I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses.
I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.Įach night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below: A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. 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.īut it gets worse. 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. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. 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. 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. 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. 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: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing. 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 don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before? and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.
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. I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:
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. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.Īnd the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it.