Other Senses

The Wikipedia article opens with:

Extrasensory perception (ESP), also known as a sixth sense, or cryptaesthesia, is a claimed paranormal ability pertaining to reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. 

It's got a sketchy reputation at best as a concept because people focus on the part about "it's sensed with the mind." What if we focused instead on the concept that perhaps some people literally have a sixth sense?

Echolocation is known to be used by various animals. Blind or visually impaired humans use it to some degree.

The white cane used by blind people makes a loud tapping noise which aids in their spatial navigation, some blind people intentionally learn echolocation and I used to cross a road at a particular point under specific circumstances by listening for traffic instead of looking. At sunset, this was more reliable than looking into the setting sun on that road to try to spot oncoming traffic.

If you use UV light on certain creatures, like scorpions or crows, they appear very different from how they normally look to the human eye. This implies those species very likely literally see the world different from humans.

Hammerhead sharks have electroreception capabilities. This helps them detect prey in murky waters and even prey that has submerged itself in sand to try to hide.

Some of the best cooks I have known -- including my late mother, who was blind in one eye -- were visually impaired but had an unusually good sense of smell. They relied heavily on smell for determining when something was done rather than timers or visual checks like I do and were better cooks than I ever was. 

Smell isn't even a sixth sense but cookbooks don't typically describe how to cook via sense of smell. And if we more routinely included information about that, maybe visually impaired people would be empowered to be more independent.

I recently saw this joke on Reddit that's basically about temporarily impaired perception that's fixable. Perhaps planet Earth could try a little harder to wonder why people think they "know" something no one else can perceive and wonder if it's verifiable rather than dismissing people out of hand as crazy for perceiving things different from them.

I'm very seriously handicapped and it's taken a serious toll on my eyesight over the years, but I have a long standing habit of paying attention to handicapped characters in stories. So long before my eyesight went to hell, I was paying attention to blind characters in stories.

Wait Until Dark is a 1967 film about a blind woman being victimized by criminals who turns the tide on them once it gets dark by cutting the lights and dousing a guy in gasoline so he can't light a match to compensate.

In some TV show, maybe or maybe not Columbo, a detective is interviewing a woman who confidently asserts that it was a particular type of vehicle. He realizes she's blind because she's using her finger on the edge of her cup to know when to stop pouring her tea and there are probably other clues. Maybe she can tell him the make and model but not the color of the car.

She ends up explaining she knows what kind of car it is by the distinctive sound of the door shutting and she's familiar with it because she has a friend with the same kind of car.

I've touched on this previously: The 1984 movie Places in the Heart has a blind man save a Black man from being lynched because as a blind man, he identifies people by voice and can name all the KKK members. He doesn't care their faces are covered. That's irrelevant to him.

People who have face blindness -- covered in the same thing linked above called Eyewitness Testimony with supporting resources -- or people who aren't truly face blind but who have difficulty learning faces sometimes are better at identifying people by voice or other traits than is typical.

I have discussed this with people with various strengths and weaknesses and engaged in conversations with people in the gifted community about the challenges in distinguishing unusual talents or abilities of this sort from "psychic phenomen."

I have suggested elsewhere that Joan of Arc may not have picked the dauphin out of a crowd by voices in her head or "God telling her." She may have been able to tell he was a noble and the others were not based on appearance or mannerisms.

A commonly known difference in the modern world between the rich and the poor is the condition of your teeth. Rich people either have healthy teeth and a beautiful smile full of pearly whites because they are well fed and healthier or they get dentures or cosmetic surgery to LOOK that way.

It's gone down in history as supporting evidence of her being chosen of God or at a minimum an explanation for why people of her era accepted her as such. But there's not even a surviving portrait of her, so we don't really know what she looked like, yet we act like we are certain what happened there.

I see no reason to believe that her ability to pick a noble out of a crowd had to be divine inspiration and not a more prosaic explanation, like "You've got to be joking! He smells of the pig manure he shoveled this morning. Obviously, HE isn't the dauphin!"

She was socially savvy enough to dress like a messenger boy (like "a man" but one too young to need to shave) to keep herself safe as a woman traveling alone through hundreds of miles during The Hundred Years' War. I don't think it takes much to suggest social savvy is a perfectly plausible explanation and either she saw no reason to explain how she knew or other people just assumed divine inspiration and she saw no reason to argue it or perhaps it never really came up in conversation with her as the tale was retold to other people.

Years ago, I had a lively discussion of seeming psychic phenomen and potential other explanations on a gifted list. This led to a spin-off list that I was invited to join and soon left because all the people who joined WANTED to BELIEVE and it wasn't remotely like the lively debate that inspired the creation of the email list.

But I have known people who had a reputation as psychics who had very prosaic explanations for some of their actions that freaked out other people. My own mother spent a lot of time desperately trying to CONVINCE people she really was psychic and her dreams really came true, but when I commented on her seeming extra sensory knowledge of when I most needed money, she didn't attribute that to being psychic.

I was a military wife with small children. She was a former military wife and knew from long experience you get paid by the month, you get paid the same amount no matter how many days the month has and you end up having too much month left at the end of your paycheck for months with 31 days.

So she replied "Oh, I just look at the calendar and if there are five weekends instead of four, I send you money the last week of the month."

Often, such people have no reason to explain how they know. Until I said something about her uncanny ability to send money when I was broke, my mother never had reason to explain how she decided when to do that.

Additionally, very knowledgeable, observant people can't always explain to you how they know. In a remarkable exception to the rule where people typically say "luck" or "ESP," a physician who had an uncanny track record for sending people for syphilis testing earlier than usual and being right was assigned two physicians to observe him work. 

This led to the identification of the eye flutter as an early onset symptom. 

Where this becomes problematic is when such people end up having to explain themselves to the authorities. "I'm SMART! TRUST me!!!" isn't a legal argument you can get away with.

I TWICE had a brush with being threatened with having the authorities sicked on me for being too competent. 

In one case, I spoke with my son's fourth grade teacher at the start of the school year like I had done EVERY year and been well received because they felt they could talk comfortably with me about my different kiddo and then this teacher promptly reported me to the school social worker as a psycho overprotective helicopter mom.

She called me. We talked on the phone for thirty minutes and she said "I know both your kids and they're great kids. I don't need to make an in person appointment with you. This was some weird misunderstanding."

Months later, he didn't exactly apologize but admitted, yeah, the boy ain't normal. It's just subtler these days and not blatantly in your face like it was for K-3.

In another case, I was being implicitly threatened with have child protective services called because my son lost five pounds and the physician and social worker on his specialty team where a social worker and dietician are ROUTINELY included were very upset.

He has a relatively mild form of a very serious condition. He first gained twenty pounds in a year, going from around 102 to 122 pounds so it was a substantial weight gain, and then lost five.

He wasn't underweight. He didn't feel bad. He wasn't concerned. I wasn't concerned.

But I also was making adjustments to everything they prescribed because his condition is relatively newly identified as a milder variation and the stock answers weren't working.

He was prescribed digestive enzymes when he was first diagnosed. Eighty-five percent of people with the condition are on these and it's a large part of why he gained weight.

But he was initially told take 5-6 pills per meal and this upset his stomach so much, he was avoiding eating. I sat him down and talked to him about "We're trying to put weight on you. Not eating won't do that." and told him to play with the dose until he found something that worked for him.

He found he could tolerate two pills per meal. So that's what he did, with my permission. But if it went to court, that would be grounds to claim child neglect and that I'm at fault for his weight loss.

I also let him try my digestive enzymes. We have the same condition and a different presentation of symptoms. He has more gut issues. I have more lung issues.

My digestive enzymes were buffered and I took his pills instead of mine when I was prescribed Zithromax because you are supposed to take Zithromax with food, I was supposed to take digestive enzymes when I ate and the buffering agent is counterproductive for Zithromax. It makes it less effective.

So I took his pills and then went "Oh, you should try mine. Mine are buffered. Maybe they won't upset your stomach so much." And he did and I got his prescription changed.

And you never want to be a homemaker or other "unqualified loser with no life" essentially calling your medical team stupid to their face in court. So we got his weight up, got them off our backs and when he turned eighteen, he chose to just not seek a new physician for his condition because our management of it was working fine.

I guess that falls under having sense rather than a sixth sense.