Seth Ross

Here’s another form to fill out. Am I a responsible adult? Deep down, the answer is No but ticking Yes is definitely the irresponsible thing to do, so I tick Yes. That’s a conscious and informed decision but imagine if you couldn’t rely on your mind to report, even to yourself, the correct answer. This short book is an insight into the mind of a person who cannot assess where the boundary is between the brain interpreting reality correctly and the brain producing a false signal or the brain being functionally capable but the signal being skewed by a third influence. When reality is deeply odd, that doesn’t always mean it isn’t there, so we make inferences to resolve the doubt.

Here’s the thing: We don’t see pictures. Light hits sensors in the eyes and the photon shower precipitates a new relay signal, which the brain recognises through neural synapses and interprets into the context of its previous experience of patterns and builds a picture. That mind picture sometimes leaves something out which the brain doesn’t think is relevant or adds something which it thinks should be there to fit the pattern (association) but isn’t there on this occasion, which is why the justice system thoroughly checks witness statements. As all the subconscious stuff happens behind the curtain, you only think you see a real picture. Do you think a TV is a window and the actors are standing behind? No, it’s constructed from a signal.

Here’s the boundary issue: This story is told from the perspective of someone who has trouble functioning in society because they have visions which are on the boundary of unreality but they might just be real (in which case the rest of the population should already be paranoid). Alternatively, what they’re seeing could represent a faulty signal, or they could be brought on by the anti-psychosis medication they’ve been taking, or withdrawal from it. The character simply doesn’t have the mental capacity to determine which, especially under numbing medication. Wouldn’t it be good to be in your shoes? Almost certainly not.

There’s also a hint of the Alice in Wonderland-style choice of taking the red pill or the blue pill, i.e. do you want to know the harsh truth or would you prefer to while away your life happy in a comfy dreamland where you can abdicate all control? What if the “harsh truth” is a dreamland? Mental health patients are encouraged to abdicate control because they are so much easier and more passive for everyone else to manage that way. Their meds are to help us, not them. Suicide is another theme – what is the point of living like this?

The book is much too short but the argument against that statement is that it gives a complete impression of this condition, so what else is there to say?

Here’s the interpretation: I’m not deranged (but someone who was deranged would tick the box to say they’re not) or paranoid (see previous bracketed comment) but I can admit to occasional minor visions. If I faint, I see a very complicated, black ink sketch, multiple leaf pattern, like wallpaper. I interpret that as oxygen starvation to the brain, like a log-off screen. Sometimes, when I’m tired, I close my eyes and can see a pair of eyes staring back at me on the inside of my eyelids. I interpret that as pressure on the eyeball, an imprint. The important qualification is that these are my interpretations, scientific-style if you like. If someone else had exactly those observations, they might use their own experience or incapacities to reach different conclusions.

Here’s the other thing: I heard an anecdote from a woman who went to Bible camp and said she witnessed the casting out of spirits. I think that’s nonsense but here goes. She said she could actually see these ape like creatures wandering between the tents, trying to get back into people. I would interpret that as peer pressure, i.e. the group reinforces their own hallucination, alongside trance induced praying and meditation affecting her mental state. She believed she saw it though so, without chemicals, the signal to her brain or its interpretation into an image had diverged from reality. Buddha sat under a fig tree and had visions (overdosing on figs can make you lucid) and St John of Patmos ate magic mushrooms then wrote The Book of Revelations. God knows what Nostradamus was taking. If you want an insight into the daily struggle that people affected by worrying reality vs unreality puzzles are experiencing, the inability to trust one’s own senses, look no further than this brief exposition. It won’t help them but it may give you more empathy.

If you want to test your own mind’s ability to confuse what’s there, set your search engine to “video”, then look up “Selective attention test from Simons & Chabris (1999)” and try to count exactly how many times the players in white tops pass the ball to each other. After that, read about the experiment and, if you have made a blinding and implausible observation error, doubt your brain, stop trusting your eyeballs, go tick the box marked irresponsible adult and admit we’re all at different points on the same wide spectrum. Good luck and if you can’t find this article again, you’ve probably imagined it. Then again, someone drawing you into a secret world behind the illusion of reality would say that, wouldn’t they?… (más)