A character in a story I wrote a long time ago imagines zipping himself closed inside a transparent bubble. As it turns out, we are all living inside our own transparent bubbles; most of us just don’t realize it. We take our experiences at face value. We assume everyone accesses the world the same way we access it, pays attention to what we pay attention to, sees the same colors, and has the same understanding of basic concepts.

Yes, we disagree with some people, but they’re so obviously wrong. The rest of us are on the same page, right?

The topic of the Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain) this month was imagination. One of the participants commented that he has difficulty creating and sustaining visual mental images. The inability to form mental images is called aphantasia. It was identified in the 1880s but only named a few years ago, perhaps because it affects such a small percentage of the population. I can’t imagine being unable to create mental images! Visual mental imagery is an integral aspect of my sense of self and of how I function in the world. I couldn’t be me if I couldn’t do that.

Several years ago I learned about misophonia, also called soft-sound sensitivity. For people with this condition, ordinary sounds the rest of us easily tune out, such as chewing noises, tapping, or rustling paper, can be deeply disturbing. People with misophonia may have such strong physical and emotional reactions to certain sounds they curtail their activities to avoid them. Many more people are affected by misophonia than by aphantasia.

A few months ago I created a handout with a chart using four different colors, including a dark green. So many people saw the color that was clearly green to me (and my computer program) as black or gray or brown that I changed the shade for subsequent copies. These weren’t instances of color blindness, just different visual interpretations.

And then there’s the experience of anger. A lot of people believe anger to be a negative emotion, to be avoided, mitigated, or managed—certainly contained. But others, including me, find that anger can be energizing and even motivating at times. When I described getting angry about an aspect of my health/heart conditions to a friend earlier this month, she tried to persuade me of the value of acceptance. (If you know me, feel free to laugh now.) But I often experience anger that is about something—as opposed to anger at someone—as productive rather than destructive.

That Pesky Four-Letter Word

Lastly there’s a word common to all of us, and whether we use it or someone else uses it, we assume we know exactly what it means. The word is goal. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz begins one of his chapters* with this paragraph:

Choosing wisely begins with developing a clear understanding of your goals. And the first choice you must make is between the goal of choosing the absolute best and the goal of choosing something that is good enough.

Does this paragraph make sense to you? Did you sort of nod (at least mentally) in agreement? Apparently it made sense to him.

You could call what Schwartz is talking about a preference, a strategy, a drive, an inclination—you could call it a lot of things, but goal is definitely not one of them. The definition of goal is:

the state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it.

A goal has an end point. (Visualize a goal post if you can.) It represents a significant change from your current state of affairs, which is why it requires a plan. Once you reach that end point, you no longer need to keep taking the steps you outlined in your plan to get there.

Semantics, you may say. So what?

Well, Schwartz is talking about taking an action that involves choosing something. The most important thing to determine when you’re choosing something is what is your desired outcome not what is the method you are going to use to make the choice. And that’s a lot more than semantics.

So you may know what a goal is and how to set and achieve one. Or you may think getting gas on the way home from work—or making the absolutely best choice—is a goal. In any case, you probably assume others define the word the same way you do.

My Particular Bubble

I can and do create vivid mental images (don’t have aphantasia). I’m bothered by the reverberating bass sounds coming out of speakers in cars next to me at stoplights or the apartment next to mine, but I don’t have misophonia. I can distinguish dark shades of green from black or brown. I don’t experience anger as an entirely negative emotion. And I have a good understanding of what a goal is and how to achieve one.

These are all things I now know are not the same for everyone else. But there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of things I must assume to be the norm for everyone. It’s part of the human condition. It’s also one of the reasons I have always been interested in learning about temperaments or personality types—not for the purpose of “putting people in boxes” but to understand perspectives that are so different from my own.

Your view from your bubble, like my view from mine, is unique. The conditions inside your bubble, like the conditions inside mine, create our personal experience. Rather than taking everything at face value and assuming our experiences or interpretations are valid for everyone else, we might be better off adopting the perspective of one of my former clients, which is:

Isn’t that interesting?

*The subject of this chapter of Schwartz’s book will also be the subject of my next blog post.