Does everybody sense with the same intensity? Or are our sensory pathways on a spectrum?
Is there any credence to the idea that typically 'sensitive' people have more intense sensory systems? Do they feel more than normal?
In regards to our primary senses (touch, taste, hearing etc.) but I'm primarily interested in touch. For example, if two people touch a cold metal object, can one person feel the sensation more sharply than the other?
Edit: Stuck in the spam filter for 22 hours, so resubmitted here with permission from the mods.
Posted Aug 14, 2013, 1:35 PM UTC · edited
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Prefacing all of this by saying I am not an expert by any means on any of these senses. The below is merely meant to guide you in the right direction of things to google for more info on the subject.
Yes, all of the primary senses vary in intensity from person to person. On the subject of touch, pain tolerance most certainly varies from person to person and can be quite problematic for anesthesiologists. For instance, redheads in general have a higher pain threshold than most. For sight, some women are able to perceive a much wider spectrum of colors than men due to having 4 cones rather than 3 (basically the opposite of being color blind, some also speculate that this is why color blindness is more common in men). With taste, 35% of women and 15% of men (called supertasters) experience the sense of taste with a far greater intensity than average. Hearing is one of the easiest sense to put on a spectrum since people often start to lose their hearing as they get older and lose the ability to hear certain frequencies. Finally, for smell, I can't cite any sources for general variation, but women commonly report having a heightened sense of smell during pregnancy.