The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird

by Dan Schreiber

Just look around you. We’re a multitude of realities. Every day, as you go about your life, you’ll be walking among people who think very differently to you.

Nobelitis, or the Nobel Disease, is a condition whereby the recipient of the prize suddenly feels they’re an expert on things they know next to nothing about. Sufferers of extreme Nobelitis become suddenly emboldened to speak up about the mad ideas they’d previously kept secret for their entire careers.

This sperm bank for geniuses—founded in 1979 by an optometrist called Robert Graham, who started it because he believed that human beings were turning into idiots—ran for 19 years, and produced 218 children.

The phenomenon is discussed in great detail in the book The Third Man Factor by Canadian author John Geiger, who claims that it’s not just experienced by explorers but has been reported by many other people, such as those rushing out of

the Twin Towers on 9/11. Geiger points out that it’s a sort of positive hallucination that actively gives us support. It’s as if our brain has worked out that in times of extreme peril we need someone beside us, so we very literally conjure up an imaginary friend to help us survive, or rather comfortingly, see us through to the end.

An eccentric bookseller, Geoffrey would often advise customers to not buy certain books when he thought them too ignorant to own a copy. And when he found that he needed to stock up on new popular books, he’d often place them on the bottom shelves, or behind the counter, just so he could make it more difficult for customers to get to them.