Try running your fingers lightly along the side of your neck or across the sole of your foot. You will certainly feel the touch, and it might even be a little uncomfortable, but it is unlikely to make you burst into laughter. Now picture someone else lightly touching that very same spot. Suddenly, you might …
You pick up a towel from the clothesline and press it against your cheek. It looks dry, but something about it tells you otherwise. The fabric feels slightly cool against your skin, and when you squeeze it between your fingers, you can tell it hasn’t dried completely. You might even ask someone else to check …
You send a voice message without thinking much about it, then press play to check what you said. The words are yours. The accent is yours. Yet the person speaking seems to have borrowed your sentences and delivered them in a voice that is thinner, sharper or less assured than the one you remember using. …
You are sitting in a café, reading something on your phone, when a small discomfort interrupts you. Nothing has happened. Nobody has spoken. Yet you look up. Across the room, someone is looking directly at you. Experiences like this are unsettling partly because the order seems wrong. You did not see the person staring and …
A puppy rolls onto its back, paws folded uselessly against its chest. Its ears are slightly too large for its head. Its stomach is round. It looks up at you. And for some reason, you want to crush it. Not actually crush it, of course. You want to squeeze it, perhaps harder than seems reasonable. …
There are things you might hesitate to do alone that become strangely easier when someone else is standing beside you. Walking down an unfamiliar street late at night, entering a dark building, confronting someone behaving badly, getting onto a frightening amusement-park ride, or simply speaking up when something feels wrong can all change when we …
Someone hands you a seashell and tells you to listen. You raise it to your ear, perhaps standing on a beach, perhaps sitting in a room hundreds of kilometres from the nearest coast, and there it is: a soft, hollow rushing sound. As a child, you may have accepted the explanation that the shell remembers …
There is something slightly unsettling about the way you are reading these words. You probably feel as though your eyes are looking directly at a screen, your brain is observing the letters, and somewhere inside your head the meaning is being understood. But your brain has never seen this screen. It has never seen a …
There is something strangely difficult about looking away from the sea. A person may arrive at a beach intending to stay for only a few minutes, yet soon find themselves standing at the edge of the water, watching one wave rise, fold and disappear after another. Nothing particularly surprising is happening. The waves do not …
There may be no faster way to make an ordinary object interesting than to place a small sign beside it saying DO NOT TOUCH. A sculpture we might otherwise walk past suddenly deserves a second look. A mysterious button becomes almost magnetic. A freshly painted wall somehow invites the fingertips. Even a harmless object behind …
