Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [174]
the medical definition of delusion. See for instance Caroline Bunker Rosdahl and Mary T. Kowalski, Textbook of Basic Nursing (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Ninth Edition, 2007), 1469. The italics are mine.
“looking at a gourd.” Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, in The Essential Erasmus, John P. Dolan, trans. (The New American Library, 1964), 128.
“sane and vigorous mental life and dementia.” Sully, 3.
“for wise men are grown foppish.” William Shakespeare, King Lear, Russell Fraser, ed. (Signet Classics, 1998). The quotations in this paragraph appear on pp. 30 and 29, respectively.
In ancient Indo-European. See for instance the entry on “to move” at the Center for Indo-European Language and Culture of the University of Texas at Austin’s Linguistics Research Center (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/iedocctr/ie-ling/ie-sem/MO/MO_MO.html), and their chart of Proto-Indo-European root words (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/PokornyMaster-X.html).
the knight errant and…the juif errant. I am indebted to David Bates for this insight. His discussion of the etymology of “error” and of these two wanderers appears on pp. 19–21. The quote appears on p. 21.
CHAPTER 3 OUR SENSES
The story of Captain John Ross’s misadventure in the Arctic is drawn from his own account of it, A Voyage of Discovery: Made Under the Orders of the Admiralty, in his Majesty’s Ships Isabella and Alexander, for the Purpose of Exploring Baffin Bay, and Enquiring Into the Probability of a North-West Passage (Longmans, Hurst, 1819) (the block quote appears on pp. 245–246); from Clive Holland and James M. Savelle, “My Dear Beaufort: A Personal Letter from John Ross’s Arctic Expedition of 1829–33,” Arctic, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March 1987): 66–77; from Earnest S. Dodge, The Polar Rosses: John and James Clark Ross and Their Explorations (Faber and Faber, 1973); and from Antarctica: Exploration, Perception, Metaphor, Paul Simpson-Housley (Routledge, 1992). The footnote about the Peary expedition comes from a contemporary newspaper account of the MacMillan expedition (“To Seek New Land Peary Saw in Arctic,” the New York Times, Feb. 14, 1912), and from Peary and MacMillan’s own accounts of it, respectively: Robert Edwin Peary, Nearest the Pole (Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1907) and Donald Baxter MacMillan, Four Years in the White North (Harper and Brothers, 1918).
The information about superior mirages and travelers (other than John Ross) who have been fooled by them is drawn from Simpson-Housley; from Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate, Second Revised Edition (Oxford University Press, 1996); and from “The Superior Mirage: Seeing Beyond” (http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/history/artmirge.htm) and “The Arctic Mirage: Aid to Discovery” (http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/elements/supmrge.htm) both by Keith C. Heidorn, 1999.
Edward Adelson’s checkerboard illusion and a complete explanation of how it works can be found on his website at http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/. The inattentional blindness videos can be found at http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/djs_lab/demos.html. The story of the crash of Eastern Airlines #401 comes from Marc Green, the same psychologist who coined “Mental Act of God,” (http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/inattention-alblindness.html).
Virtually no explorers had sailed to the Arctic from England. In 1778, James Cook, best known as an Antarctic explorer, took a stab at finding the Northwest Passage from its imagined Western end, but, after his passage was blocked by ice north of the Bering Strait, he gave up and dismissed the existence of the passage as a fantasy.
Ross’s reputation was tarnished, and it was soon to tank. Ironically, Ross’s reputation was restored by an expedition that was borderline disastrous. In 1829, he returned to the Canadian Arctic, only to have his ship become trapped in ice to the south of Lancaster Sound. He and his men explored the area while waiting for the ice to break