An antique shop on the American East Coast. A glass case. A ring we never touched – and could not forget.

I read objects for a living.

Brands, spaces, people. What I perceive, I translate into visual systems – corporate design that fits like a tailored suit. It is a craft. It can be described rationally. A viewer sees care and infers from it the maker’s attitude. That is not magic. That is semiotics.

What happened in that antique shop was something else.

Old vinyl records stood next to dusty sideboards. In the far corner, a rectangular glass case – chains and rings behind it, plain, without any particular materiality. My wife and I leaned over it. We went quiet.

“I felt it.”

“The ring at the back left?”

“Yes.”

 

— PAUSE —

 

“It radiated something.”

“How would you describe it?”

“It was something evil.”

“Yes. It was dark.”

No mystical music. No candlelight. We had felt the same thing – without discussion, without eye contact in the moment it happened. We left the shop.

I have no interest in the esoteric. And I cannot pretend nothing was there. That would not be rational – least of all when my wife had experienced it independently, in exactly the same way.

Since then, I have worked through three explanations. None of them is complete.

The first: parapsychology has a term for this

PSYCHOMETRY

The idea that objects retain emotional states. Not scientifically recognised. But documented as a phenomenon, and not conclusively explained to this day. I mention it not as a belief. I mention it because the honest response to an unexplained experience is to name every possibility.

The second: cognitive science has the concept of

THIN SLICING

People draw precise conclusions from minimal signals, faster than consciousness registers the process. What appears as intuition is often pattern recognition at a level we cannot directly observe. Perhaps we read something in that ring I cannot name – patina, proportion, something in the surface texture – and it pulled us both in the same direction.

The third is the one that occupies me most:

NEURAL COUPLING

Neuroscientists at Princeton University showed, in studies on neural coupling, that emotional experiences between people in shared sensory environments can converge unconsciously – without language, without facial cues serving as signals. What two people perceive in the same room can align at a neural level without either communicating anything to the other.

That explains our agreement. It does not explain what triggered the original response.

“Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.”

RAINER MARIA RILKE, DUINO ELEGIES

The question that remains:

did the emotion come from the ring’s maker? From the person who had worn it? Or did we read something in an object that was never designed to communicate anything – and spoke so loudly for exactly that reason?

I cannot reproduce the experience. I do not know whether it is reproducible. But it changed my attitude toward the work.

Design communicates on two levels. The first is legible: colour, form, typography, structure. A trained eye can decode it like a language. The second level is quieter. It does not emerge from decision, but from disposition – from what a person brings to the work: care, respect, conviction. Or their absence. Viewers sense this. Not always consciously. But they sense it.

Whether feelings can be stored physically in matter is a question I cannot answer. What I know: they are stored in work. The difference between an object made to sell and one made to last – that difference is perceptible. Sometimes across centuries.

And what lay in that case had not been made to last. It had survived nonetheless. With whatever it carried inside it.

One should be careful about what one allows to resonate. Not every frequency is one worth seeking out.