The Reality Bubble

We are each of us, THE REALITY BUBBLE contends, entirely unique in our exact sensory experience of the world. Your world is not my world. This significant book, the fullest portrait of the extent and import of sensory diversity across our species, is a major work of popular science and explanatory psychology from the acknowledged UK expert in the field.

You may be someone for whom certain words taste like lemon sherbet or like ginger beer, or for whom each station on the London Underground has its own distinct flavour. You might have no visual recall whatsoever and be entirely reliant on a proposition-only memory. You might be in love with the Golden Gate Bridge or find the sound of someone chewing at the next table drives you to distraction. Or you might find all of these experiences unimaginably odd, but what you will probably not know is that you are yourself unimaginably odd, that you experience the world uniquely, that you do not see colours, hear sounds, taste flavours exactly as any other single human being does. Your world is not my world, and not anybody else's, exactly. The way you feel is indeed uniquely yours. Your sensory reality is all your own. Our experience of reality is entirely constructed by our senses, and that construction is far more fragile, subjective and diverse than we ever hitherto imagined. Science has only recently started to be able to show us just how different we are, just how wide the sensory diversity spectrum stands. These differences are very consequential, might explain much and might require us to re-set how we look at each other, how we understand that what we share might not be exactly what we thought we shared. We each simulate reality, and a distinctly different one at that. Difference is all.

Professor Simner has the expertise, the fluency and the casebook to explain the sensory diversity of humankind to the widest readership. Thirty years of researching, thinking and feeling about this subject are distilled into this major work, a summation of a life in science and a summary of where that science has reached. She shows through stories of very real, very varied individuals just how differently each of us experiences the world, just how much exploring our sensory differences can explain about what it is to be human, to feel human.