PHANTASIA

Some people can see mental images, some can't. The consequences are profound.

- BY LARISSA MACFARQUHAR

Recent research has linked mental imagery to traits as different as vulnerability to trauma and a propensity to hold grudges.

When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and took them to be evidence that he had been a happy child, although he didn’t remember making them. When he was seven, in the summer of 1969, his father woke him up to watch the moon landing; it was the middle of the night where they lived, near Southampton, in England. He didn't remember this, either, but he'd been told that it happened. That Christmas, he and his brother were given matching space helmets. He knew that on Christmas morning the helmets had been waiting in the kitchen and that, on discovering his, he felt joy, but this was not a memory, exactly. The knowledge seemed to him more personal than an ordinary fact, but he could not feel or picture what it had been like to be that boy in the kitchen.

When he was eight or nine, he read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” over and over. At the beginning of the book, aliens implant images of tool-using into the minds of man-apes. Near the end, the main character, David Bowman, spools backward through memories of his life:

Not only vision, but all the sense impressions, and all the emotions he had felt at the time, were racing past, more and more swiftly. His life was unreeling like a tape recorder playing back at ever-increasing speed. . . . Faces he had once loved, and had thought lost beyond recall, smiled at him.

To Nick, these events—the images in the minds of the man-apes, David Bowman’s reliving of his life—were thrilling and otherworldly, with no connection to reality, brought about through the intervention of aliens, in distant, fictional worlds.