Sense and Perspective - Part 2

Sensory Differences Roll Up Into Cognitive Differences Informing Learning Style and Bias

Beck’s Colors video playfully combines vivid imagery and upbeat psychedelic sounds. The visuals also evoke tactile sensation — prompting one to practically feel the texture and plasticity of the slime.

Part 1 of the series introduced:

• Some senses they didn’t teach us in grade school

• Interoception: the mind-body sensory connection and the elusive unconscious executive center that mediates it

• Supertasters and their bitterness

Sense and Perspective - Part 1

Part 2 continues to dig into how sensory differences influence thought patterns, experience and perspective. I’ll cover:

• How brain plasticity makes seemingly superhuman sensory feats possible, and not just for the gifted

• How cognition and emotion coevolve, with stress responses occasionally whipping us into action

• Fight-or-flight’s counterpart: rest-and-digest

• Why cognitive adaptions and core beliefs underlie bias

Difference & Disability vs Plasticity

As kindergarten teachers often point out, everyone is wholly unique, no two the same. This truth manifests in part via differences in sensory hardware, the mind’s connection to the surrounding world. Infinite variety of sensory differences and disabilities exist due to genetics, developmental factors and injury. One under-appreciated example covered in Part 1 — genetic differences make 1 in 4 people ‘supertasters.’ This group has far more bitter sensitivity, more tastebuds and more taste/aroma sensitivity in general than ‘medium tasters’ and ‘non-tasters.’ Consequently, supertasters tend to be pickier eaters, less prone to obesity, hate broccoli, develop stronger sense of disgust and tend towards negative emotional responses in general.

The supertaster phenomenon wasn’t identified until the 80s, even though it accounts for enormous variation in experience. Comparing notes on sensory differences is fraught, the internal world being entirely personal and nontransferable (although this may soon change due to advances in mind-machine interface.) So, less challenging sensory disabilities often go unnoticed, us lonely souls with no stable reference point to compare our internal experience. One study found 1 in 200 volunteers lacked a sense of smell, but didn’t know it. Another found nearly half colorblind individuals were unaware of it around age 20.

Colorblindness may not be a disability so much as a difference, a polymorphism like supertasting. With two rather than three types of color receptors, colorblind individuals cannot resolve some color differences that others can, usually red tones. There does however appear to be advantages. Colorblind individuals tend to have superior night vision. Not just in the dark, colorblindness also offers advantages in breaking camouflage under some conditions. So, for example, hunting groups with diversity in colorblindness likely detect more prey and perform better than those with only normally-sighted hunters. This represents an evolutionary advantage for the group.

Due to brain plasticity, subconscious compensations likely make the colorblind visual experience practically as rich as those with full-color vision. Just different. With one less stream of sensory info coming in from the eyes, the brain processes the remaining streams with similar horsepower, allowing finer resolution among the narrower bandwidth.

Likewise, those blind, deaf or anosmic (lacking sense of smell) from early age tend to develop heightened abilities in other senses to compensate. Sometimes mind-blowing, many such stories demonstrate awesome sensory processing adaptions made possibly by brain plasticity.

One example — Daniel Kish — a blind man, learned to use echolocation similarly to bats and dolphins. He makes clicking noises and detects the echos bouncing off surrounding structure to create a mental map. Kish has developed this non-visual spacial awareness well enough to ride a bicycle. Just as amazing, Kish has taught his echolocation technique to over 500 blind kids.

So it seems human minds have a somewhat fixed amount of power for processing sensory info. Subconscious forces determine how it processes sensory inputs, with whatever ones are available, mostly solidifying before adulthood when the brain loses plasticity.

Due to the entirely personal nature of the internal world, orienting the senses necessarily occurs via self-training, at least to start, perhaps analogous to many artificial intelligences. The developing infant brain makes as much practical sense as possible by forging associations within a complex mess of sensory signals. Like ChatGPT does for language.

The pyramid of learning developed by occupational therapist Kathleen Taylor and special educator MaryAnn Trott. It indicates sensory processing development as the basis of all learning

The blank slate from which our sensory perception develops is profound: newborns have not yet learned to process sensory inputs independently or really at all. That is, newborns experience intermingled, undifferentiated senses where, for example, sounds bleed over into vision. Much infant development involves the brain training itself to orient whatever signals are available to make them useful, to make sense of the world. Later in development, language enables more focused and directed learning and literacy hopefully enables more self-directed learning. That Daniel Kish was able to teach echolocation to so many children is proof positive that seemingly superhuman sensory adaptions can be learned and taught (at least to those with enough brain plasticity.)

The opposite side of that coin, however, is that sensory processing does not remain so malleable later in life. For example, when vision is restored in adulthood to a person born blind, complex visual processing skills like facial recognition do not typically develop, even after decades.

Something about old dogs and new tricks. Adult minds, already structured and adapted, lack the plasticity to compensate for sensory decline from aging and injury, unfortunately.

Feel the Love: Cognition and Emotion

Cognition is a word thrown around here quite a bit, but what exactly does it mean?

Cognition is the process where sensory inputs, thought, and experience are synthesized into knowledge and function. More expansive than “thinking” this broad mind-power encapsulates ability to perceive, process, store and retrieve information in order to respond to the environment, formulate goals and carry them out.

As mentioned throughout Part 1, a mess of interconnected factors (including sensory differences) that go into cognition affect what comes out the other side — how one thinks, the things one likes and the actions one takes. Some even argue sensory information is necessarily the foundation, not just of learning, but of all thought, adding complexity with development, internalized and contextualized relative to other thoughts. Dizzyingly complex in any case, cognition involves many mysterious layers of mental processing applied over sensory inputs to yield our conscious experience.

