Articles
There is something called
Sensory Gating and it refers to the brains process of filtering unnecessary stimuli, in order to protect our beautiful minds, to prevent us from going crazy. People with schizophrenia and autism have problems with Sensory Gating. There is also something called Latent Inhibition, being the latency of acquiring the information from our senses, it's related to the first. Low
Latent Inhibition would be a incapability to ignore the constant stream of stimuli, or capability to sense more than a normal person, depends how you prefer to see it. This is quite tied up with the IQ, meaning that people with higher IQ are more likely to actually handle all that information (capability), whilst people with lower IQ might find Low Latent Inhibition quite troublesome (incapability).
If you have been watching Prison Break, you will know that Michael Scofield had Low Latent Inhibition, which, no surprise there, made him a ... genius.
Now, LLI means that you observe everything - what you see, hear, feel, touch, think, taste, all of it (whether you cope with it or not, that's another story). The question would be - is there something as Social Low Latent Inhibition? In my mind this would be capability to perceive a huge quantity of information from the interaction with people - the way they look, how they talk, what they say, what they don't say, what is their expression, does it match what they say, how they actually appear to feel, does it match what they are trying to present, etc. I am aware that we all do this, we process all these kind of information, but what if you overdo it? What if you can't block the fact that a person just lied to you and won't admit it? What if they are saying something, giving a reason, when you know that it is made up, right on the spot and that behind are other more basic reasons? What if the person really tries to wear their mask, but you see past that and you just can't make them understand that you see past their mask?
It doesn't help you, the fact that you can see all that. No one, well, almost no one, will admit it, cause most of the times you will see things that maybe even the person itself didn't knew where there. It rarely helps you in communication, cause people don't really like being caught. Also people don't like when you "read" them, unless you tell them something good about them. What do you do? Keep it all for yourself? Ignore it? Throw it to their face? That's a risky one.
Does it take high Emotional Intelligence to be able to cope with all this?
Or maybe, most of the people are like that, and there's nothing special about the fact that you can be really emphatic and sense what people feel and, even worse, sense the lies behind their persona... cause, lets face it, we all put up an emotional mask, and we don't really want others to know what sick, fucked up, reality is behind it.
Anyway, I was just wondering...
