More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Seeing patterns where they do not exist is known as apophenia. Finding meaning where there is none is a neat definition of madness.
Enoch used Dostoevsky to introduce his study of the Capgras delusion, ‘a rare, colourful syndrome in which the patient believes that a person, usually closely related to him, has been replaced by an exact double.’ Enoch had treated a man at Runwell who believed his wife was a replica.
With time, once an unlikely occurrence is incorporated into the story of a life, or a death, it becomes almost impossible to see the alternative possibilities that once existed.
We confer meaning to control our existence. It makes life liveable. The alternative is frightening. Randomness is banal. It diminishes us. But the truth is that we resist meaning almost as often as we insist upon it. We refuse its presence to make life simpler and to spare ourselves. There was no way we could have seen that coming.
In his Handbook of Physiological Optics, Helmholtz suggested that much of our vision is made up of ‘unconscious inferences’ about what we expect to see, rather than a straightforward processing of light and shapes.
Rather than sensing the world in a ‘bottom-up’ fashion, through our eyes and ears, a ripple on your skin, it proposes that our brains work from the top down, a waterfall of internal theories and beliefs, memories and expectations, which guide our perceptions and are then corrected by feedback from the outside world.
Ibsen calls the fictional version of reality that each one of us knits, moment by moment, within ourselves our livslögnen, or life-lie. Do we even exist without the meanings that we invent for ourselves?
‘Men are not made for safe havens,’ Hamilton wrote of Aeschylus in a passage that Kennedy underlined. ‘The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory.’
He was shot in the head shortly after midnight, as he cut through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, minutes after declaring victory in the California primary. ‘Everything’s going to be okay,’ Kennedy whispered, as he lay dying on the floor. Barker described it as Miss Middleton’s best prediction yet. ‘You were insistent,’ he wrote.
useful definition of a delusion is not that it is an inaccurate belief about the world; it is a belief that you refuse to change when you are confronted with proof that you are wrong.
