The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [10]
How does the pathology belief system transmogrify normal into abnormal behavior? “Given that the patient is in the hospital, he must be psychologically disturbed,” Rosenhan explained. “And given that he is disturbed, continuous writing must be behavioral manifestation of that disturbance, perhaps a subset of the compulsive behaviors that are sometimes correlated with schizophrenia.” And not just writing. One pseudopatient, while pacing up and down the hall, was asked by a nurse, “Nervous, Mr. X?” He replied, “No, bored.” Another ersatz patient overheard a psychiatrist explaining to some interns that the line of patients queued up for lunch thirty minutes early “was characteristic of the oral-acquisitive nature of the syndrome.” Nah, it couldn’t be that they were just bored and hungry.
If the diagnostic label is so powerful as to cause someone to judge sane people insane, could it work in the reverse? Might insane behavior be labeled sane under different circumstances? In a subsequent experiment to test the reverse power of diagnostic belief, Rosenhan contacted a mental institution after they wrote him to explain that they would never fall for such a ploy. Rosenhan told them that over the course of the next three months he would send in one or more pseudopatients, with the staff instructed to record which patients they thought were fake. Once again demonstrating the power of belief to interpret the data in light of the diagnostic tool, out of 193 patients admitted to this hospital, 41 were classified as impostors by at least one staff member, with an additional 42 classified as suspected fakes. In point of fact, no pseudopatients were sent to that institution! “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals,” Rosenhan concluded. “The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meaning of behavior can easily be misunderstood.”
What you believe is what you see. The label is the behavior. Theory molds data. Concepts determine percepts. Belief-dependent realism.
Know the Mind Itself and You Know Humanity
Now free on his own recognizance, Chick D’Arpino returned to work and began his journey of understanding. To what end?
Before I die I want to understand the human capacity to correctly answer such questions as “What am I?” “Who am I?” “Is there a source out there who knows we are here?” I think I have answers to these big questions that I want to share before I die.
Where did you get those answers?
I got these answers from the source.
What is the source?
The mind itself.
* * *
I am not the first to ask Chick D’Arpino such questions. When he initially approached Stanford University to sponsor essay contests on his big questions, some professors there had questions similar to mine. In a letter dated September 19, 2002, Chick explained himself to the Stanford professors thusly, and in the process offers us an epistemological golden nugget:
Basically, I was motivated to introduce the topic of this contest because I am profoundly aware that there is a correct answer to the question, “Who am I?” I want to do what I can to “bring out” affirmatively our human ability to understand correctly the whole extent of every person’s individual self-identity. In regard to the original source that provided both the mental ability and the information that is necessary to achieve said understanding, I hereby also affirm that our built-in relationship to that source was epistemologically expressed as follows: “Know the mind itself and you know humanity.”
Herein lies what is arguably the greatest challenge science has ever faced, and it is the problem I am tackling in this book: know the mind itself and you know humanity.
For a materialist such as myself, there is no such thing as “mind.” It ultimately reduces down to neurons firing and neurochemical transmitter substances flowing across synaptic gaps between neurons, combining in complex patterns