itself.
A different question about human intelligence
For more than a century, psychology has attempted to understand how people differ in their ability to think. Maybe the increasing resolution with which we can observe human variation allows us to ask another question.
How intelligently do you sense?
We already know that humans differ substantially in how they experience and process the sensory world. Research into sensory processing sensitivity, environmental sensitivity and interoception provides important parts of the scientific foundation. (PubMed)
What we do not yet know is whether detection, discrimination, interpretation, integration and effective application of sensory information constitute a broader dimension or dimensions of human capability that we have largely failed to recognise.
That is the proposition behind sensory intelligence.
It is an invitation to increase the resolution and to discover what human beings can sense that we have never thought to measure.
References
Aron, E. N. & Aron, A. (1997). Sensory-processing sensitivity and its relation to introversion and emotionality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(2), 345–368. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.73.2.345. (PubMed)
Aron, E. N., Aron, A. & Jagiellowicz, J. (2012). Sensory processing sensitivity: A review in the light of the evolution of biological responsivity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(3), 262–282. DOI: 10.1177/1088868311434213. (PubMed)
Greven, C. U. et al. (2019). Sensory Processing Sensitivity in the context of Environmental Sensitivity: A critical review and development of research agenda. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 98, 287–305. (DOI)
Murphy, J., Catmur, C. & Bird, G. (2019). Classifying individual differences in interoception: Implications for the measurement of interoceptive awareness. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 1467–1471. DOI: 10.3758/s13423-019-01632-7. (Springer)
Murphy, J. et al. (2022). Towards a comprehensive assessment of interoception in a multi-dimensional framework. Biological Psychology, 168, 108262. (ScienceDirect)