Reader's Block by Matthew Rubery;

Author:Matthew Rubery;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

Hallucinations

“I was lying in bed reading a book by Italo Svevo, and for some reason, looked down, and there they were: a small pink man and his pink ox, perhaps six or seven inches high.”

—Siri Hustvedt

IN 1879, THE PSYCHOMETRICIAN Francis Galton began sending out questionnaires seeking information about the nature of mental imagery. By gathering hundreds of personal accounts describing what individuals saw in their mind’s eye, Galton sought to confirm statistically the substantial variations among people’s abilities to visualize objects. The original questionnaire contained the following prompt about reading: “6. Printed pages.—When recalling passages in a book, is the actual print clearly conspicuous? How much of a page can you mentally see and retain steadily in view?”1 Galton already knew that individuals visualized in strikingly different ways. Even so, the response from the novelist Mary Eliza Haweis stood out:

Printed words have always had faces to me; they had definite expressions, and certain faces made me think of certain words. The words had no connection with these except sometimes by accident. The instances I give are few and ridiculous. When I think of the word Beast, it has a face something like a gurgoyle. The word Green has also a gurgoyle face, with the addition of big teeth. The word Blue blinks and looks silly, and turns to the right. The word Attention has the eyes greatly turned to the left.2

Haweis’s animated alphabet (Figure 6), a concoction of synesthesia and fantasy that stretched credulity, proved to be an outlier among the responses, most of which differed from one another only by degrees (and certainly did not mention gargoyles). Galton concluded from the survey that mental imagery exists on a continuum ranging from the almost total absence of images—a condition known today as aphantasia—to ones so extravagant that they could only be understood as hallucinations.3

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