{{Title link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ }}
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.
And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.
I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:
Ozy: I am currently eating chickpeas and rice and I am _delighted_ by the fact that I can eat this _whenever I want_ The nice thing about DISCOVERING YOUR FOOD PREFERENCES is that suddenly all the food in my cupboards is food I like and am looking forward to eating. and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.
Scott: I don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before?
Ozy: It took me a while to have enough of a sense of the food I like for “make a list of the food I like” to be a viable grocery-list-making strategy.
Scott: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing.
Ozy: Hrm. Well, it’s sort of like… you know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you _actually believe_ you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention _all_ my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”
Scott: How does that apply to food?
Ozy: Well, sometimes people will tell you a certain food is high-status or healthy or a thing that everyone enjoys, and then I would like it. And a lot of times I just ate whatever was in front of me or ordered whatever the cheapest vegetarian thing on the menu was. And I… sort of vaguely had a sense that some things were more pleasurable to eat than other things but I didn’t like _keep track_ of what they were or anything. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. And also because I didn’t intuitively grasp that the “liking” thing everyone was talking about was related to pleasure and not to like popularity/status.
So the fact that people talk about what foods they like about a zillion times a day isn’t enough to make everyone realize liking foods is a thing.
But it gets worse. A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below:
I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.
Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.
Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.
But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.
All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.
So I guess you can just not be able to smell and not know it.
This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.
I know one friend’s answer. He discovered he was color-blind sometime in his teens. This still surprises me. People are always taking Ishihara tests (those colorful dotted circles with numbers inside of them) and discovering they’re color blind. Going through life with everyone else saying “The light was red, but now it’s green” and thinking it was weird that they were making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray, but it was probably one of those metaphors.
As for me? I took a surprisingly long time to realize I was asexual. When I was a virgin, I figured sex was one of those things that seemed gross before you did it, and then you realized how great it was. Afterwards, I figured it was something that didn’t get good until you were skilled at it and had been in a relationship long enough to truly appreciate the other person. In retrospect, pretty much every aspect of male sexual culture is a counterargument to that theory, but I guess it’s just really hard for my brain to generate “you are a mental mutant” as a hypothesis.
But even bigger than that, I think I might not have had emotions, at least not fully, for about five years as a teenager when I was on SSRIs. I even sort of noticed myself not having emotions, but dismissed that as an odd thing to happen and probably other people were just being really overexuberant about things. Later I learned emotional blunting is a commonly reported side effect of SSRIs and I was probably just really not experiencing emotions. When I came off them it took me several years to get used to having normal-intensity feelings again, but it wasn’t a sudden revelation, like “Wow, I was missing a fundamental human experience for the past several years!” Just a sense of things being different which was hard to cash out.
As always, I wonder if a lot of what other people interpret through vague social things might be biological, or at least more complicatedly social. I can’t enjoy jazz music even a little – the best I can do is pick up something sort of like a beat and half-heartedly feel like maybe I could snap my fingers to it if I could build up the energy. My brother fell in love with jazz as soon as he heard it and is now a professional jazz musician who has dedicated his life to it. Are we listening to the same thing when we hear a jazz tune? Or am I like a guy who can’t smell trying to appreciate perfume?
It took me approximately forever to find out I was faceblind.
In retrospect, the incident with telling someone she looked like Evil Galadriel from the FotR movie and having everyone including her deny it…makes a lot more sense.#prosopagnosia #that is such a boring tag; does anyone have more interesting suggestions?
“You humans all look alike to me”?
(I was thirteen myself. Since autism and prosopagnosia are often found together, when I started reading autism neurodiversity blogs it came up early and often. I was occasionally confused as a kid when others could not only tell people with the same hair colour and style apart, but expected me to do the same.)
As for the article, I do wonder what experiences I might be missing. I have gradually figured out over the course of my life that my emotional range is non-standard: I appear to be missing awe entirely, I don’t feel limerence but I do feel perseveration* (which I’m told is both a similar feeling and one that most people lack), I have most** of the sex-related emotions but in such a way as to make them nearly unrecognisable (so I’m missing out on other people’s experiences of them, but everyone else is missing out on mine), my mother says that she experiences frustration as an emotion all its own rather than a sub-type of anger so apparently that’s a thing. (There might still be other emotional divergences I don’t know about yet.) I don’t know what thorns sound like (though I do know what eths sound like). I’m not entirely convinced that sour and bitter are actually separate flavours to me; I’ve been meaning to investigate that further. There’s probably others I don’t even suspect.
