If you think you’re like everyone else, you’re probably wrong

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I don’t mean like everyone else in terms of dressing the same way, liking the same foods or enjoying the same books, for example, but in terms of the way you perceive the world. Maybe you’ve laughed with someone about the trouble you have remembering people’s names, or smiled together at the gorgeous scent from a flower. Or maybe they just looked at you blankly and didn’t know what you were talking about. As a child it’s natural to think that everyone else experiences life the same way you do – sees the same sights, smells the same scents, hears the same sounds. But then you find out that some don’t – some may be short-sighted, so when you point at something ‘over there’ they just can’t see it. Some may be blind, some deaf, some have a good sense of smell and others a poor sense or even none at all, some are colour-blind, some people are good at recognising others, some are not, some have excellent memories, others are absent-minded… In fact there are far more differences than those and I keep finding out about new ones. Synaesthesia was one of the first – when senses are cross-wired so that words or music are perceived as colours, for example. I was fascinated when I first heard about this, but now I find it’s far more common than I thought. Even my daughter has it to some degree. As another example, when a girl asks her boyfriend ‘What are you thinking about?’ she’s probably hoping he’s going to say ‘How gorgeous you are’ or ‘I’m imagining our future together’ or something like that, and when he says ‘Oh, nothing’ she thinks that means he’s actually thinking about football and doesn’t want to admit it. It’s taken me years to accept that when he says ‘nothing’ he really is not thinking about anything at all. I mean how is that even possible? It’s something I just can’t imagine. Last week I met a lady who had no inner ‘eye’. When someone talked about seeing something ‘in the mind’s eye’ she literally had no idea what they were talking about. When her daughters tried to jog her memory they would tell her to ‘just run that film-reel through again’ but she didn’t know what they meant. She never saw images in her head. When she read a book, a description of a place or a person didn’t bring up any pictures, she just saw words. Again, this is something I find hard to imagine. Although I guess it does explain why some people like to watch films but don’t like reading books. I asked her if she had dreams. She had to think about that for a moment, then she said that she had emotional dreams, for example a feeling of being trapped somewhere, but she didn’t get any images of what or where that place might be. What sensory or mental differences have you found out about that have surprised you? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2024.