Our Five (and a Bit) Senses

We come equipped, straight out of the box, with five senses. A modest toolkit, really, when you think about it, but we behave as though it were comprehensive.

Sight: the small, curated cinema playing constantly behind the eyes.
Sound: the endless soundtrack, much of it unwanted.
Touch: the sense that reminds us we have bodies and that they are fragile.
Smell: the most honest sense, incapable of lying, brutally evocative.
Taste: pleasure distilled, or punishment, depending on the cook.

These are the official channels through which reality applies for membership. If something cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelt or tasted, we tend to treat it as rumour, superstition, or marketing.

And yet, there is another sense – less tidy, less democratic – distributed unevenly and spoken about in whispers. Call it intuition, clairvoyance, premonition, extrasensory perception, or simply a feeling. Some people have it in spades; others appear to have misplaced it along with their empathy.

This sixth sense concerns itself with what cannot be photographed. It spots the quiet mechanics behind events: the invisible chains of cause and effect that the intellect, busy congratulating itself, fails to notice.

The trouble is that even before we get mystical, we are already overwhelmed.

Psychologists tell us that we are assaulted by millions of bits of information every second, first estimated at two million, now closer to eleven. Your brain, however, is a quaint, Edwardian device. It can handle roughly 134 bits at a time. The rest is discarded like spam.

And here’s the catch: my 134 bits are not the same as yours.

We all edit reality ruthlessly. We delete what bores us, distort what threatens us, and generalise what saves time. It’s less a faithful recording and more a highlights reel, aggressively trimmed by personal bias.

Take the word elephant. You didn’t look it up. You didn’t consult a field guide. You conjured one instantly. Yours may be a cuddly cartoon with eyelashes, or a colossal grey engine of destruction. Same word. Different beast.

That mental shortcut, the template built from memory and habit, is how we survive the day. But it also means that what we call “reality” is, in fact, a private screening.

Those internal pictures shape how we feel….
How we feel shapes how we move….
How we move shapes what we do.

And so two people can witness the same event and walk away with entirely different stories, both convinced they saw the truth.

For all participants in Police Training School, a little charade is played: an event is staged, then instantly dismembered by memory. The trainees are asked to recount what they’ve seen and find, to their faint horror, that reality has splintered. Not just the embroidery of detail but the bones of it disagree. One swears blind the jacket was blue, another would bet a limb it was brown.

The facts, it turns out, are not facts at all, merely rumours we tell ourselves with confidence.

Why? Because our filters differ. Values. Beliefs. Attitudes. The furniture of the mind, arranged over years and rarely dusted.

Which leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: much of what we think we see “out there” is actually coming from in here.

Perception, it turns out, is projection.

Observe someone you admire. Their kindness, brilliance, or courage resonates because it already exists, however faintly, within you. Likewise, the traits that irritate, enrage, or exhaust you in others are often familiar tenants of your own psyche, knocking from the inside.

Carl Jung put it more elegantly, of course: we fling our unconscious material onto the world like a slide projector and then complain about the image.

The news is a perfect example. It is just information. The horror or hope you extract from it depends entirely on the mental weather you bring to the reading.

Which means it is impossible to recognise something you do not, in some way, already contain.

When you look at your partner, your friend, your client and think, fascinating, that is autobiography.
When you think, absolute nightmare, that is also autobiography, just less flattering.

Is the grass greener on the other side? No. The grass is the same colour everywhere. What differs is the lens.

When projection is unconscious, life feels unfair and other people seem to be at fault. When it becomes conscious, something quietly radical happens: responsibility returns home.

This is powerful knowledge, especially with children, lovers, colleagues, customers, or anyone who has ever annoyed you before coffee.

Happiness, then, is not a mystery bestowed by luck or withheld by fate. It is largely a matter of noticing what pictures you are playing in your own head—and deciding, with a little discipline, to change the channel.

That is why happiness is, to an alarming degree, a choice.

And success? Zig Ziglar had it right. It is not a competition with others. It is a private reckoning with your own potential – what you did versus what you might have done, had you been paying attention.

The rest, like most of reality, is interpretation.