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By Root 1004 0

terrain of religion or politics. You can provoke a deep-seated sense of rightness just as swiftly by, say, asking a bunch of scholars of Elizabethan literature who really wrote Hamlet. It’s almost impossible to imagine any finding that would settle that question to everyone’s satisfaction, just as it is almost impossible to imagine how you would get all parties to agree on the origins of human life, or on the necessity of U.S. intervention in Iraq. Yet it is often precisely these irresolvable issues that arouse our most impassioned certainty that we are right and our adversaries are wrong. To my mind, then, any definition of error we choose must be flexible enough to accommodate the way we talk about wrongness when there is no obvious benchmark for being right.

To find such a definition, we might return to the experience of error. Rather than thinking of being wrong as believing something is true when it is objectively false, we could define it as the experience of rejecting as false a belief we ourselves once thought was true—regardless of that belief’s actual relationship to reality, or whether such a relationship can ever be determined. This is a tempting fix, for two reasons. First, with a slight tweak to an established definition of error, it puts paid to any irksome questions about truth. Second, it shines the spotlight on an important and often overlooked corner of human experience, one that is central to this book: the hinge moment when we swing from believing one thing to believing its antithesis. Still, as an overall definition, this one seems unsatisfactory as well, since it fails to capture our everyday notion of error. When we accuse someone of being wrong, we don’t mean that she is in the throes of rejecting one of her own beliefs. We mean that her beliefs are at odds with the real state of the world.

In the end, then, neither of these definitions of being wrong—as a deviation from external reality, or an internal upheaval in what we believe—will completely suffice for our purposes. Although I will draw on both ideas, the full human experience of error is too multiform and chameleon to stay put inside either one. In writing about comedy, the French philosopher Henri Bergson argued against “imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition.” Instead, he wrote, he hoped to provide his readers with “something more flexible than an abstract definition—a practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship.” This strikes me as an admirable goal, and one that will serve as well for wrongness as for funniness. For better and worse, error is already our lifelong companion. Surely, then, it’s time we got to know it.

Most of the rest of this book—into which I promise to release you very soon—is built around stories of people screwing up. These stories involve, among other things, illusions, magicians, comedians, drug trips, love affairs, misadventures on the high seas, bizarre neurological phenomena, medical catastrophes, legal fiascos, some possible consequences of marrying a prostitute, the lamentable failure of the world to end, and Alan Greenspan. But before we can plunge into the experience of being wrong, we must pause to make an important if somewhat perverse point: there is no experience of being wrong.

There is an experience of realizing that we are wrong, of course. In fact, there is a stunning diversity of such experiences. As we’ll see in the pages to come, recognizing our mistakes can be shocking, confusing, funny, embarrassing, traumatic, pleasurable, illuminating, and life-altering, sometimes for ill and sometimes for good. But by definition, there can’t be any particular feeling associated with simply being wrong. Indeed, the whole reason it’s possible to be wrong is that, while it is happening, you are oblivious to it. When you are simply going about your business in a state you will later decide was delusional, you have no idea of it whatsoever. You are like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, after he has gone off the cliff but before he has looked down. Literally in