Sensory Predominance: Which Is Yours?

I was talking with my father the other day when the issue of sensory predominance came up. “Without any doubt”, I said, “I am mostly aural, a bit less kinesthetic, and visual comes in the last place”. The man looked at me in astonishment: “Oh my god”, he said, “I am exactly the other way round”.

(Just in case, ‘kinesthetic’, perhaps the only definition not self-evident, is the sense that gives us a feeling of bodily presence, and allows us to detect where is each limb and doing what, general tone, weight, tensions…)

Events like this make you realize that there are many languages within the same language, and as many worlds as persons out there to perceive it:

A person who is predominantly visual can be alright with a noise rate that for an aural is unbearable.
You can cram a lot of aural guys in a concert hall because they are absorbed with the music, but that kinesthetic on third row finds the lack of space suffocating, and the visual one gets easily distracted with absurd details in the ceiling.
A piece of cloth will look completely different for a predominantly visual, interested in the color, and for someone more kinesthetic, more focused on textures, maybe one of those persons who likes to touch everything, who learns the world with his hands.

Many disconnections in relationships, many of those weird moments between people that one lets go with a shrug, have undoubtedly to do with things like these: moments where the sensation of speaking of the same thing is only an illusion.

On the other side of the coin, and maybe it’s easier seen by a third person, sometimes you find people connecting and engaging in ways that look a bit incomprehensible to you. Their conversation evolves in ways that do not look quite logical to you, but that seem to make perfect sense to them. The reason is because they are sharing a certain predominance, and perhaps their words appeal to senses that you are not that aware of.

Being aware of such a division can help us have more effective communications, by trying to detect the interlocutor’s main sensory channel and then adapt our language accordingly.

For example: if someone uses expressions like ‘taking the bull by the horns’, the chances are there is a kinesthetic predominance. Maybe you’re more aural and had been using phrases like ‘starting with a bang’, satisfied of finding such a vivid language, and then wondering why it has so little effect on the other person.

Training oneself on this awareness can be criticized as lacking spontaneity, or an attempt to ‘manipulate’ the dialog; but I prefer to see it as a challenging game, and above all, an act of politeness: if you have notions of Chinese, and find out someone is Chinese, you try to speak Chinese. If you find out someone is aural, you try to speak aural.

I’d also like to add that this classification of senses BY NO MEANS IMPLIES LIMITATION. I don’t want to see the mobs with torches in the streets: “Death to the aural!” “Kinestetic are superior!”. Every human being can and must enjoy and freak out via these three channels, and, notwithstanding our sensory predominance, we all know what is our left feet thumb doing right now; it is only that they come in a different order; the ‘minor ones’ are not to be despised; they are additional chances to grow, to learn and to explore, and a part of that incredible wealth of the human species that comes from our differences.

So, I have already said my order; which is yours?