 We may wonder what phenomenological categories to use for the description of this sort of experience, whereby the world in general appears brighter and newly vivid. It may be that the category of salience is, once again, of some help here. James notes how in the experience of the depressed person, the world can appear “flat.” And this is what we should expect: in central cases, the person who is depressed is suffering from a lack of emotional engagement with the world, and in turn, therefore, from a blunted sense of the differentiated significance of things, so that the patterns of salience that normally inform the perceptual field are flattened out. Hence James writes of Tolstoy’s experience of a period of existential crisis that: “Life had been enchanting. It was now flat sober, more than sober, dead” (1902, p. 152). And speaking more generally he comments that: