After nearly five decades of interacting with other people, I have recently discovered that many of their interior lives are very different from mine. I read an article about hyperphantasia, which is the ability to imagine scenes and experiences that are not taking place, the opposite end of the spectrum from aphantasia, which is the absence of visual imagination. Some people with hyperphantasia, the writer says, cannot only visualise an apple but also imagine its weight in their hand.
I was surprised: of course I can. I can’t think of an apple in general without conjuring a particular apple, not only its weight but the texture of its surface, the difference between a glassy Granny Smith and a sandstone-skinned russet; the way a crisp apple breaks between my teeth and the give of a more floury one. I can smell apple blossom in my imagination, or an apple baking with cinnamon, and let’s have the wine-and-caramel scent of raisins too.
The article quoted a woman saying that what she could see in her mind was as vivid as a film. What I experience in my mind is much more vivid than a film, because my mind isn’t limited to the audiovisual. Asked, as a research questionnaire on hyperphantasia asks, to imagine a lake, I see the lake in its weather, bordered by fields and hills, reeds at the edges, rocks and birds, water rippling like the chocolate on a biscuit, but I also feel that rippling wind in my hair and the sunlight on my shoulder. You don’t get that in the cinema.
I’ve been writing stories since I learnt to write, and publishing novels for 15 years. It’s my work to imagine realities I don’t inhabit, to move through landscapes I’ve never seen in the bodies of people who don’t exist. I have to be able to think about the historical, social and economic experiences of people who aren’t me, and more importantly to feel the steering wheel or cliff-face or baby in their hands, taste the food in their mouths and hear the birdsong and traffic and wind that is the soundscape of their days. Then I have to work to represent these experiences in sentences but that’s the second of many stages.
Sarah Moss: Until recently, I assumed everyone had infinite worlds of light, sound, scent, taste and touch in their heads
The problem isn’t me and my sourdough and my kale. Access to nourishing food should be a right
Sarah Moss: I find the phrase ‘first world problems’ deeply objectionable
I fly too much and I feel guilty about it, but I keep doing it
I work from memory into invention: I have not – so far, may it stay this way – been close to a burning building, but I know the sight and sound and smell of fire; I know how buildings come apart; I know urgency, fear, desperation, and from these memories I can find my way into the minds and bodies of those standing helplessly in a holiday park on a summer night and also those whose natural or trained response to emergency is action.
Until last month, I assumed everyone had infinite worlds of light, sound, scent, taste and touch in their heads. Some of my invented characters have calmer and less vivid minds than mine, but I realise now that my baseline was loud and fast. (I’ve got better at managing them, but the demons and ghosts in my head have been at least as real as the sunlit lakes and apple blossom.)
[ My teacher told my parents I was ‘retarded’. My grandmother taught me to readOpens in new window ]
I started to ask friends and family, what’s it like in your head? What do you see and hear, do you smell and touch and taste in your mind? Unsurprisingly, there was a spectrum; also unsurprisingly, hypherphantasia is over-represented among my bookish, arty, theatrical friends. Most of us remember, hope, fear and dream with all our senses all the time, drop in and out of our interior lives day and night. But some said they could sometimes visualise and maybe hear but not taste, touch or smell in imagination, and some said they had no such thing and didn’t really believe that anyone else did. Apart from the psychologist, everyone was amazed and curious to learn that other people had such different experiences of being conscious.
I’ve been wondering ever since, what else is it we don’t know about each other?