Mark Haddon’s Swimming and flying: an extract

Some years back I volunteered to help with an experiment at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford which involved having my brain scanned while I watched a series of seemingly random images flashed up on a screen. Some were clearly meant to be neutral, others highly stimulating in one way or another. I remember a bath towel dropped on to a wooden floor, which was the most wonderful shade of turquoise. I remember pictures that were meant to be pornographic but which had clearly been taken from a copy of Mayfair c. 1972 and were therefore antique and oddly charming. Soft focus shots of the Tennis Girl soaping herself in the shower after a sweaty match. I remember a photograph of a horrifically mutilated human body followed by a picture of a tiny silver cake fork which was one of the funniest things I have ever seen, as if something had gone slightly wrong at a tea party.