Super sensory perception

Sometimes, I wonder what I miss in the world. You see, my wife, Syahidah, in particular, notices things I do not, sees things I do not see, hears things I do not hear, smells things I cannot smell. She is gifted in sensory terms in a way that seems, at times, to be almost miraculous. That is, to one who could never perceive what she does so readily, it does seem like a miracle. She often reminds me, simply by perceiving the world, that the world I see, is not all that there is to see.

A few days ago, we were out, at night. I stood by the roadside, with the cars rumbling past and she stood on the pavement, about one and a half to two metres away (I had just turned back to speak with her, whilst approaching the road). There was quite a bit of background noise and conversation required acute attention to each other’s voices.

“Why don’t you check out that Korean restaurant – and get a menu?”, she asked, looking hungrily across the street, for Syahidah is a bit of a foodie.

I took a couple of steps into the road, for it was free of traffic, at that moment, so I was, by now, perhaps three metres away from Syahidah.

“Is that your phone?”, she called after me.

I stopped and listened and heard nothing.

I reached my hand into my pocket and my phone did, indeed, seem a little agitated.

I pulled it out. Sure enough, someone was calling me. As I answered, I had one thought in my head, which I said aloud to Syahidah, before I turned my attention to the caller:“How did you hear that?”, I asked her, with a raised voice – for such a voice was necessary, I thought, for a normal person to hear me, at that distance, and with that background noise.

She shrugged, having no answer, or explanation herself. She just heard it, that is all.

As my call proceeded, my mind was half on Syahidah’s miraculous hearing.

Think about it: my ear was about 1 metre from the phone. Hers was about two and a half to three metres away. Given that the sound energy intensity will decline by an inverse power square law – that is it will be proportional to 1/distance squared, the sound intensity at her position would have been about 1/6 to 1/9 of what it was for me. Yet she had heard it and I had not. That means that her hearing, at the frequency of the phone ring, is at least around 6 to 10 times more acute than mine. I find that quite startling.

She often tells me of noises I have not heard, of people approaching or things happening, that are too far for me to be able to perceive – yet she is right, every time. She will hear the voices of people in the street at night, far from our house, long before they are near enough for me to hear. Her perceptual range is thus far greater than my own.

Now you should note that my own senses are not in deficit: I see, hear, taste and smell just fine. It is that her senses are more sensitive than is normal. At least, her hearing and smell, in particular, are.

Observing her perceiving the world is a bit humbling. For she tells me, just by her effortless perception, that my world, the one I sense, it is not as rich as hers: she hears softer sounds, smells fainter smells, notes things at greater distances and senses an altogether greater variety of things, than I am able to. We live in the same world, supposedly – but, in a way, I know that is not true: for her world is in “higher definition” than mine. Indeed, her world might be said to be HD colour TV – and mine no more than an old fashioned low definition black and white TV. That would seem a fair comparison given how much more sensitive her senses are, than mine.

I wonder, now, what effect having such a mother, has on the senses of my children. I do not know enough, yet, about how they perceive the world, to know if they have inherited her greater acuity of sense perception. I hope so. For if they have, they will see a richer world, for the duration of their lives, than I know – and I would be happy for them, if that were so.

I shall endeavour to observe what they perceive and so come to a better understanding of just what their threshold of perception might be. I already have hints that they may have better senses than one might expect. Future posts will report my observations.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 6 and Tiarnan, 4, this month, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

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