One particularly potent layer — emotion and mood — profoundly impact thinking and experience, interwoven with cognition. Not a one-way street, emotions develop in part from previous cognition and beliefs, but also deeply influence subsequent cognition. Indeed, emotions tend to be motivational forces in thought.

Negative emotional states often arise from HALT stressors — hunger, anger/annoyance, loneliness and tiredness — mostly realized via previous cognition. These and other stressors activate the sympathetic nervous response to arouse and motivate, cope and respond. Manageable levels of such stress lead to focused, self-interested, competitive behavior. As stress increases and overwhelms, more extreme negative emotional states follow, often leading to rash decisions and actions. This is the body shutting down higher reasoning to promote immediate action based on whatever limited info is available. Under extreme stress especially physical threat, the fearful sympathetic response halts all cognitive foot-dragging and defaults immediately to fight, flight, or freeze, a deeply embedded survival reflex.

Oppositely, the parasympathetic, rest-and-digest response calms the stressed-out sympathetic response, allowing for recovery and deeper, more abstract, less motivated thinking. Factors promoting this relaxation include the absence of stressors, slowing of breathing, welcome physical contact (good touch, not bad touch), repetitive prayer, meditation, and interaction with cute creatures (animals/children) as well as friends and loved ones. More varied and positive emotional states tend to emerge, less immediately motivated. In parasympathetic mode, where most of us spend most of our time, higher mental functions requiring deep thought, like creativity, planning and strategizing are enabled as well as less productive more (fun) indulgent ones. In the absence of stress and with comforting social queues, the body encourages less action, to rest, and also to play, imagine, innovate, socialize and plan ahead.

So, over time, cognition and emotion co-evolve, each deeply influencing the other in mutual development. Social and environmental factors interact with thoughts to create emotions which motivate actions that resolve/create stressors leading to new emotions. Tangled in a web of interacting variables, cognition from one moment necessarily impacts the next, hinging in part on fickle emotions and stress responses.

Unfortunately, sometimes thought patterns evolve into a dysfunctional cycle. Repetitive use of mental pathways, even when maladaptive or unwanted, tends to ingrain them. Addiction is a great example, a maladaptive coping mechanism which tends to cause one to ignore problems, eventually creating more stress, leading to more coping etc. Worse yet, chronic stress eventually leads to structural brain changes, literally growing the limbic infrastructure responsible for stress responses while shrinking the prefrontal cortex responsible for higher reasoning like emotional regulation, planning and decision-making.

Sensitivity in interception (the sense of internal health states discussed in Part 1) no doubt shape sensitivities to internal stress. Hunger and tiredness especially are complex feelings (not emotions) based on internal senses like stomach fullness. I’m convinced, for example, that my hunger sensitivity can be a bit extreme, leading to impressive capacity for hanger (and annoyance in general.)

Physical insecurity, fear and the sympathetic response seem the most potent drivers of thought, sometimes lack thereof, being so critical to survival. Not felt equally, those with anxiety disorders have heightened fight-or-flight responses for example. But also, those with heightened sensory sensitivities may experience more jarring sensations leading to increased opportunity for trauma and fearful responses. Increased taste sensitivity makes supertasters pickier eaters, more negative emotionally and with heightened disgust sensitivity. Similarly, high noise sensitivity correlates to more negative emotional responses, mood disorders and introversion. Common wisdom recognizes ‘sensitive’ individuals with lots of ‘nerves.’ Scientific research recognizes ‘ease of excitation’ sensitivity scale and that it correlates with neurotic personality type. 🤓Same deal.

Also central to survival are factors related to cooperation, sociability and reproduction, also powerful drivers of thought, thankfully. These include love, compassion, libido, trust snd sense of justice as well as personality characteristics like conscientiousness, extroversion and agreeableness. Rather different from ‘ease of excitation,’ but a psychological measure of sensitivity all the same, ‘aesthetic’ sensitivity tests appreciation for complex positive stimulus like beauty. This ability correlates to open and extroverted personalities.

Personality forms another potent factor determining thought. Less a layer of cognitive filtering like emotion and more a preference for thought patterns, personality amounts to cognitive style. Developing from genetic factors interacting with intricate social queues, personality relates to social and coping strategies and tendencies. These tend to solidify in young adulthood together with core beliefs. Beliefs, too, form a critical layer of cognitive filtering (more on those in Part 3.)

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Of course, one doesn’t normally think so specifically about one’s internal world. The conscious experience is a messy soup difficult to deconstruct, especially while swimming in it. But the implications of all this are wild to consider. One’s cognitive adaptions, processing techniques subconsciously developed mostly in childhood informed by sensory differences we’re mostly unaware, determine how and if sensory info reaches consciousness. That is, adaptive mental programming determines how one experiences and relates to the world, often determined by mysterious forces beyond conscious control. These adaptions embody bias — how one thinks as an individual. These mental short cuts determine what one tends to notice and prioritize, without thinking about it, and oppositely ignore and disregard as unimportant.

So, the common expression to “see things differently” can literally be true. Indeed, those who tend to use phrases involving vision also tend toward visual learning and good eyesight. Favoring phrasing like “see what we like” vs “what feels right” vs “what sounds good” often reveals a dominant sensory mode, for learning and communicating.

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I hope this article looked, sounded, felt, smelled and tasted good to you! If you liked it, please hit the like button and/or leave a comment. I love to hear it and also it helps me connect with more readers. Cheers! 🍻 💕

Coming up next:

Part 3, coming soon, takes a hard look at core beliefs and how these act like a stage for the subconscious to frame conscious experience. We’ll also dive into the research on how sensory and cognitive differences interact with ideology, religiosity and political preferences.