When I was about seven years old I was diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder. At the time, such disorders were classified as learning disabilities. The way learning disabilities are diagnosed is by administrating an IQ test and an achievement test that focuses on skills like reading, writing and math. If there’s a big difference between the two scores, you have a learning disability. In my case my IQ was above average for my age, but my skills were below average for my grade level. No one at my school knew what to do with those results. Did I belong in the gifted program or in the resource room? One school board member remarked to my mother that my high IQ and learning disability would just cancel each other out over time, so what was the issue? My mom’s response was the stuff of legend.

I spent much of my formal education dealing with everyone else’s reaction to my ability to exceed expectations. I was a kid with the words “learning disabled” on my record who also appeared to be blazingly smart. It was a cognitive dissonance that most of the adults in my life didn’t know how to handle. I must be a liar. Something must be wrong with the diagnostic test that labelled me as disabled. Perhaps I had one of those mothers who was making excuses to extract special treatment for her children. Or I was cheating. As people observed more and more evidence that a disorder was actually present, that became the popular conclusion. I did well in school — at times better than “normal” children — because I cheated.

Now as an adult, the disorder and the intelligence have slotted nicely into the eccentric genius trope, so it’s questioned less and the intelligence valued more. People throw around lots of crazy superlatives when introducing me. Direct reports quote me in meetings. I have the power to silence debates on topics I know nothing about just by expressing some random impressions out loud. It’s jarring, off-putting and I’m still really trying to figure out how to use this new power responsibly. But what is more disturbing to me is the fatalism with which other people treat their own intelligence. Fatalism bordering on nihilism, as if every person has a specific capacity for intelligence with a strict ceiling created by genetics and biology.

What’s interesting about sensory processing disorders and often absent from the conversation about them is how they teach us that this isn’t true. When I was growing up the adults in my life who didn’t think I was a liar and a cheat tended to remark: imagine how smart you’d be if you weren’t learning disabled? Then in 2007, new research started coming out suggesting that my story wasn’t as unusual as assumed. People with sensory processing disorders or impairments tend to have higher IQs overall.

The question is …. why?

What is a sensory processing disorder exactly?

People with sensory processing disorders experience a breakdown between sensation and perception. Our physical senses work normally. Nerves fire as they should, but when the brain tries to assemble all this information into an experience of the world something goes wrong. Information gets lost, or isn’t filtered correctly. We get “out of sync” and respond inappropriately to sensation around us. We become hyper reactive to sensation, or not reactive enough. We can experience mild sensory hallucinations.

The brain naturally modulates sensory perception throughout the day in everyone. It may increase your sensitivity when you’re hungry so that you’re better able to find food. Or it may decrease your sensitivity when you’re tired so that you can fall asleep. Normal people experience what people with sensory processing disorders experience too. With all that variation the brain is bound to occasionally make mistakes and turn the dial too far up or too far down. Normal people describe sensory hallucinations as “the mind playing tricks.” Hyper reactivity is just being “distracted” or overwhelmed. Hypo reactivity is a lack of attention, a general feeling of unfocused. Sensory avoidant and craving behavior is often attributed to moods.

The difference between the average person and a person with a sensory processing disorder is that people with sensory processing disorders experience these things far more often. These mistakes in perception happen so often that they interfere with the person’s ability to function normally in day to day life. While most people settle into an awareness of the world that feels consistent and predictable, the world is often in flux for me. The most common problem I have is inattention blindness. I will not be able to see things that are not only right in front of me, but that I am actively looking for at the time, because my brain is filtering out that sensory information. Most people notice this first in my unedited writing. I drop the endings of words, or write the completely wrong words in sentences. Then I’m unable to spot these “careless” mistakes despite multiple rounds of proofreading. (A big thing that helped me overcome this is using text-to-speech on my computer while proof reading. Accessibility matters!) But it also happens frequently in the physical world. Driving is an unbelievably stressful experience when you know you sometimes can’t see things despite looking straight at them and have no way of knowing when that might happen. So even though I spent years driving through New York City’s crowded and chaotic suburbs without a single car accident on my record I switched to public transportation and walking only years ago.

We think sensory processing disorders are caused by deformities in the white matter triggering tiny, fraction of a second delays in delivering sensory information. By the time the information reaches the part of the brain where it is integrated into perception, it is already out of date. The brain either dumps it on the floor, causing information to be lost or passes it through and creates a traffic jam like feeling.

The world in flux

There are many theories about the connection between sensory processing and intelligence but my personal belief having lived it is that the nature of this disorder forces us to build up critical thinking and sensory discrimination tactics much faster and much earlier than other children in order to just function normally. It is incredibly difficult to live in a world where your perception of things is not consistent. Where sensations that you find threatening are actually fine, it’s just you. It’s hard on you socially. It’s hard on you emotionally. You have to study other people in order to gauge whether your experience makes sense. You have to pay more attention to the world around you. You have to get used to the fact that things that feel so real and natural might in fact be wrong. Once these habits are learned for survival, there is no reason not to apply them everywhere.

In other words, I had no choice but to confront and become comfortable with the reality that the way I perceived the world wasn’t necessarily accurate or the default everyone experienced. I had to seek out other ways of looking at things, learn how to error check by playing different senses off one another and hunt for inconsistencies. I needed to be comfortable and unthreatened with second guessing myself.

What caps people’s intelligence in life isn’t natural aptitude, it’s that they stop trying. They are afraid to be wrong so they close themselves off to new information. When your sensory perception is normal and consistent, you can fool yourself into believing that perception is the truth. And often you can live quite comfortably without ever considering that it might not be.

Learning to learn

The deformity in my brain does not make me smarter, it’s the coping mechanism that I needed to develop in order to manage it that does. But there’s nothing that says people need a sensory disorder in order to develop those skills.

The single most impactful thing people can do to improve their intelligence is to learn how to soothe the shame and anxiety that comes from confronting the possibility that the world is not how you see it and experience it. When you can do that you have many more opportunities to be curious and learn. The more opportunities to learn you give yourself, the more you will learn.

There were a lot of ways people treated me as a child that were deeply hurtful. I remember when I was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society a parent of another child complained to the school that standards were being lowered. People said and did dismissive, ignorant, hurtful things. All the time. But now I’m a woman working as a software engineer where people say and do dismissive, ignorant, hurtful things…. all the time.

People acknowledging my intelligence did not suddenly make my learning disability go away. I still struggle a lot reading and writing. I still feel like I need things explained to me three or four times whereas colleagues might get it with one explanation. The difference is I don’t assign any particular significance to struggling to understand — say — first order logic versus struggling to understand how to make change. For me it is the same feeling and it’s a feeling I have no choice but to confront every single day, so I might as well learn the first order logic stuff too.