This is, in fact, the argument of one of the most fascinating, and compelling, books I have ever read, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought by Louis Sass, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers.

species, belong to one and the same genus, but

The point about the laboriousness of the process – possibly worth it if it works, certainly not if it doesn’t – reminds one of the physicist Leo Szilard’s visionary satire, ‘The Mark Gable Foundation’, published in 1961. The story described the creation of an endowed not-for-profit foundation for the specific purpose of slowing the pace of scientif

A faithful man finds in the scriptures that Rabbi X said that a certain thing was true. Later he finds that Rabbi Y said that the very same thing was false. He prays for guidance: ‘Who is right?’ God answers: ‘Both of them are right.’ Perplexed, the man replies: ‘But what do you mean? Surely they can’t both be right?’ To which God replies: ‘All thr

trying to see what has to be an unconscious process is like ‘trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’, as William James memorably put it.

As Richard Feynman said during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1965: ‘A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.’ And, I might add, a very great deal more falsehood can become known than can be disproved.

In one way, the hemisphere hypothesis is deceptively simple: the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways. It is the implications of this that are manifold. Immediately it gives rise to a number of further hypotheses: that this is a requirement of survival; that th

What I think I have shown in these chapters is that the left hemisphere is, compared with the right hemisphere, unreliable in just about every way that matters. In terms of attention to the world, and its role in thereby constructing, and understanding, experience; in its inability to comprehend time, space and motion; in its lack of skill in conve

In the face of such overwhelming evidence of the inadequacy of the machine model to the study of living organisms, why, then, does this product of the mid-Victorian mindset persist? One reason is its simplicity. We are familiar with machines, and because they are what we are used to making, taking apart and putting together, it is perhaps a natural