*Well, I did, and I still could if I allowed myself. The beginning stages are so unpleasant that once I figured out how to nip it in the bud (also age thirteen, as it happens), the temptation to do so was overwhelming.
**I don’t seem to have anything even resembling “looking at someone and wanting to fuck them”, not counting extenuating circumstances like the person being in a sexually suggestive pose.
I didn’t know prosopagnosia by that name, but I read “Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass” around age three and Humpty Dumpty’s “your faces are all the same, now if the mouth was at the top or both eyes on the same side I might be able to recognize you again” clicked with me really hard. (I didn’t realize the experience I wasn’t having was supposed to be a universal one for a lot longer – I’d try to explain that I’d been late to swimming class because I couldn’t figure out which instructor around the pool was mine, for instance, and people didn’t argue, they just didn’t seem to pay any attention to me, so I stopped mentioning it, and instead focused on learning to read enough body language to tell when somebody thought they recognized me and was expecting me to come over and say hi or be in their class or whatever. I suppose it makes me extremely vulnerable to con artists pretending to be an old friend – I did very nearly get kidnapped at age five by some people in a car who said they were friends of my mother’s, which I had no reason to doubt, except that I was wearing a thrift-store t-shirt and they called me by the name on it, which was nothing like my name, so I backed away slowly and then ran in the house. But nothing like that’s happened since then, because people expect me to have enough facial recognition to know that they are not actually a long-lost friend etc. So I guess it works out. ^_^)
Like Brin, I don’t experience limerence – thank god, it sounds really unpleasant – although around puberty I managed to sort of mishmash-mangle the experiences of finding a guy hot and having my bio-incubator (who is massively romo and cannot comprehend that anyone could be otherwise) aggressively ship me with him at the same time, into something that seems in retrospect more like limerence than like anything else, except that it was on my part very much deliberate – Dorothy Sayers has a bit where Harriet Vane muses on “persuading oneself into appropriate feelings” for somebody one is dating, which clicked with me re this – and that it lasted for about fourteen years give or take, which I am fairly certain limerence on the same person is not supposed to do.
(I was extreeeemely sexually repressed and for several years also had nonexistent libido as a side effect of severe depression, all of which made the “I find him hot so I am trying to read romo feelings into this” thing even more confusing… ^_^)
Like Brin, also, I do experience perseveration, although I don’t find it particularly unpleasant. I did get teased/bullied about it a lot as a kid, so I developed the habit of keeping absolutely quiet about the objects of my perseverations until they’d faded down to the point where I could talk about ‘em without going constantly on and on; I’m trying to work on being more open now about when I’m having a new perseveration (it’s almost always something fannish, a character or fandom or whatnot), while hitting a balance where I don’t bore everyone to death or drag too many conversations off-topic because I’m so obsessed with this one thing. Perseveration has produced most of my fanfic, though – I’d be perseverating on one character and become able to write their voice really accurately, so I’d churn out a few fics centered on them and then move on – so I feel like it’s been, y’know, overall a net positive in my life, and while I can’t figure out how to turn it off, I don’t know that I’d want to, either. :-)
I know I can only smell certain specific things (I can tell wood smoke from charcoal smoke from various kinds of tobacco smoke, but apparently can’t smell pot), and my sense of taste varies according to how depressed I am – after I started meds at age 26, I went through a brief stage of being really startled that e.g. peanut butter had a flavor. Most of my perception of food is texture; I still don’t pay a lot of attention to flavor unless it’s really strong, although I do find myself enjoying the sweet-and-salty thing you get in a lot of peanut-caramel-chocolate desserts. I don’t tend to like spicy food; I don’t like sushi because the raw-fish texture throws me, but I love most breaded things because the breading texture gives me something familiar to focus on and then the texture of the thing underneath doesn’t bother me as much. (I won’t eat shrimp unless it’s breaded popcorn shrimp, for example.)
…I don’t know, I’ve probably wandered way off the topic here. It’s an interesting topic, though. :D
(see also this other branch I was in)
Tags:
#(June 2015) #conversational aglets #long post #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #kidnapping cw #food #(I am in fact eating peanut butter right now) #(and even though I have a cold I can still tell it has a flavour) #illness mention
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