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Umberto Eco called Disneyland “the quintessence of consumer ideology,” because it “not only produces illusion,” but also “stimulates the desire for it.”
Take two young men with the same talent. One is a good-looking kid from the Great Plains with a great voice. His five closest friends are his parents and classmates. The second kid is from London, Canada. His top five includes Usher, one of the biggest pop stars in the world, and Scooter Braun, one of the biggest talent managers in music. The first kid is a gifted nobody; the second kid is Justin Bieber. The difference isn’t the face or the falsetto. It’s the quality of the top five, the power of the network.
According to Huron, there are two ways to get around habituation. The first is variety, or dishabituation. The second is time. Let’s say you listen to “I Will Survive” twenty times in a row. The next day you’d rather hear nails on a chalkboard than any more Gloria Gaynor. But several weeks later the song comes on the radio and you realize you want to hear it again. Huron calls this “spontaneous recovery”: You think you’ve had enough of Gloria, but after some time you want another hit of “I Will Survive.”
Some people cannot see images in their heads when they read or listen to words because they struggle to conjure mental pictures at all. This is aphantasia, the inability to imagine in pictures, and, either fittingly or ironically, I myself cannot imagine having it.
