It has become common to use the word psychic to refer not only to extrasensory perception, or ESP, but certain kinds of sensory perceptions as well. I’ve noticed people using psychic and intuitive interchangeably, for example. That linguistic slippage makes sense, given that unconscious processing is often discounted or dismissed as false or unreal. Still, I want to identify a distinction that I’ve been uncovering, between the sensory and the extrasensory—between the explainable and that for which I’ll be able to offer no explanations at all.
Straddling this boundary, perhaps, is a trait that appears to undergird both intuition and empathy—a broad neurological trait known as sensory processing sensitivity. Roughly twenty percent of us can be described as “highly sensitive”—which is in fact the technical term, supported by studies showing that heightened neurological sensitivity to stimuli results from a “specific, measurable set of genetic variations” occurring on a spectrum in the overall population. Researchers define the one-fifth of us at the far end of this spectrum as “highly sensitive people,” or HSPs.
As it happens, HSPs display a distinct set of characteristics—tending, for instance, to be more aware of environmental subtleties and to process information more deeply and thoroughly. But they are also more easily overwhelmed, given to emotional extremes and to struggling under pressure. And while I can’t be sure if I’m among the sliver of the populace who qualify as empaths, it’s easy enough to conclude that I fit well within the fifth who are highly sensitive. I’ve spent my life absorbed by things that other people don’t notice at all, whether it’s the nuances of a human exchange or the bird in a tree across the street.
When I read through online lists about how high sensitivity manifests in daily life, I find myself checking every single box: You’re on top of the details. You enjoy working from home. You seek meaning and purpose. Even, You may avoid violence in movies or TV shows. And as is typical, I sometimes struggle acutely with things like beeping sounds, bright lights, and chaotic activity. My husband actually reprogrammed the microwave for me so that when the food is ready, it’s just silent. His rice cooker, however, can drive me out of the house.
But heightened sensitivity isn’t inherently negative. Research shows that it is distinct from the sensory sensitivities that commonly occur in conjunction with conditions such as schizophrenia and autism. Sensory processing sensitivity is very much its own thing—and it confers advantages as well as challenges. Brain scans of highly sensitive people show greater activity in the insula, a brain region that integrates “moment-to-moment knowledge of inner states and emotions” with “bodily position” and “outer events”—a synthesis that, as essayist Rae Katz has written, basically amounts to having “a Spidey-Sense.”
It’s worth noting, too, that the nervous system isn’t limited to the brain: neurological sensitivity is embedded through the entire body. The gut, for instance, has some 200 million neurons in constant communication with the brain—a gut feeling is a real thing, conveying useful information about our environment via the gut–brain axis. So having a fraction of individuals who are hyperaware in this way, able to alert others to potential threats, has likely benefited us greatly as a species. And, notably, there is no gender difference in the trait’s distribution. It occurs as often in men as in women.
Still, it can be awkward to be an HSP. The trait is common enough that it’s not abnormal, but uncommon enough to be perceived as strange. Maybe this is part of why heightened sensitivity isn’t widely recognized in our modern society. Maybe, having been understood by earlier cultures in more spiritual terms, the trait was later dismissed as a figment. Maybe history’s seers, shamans, and diviners were all HSPs. And maybe the term psychic is at least in part a placeholder for this, naming those in the top one percent, or the top half a percent, of high sensitivity—those outliers in the ordinary distribution of human variance, possessors of this thing that has always been with us.
But how would we know if someone displays high sensory sensitivity or extrasensory perception—or both? I’m getting close now to the boundary of the unexplainable. This is where biology gives way to other fields. Some have told me it’s God, or Spirit, or the Divine—along with manifestations of the supernatural ranging from minor deities to angels to ghosts. Others have attributed it, conversely or concurrently, to physics, specifically quantum physics, that weird world of uncertainty principles, cats that are at once alive and dead, and what Einstein described as spooky action at a distance. So I wonder, past this boundary, are we launched beyond physical reality or simply deeper into it? Is this where we fall off the edge of the world? Or is that edge just another illusion?