Strong Experiences

This book is about two kinds of experience, which I suggest have a common basis in surprise. One is an experience that we feel as a bodily thrill. This might be chills or tears or some other sudden arousal, usually pleasurable and fairly common for some people. The other is an experience of suddenly coming to know something very significant. It may be impossible to put into words what is known; that is, it is ineffable. This second kind of experience may be rarer and indeed can often be so rare as to be highly memorable. Experiences of the first kind can be called ‘thrill’, and I divide experiences of the second kind into two sub-kinds, namely ‘sublime’ and ‘epiphany’. These kinds of experience can be combined: when a thrill accompanies a sense of suddenly coming to know something significant.

I group both kinds of experiences under a common heading of ‘strong experiences’ because I suggest that they have many characteristics in common, and I suggest that this is because they both begin as surprises. This explains many of their characteristics and incidentally means that strong experiences are variants of a very ordinary kind of experience and need no special psychology. The term ‘strong experience’ is borrowed from music psychologist Alf Gabrielsson's (2011) analysis of a large number of elicited reports of strong, intense and profound experiences of music. Strong experiences can be triggered when we are reading literary texts, and Chapter 6 explores why literature surprises us in these ways; I will show that all the ordinary characteristics of literature provide the materials that in the right combination and context can trigger a strong experience.

The strong experience of ‘thrill’ is a sudden arousal, such as chills or tears or some other bodily response, in response to some perception or thought. I take this generic term ‘thrill’ from the psychologist John Sloboda (1991), who uses the term to describe various arousals in response to music. Thrills were described by one of the pioneers of modern psychology, William James: