The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [8]
At this point in the story I’m picturing Jack Nicholson’s Randle McMurphy and Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched wrangling over patient privileges in Ken Kesey’s famous novel cum Academy Award–winning film, a fancy I suggest to Chick.
Nah! One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a piece of cake compared to this place. It was rough. For a year and a half I sat in my room and did all the little tasks they gave me to do and attended the group sessions and talked to the psychiatrists.
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What should we make of all this? Is Chick D’Arpino just some crazy man out of touch with reality—a lunatic in a tinfoil hat? No. One thirty-second experience does not a psychotic make, let alone a lifetime spent pursuing science, theology, and philosophy in books, conferences, and university courses to better understand both himself and the human condition. Chick may be exceedingly ambitious, but he is not crazy. Perhaps he had a momentary break with reality triggered by an environmental stressor. Perhaps. And that is what I suspect happened … or something like it. Yet millions of people have gone through the emotional stressor of divorce without ever having such preternatural encounters.
Maybe it is a combination of an environmental stressor plus an anomalous brain hiccup—random neuronal firings, for example, or perhaps a minor temporal lobe seizure, the latter of which are well documented as causing both auditory and visual hallucinations along with hyper-religious behavior. Or maybe it was some sort of auditory hallucination triggered by who knows what. We might even chalk it up more broadly to the law of large numbers, where million-to-one odds happen three hundred times a day in America—given enough brains interacting with the environment over enough time, it is inevitable that even extraordinary incidents become ordinary. And thanks to our selective memory, we remember the anomalies and forget the mundane.
Most of us don’t hear voices or see visions, yet all of our brains are wired in the same neural-chemical way as the visionaries who do, from Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad to Joan of Arc, Joseph Smith, and David Koresh. The model of how brains form beliefs and then act on them is what is of interest here, because this is something we all do—inevitably, inexorably, indisputably. Beliefs are what brains make. Whatever happened to Chick D’Arpino, I am even more interested in the power that belief systems lord over us once we form them and especially once we commit to follow through on them, whatever type of beliefs they are: personal, religious, political, economic, ideological, social, or cultural. Or psychiatric.
Sane in an Insane Land
When I was an undergraduate psychology student at Pepperdine University in the mid-1970s, for a course on abnormal psychology we were required to volunteer at a clinic or hospital in order to give us hands-on experience with mental illness. For one semester I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway every Saturday to spend the day at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. It was a grim experience. It was so depressing that even the transcendent beauty of the Pacific Ocean on the drive back did little to hoist my sagging spirits. Schizophrenics and other psychotic patients shuffled up and down the corridors, shuttling between bare and featureless bedrooms and barely equipped game rooms. Although Camarillo was a pioneer in the transition in mental health treatment from lobotomies to psychotropic drugs, stuporous brains seemed barely distinguishable from somnambulistic bodies.
In preparation for our hospital stint, our professor had us read (and listen to an interview with the author of) a paper published in the prestigious journal Science entitled “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” by Stanford University psychologist David Rosenhan.2 The article, now one of the most famous ever published in the annals of psychology, recounted