Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [32]
4.
Our Minds, Part One: Knowing, Not Knowing, and Making It Up
“I know” seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, “I thought I knew.”
—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, ON CERTAINTY
In 1992, a forty-six-year-old woman whom I’ll call Hannah underwent a neurological examination at a hospital in Vienna, Austria. The neurologist, Georg Goldenberg, began by asking Hannah to describe his own face. It was an odd question, but Hannah complied. The doctor had short hair and was clean shaven, she said; he wasn’t wearing glasses, and he looked like he had a bit of a tan. Goldenberg next asked Hannah about an object in front of her. It was a notebook, she answered, like the kind schoolchildren use, with a brown cover and some writing in Latin script that she couldn’t quite make out. And where exactly was the book located, the doctor asked her. He was holding it up in his left hand, Hannah replied, at just about eye level.
The trouble was this: Goldenberg’s face was concealed behind a screen, the object in front of his patient was a comb, and before asking about its location, he’d hidden it beneath the table in front of him. Hannah was blind. One month earlier, she had suffered a stroke that destroyed virtually her entire visual cortex and left her all but unable to move, owing to loss of muscle coordination and chronic, epilepsy-like contractions, especially on the left side of her body. All that was bad enough. But Hannah was also left with a rarer and stranger problem: she didn’t know that she was blind.
To be blind without realizing our blindness is, figuratively, the situation of all of us when we are in error. As a literal predicament, however, it is all but impossible to fathom. It is weird enough to see a mountain when there is no mountain, as Captain John Ross did. But it is really weird to see a mountain when you cannot see. And yet, this blind-to-our-own-blindness condition exists. It is called Anton’s Syndrome, and it belongs to a group of similar neurological problems collectively known as anosognosia, or the denial of disease. The most common form of anosognosia—far more common than Anton’s Syndrome, although equally hard to imagine—is the denial of paralysis. Like denial of blindness, denial of paralysis typically (although not exclusively) occurs in stroke victims. Just as Hannah unhesitatingly described people and objects she couldn’t see, these patients will confidently tell their doctors or family members that of course they are able to move—or that they just did move, or even that they are currently doing so. One illustrious (and illustrative) victim of this strange syndrome, the late Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, claimed that he had no physical problems and cheerfully invited a reporter covering his stroke to join him for a hike.
Anton’s Syndrome and denial of paralysis are, to put it mildly, bizarre. There are plenty of physical conditions that can afflict us without our knowledge: heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders—all the terrible sleeper cells of the body. But blindness and paralysis are not normally among them. Whether or not we can see, whether or not we can move: this kind of intimate knowledge of our own body isn’t usually subject to uncertainty, let alone error. In fact, it doesn’t even sound quite right to describe these things as knowledge of our body. Noticing that we have a sore throat or recognizing that our knees aren’t quite as reliable as they used to be are clearly instances of bodily knowledge. But sore throats and bum knees are pretty much only about our bodies. They don’t bear very deeply on our sense of who we are, whereas the abilities to see and to move definitely do. Moreover,