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.

nothing we know is in reality ever entirely static; and relative stasis, not motion, is the unusual circumstance that requires explanation. Stasis is, in other words, the limit case of motion, in which it approaches, but never completely reaches, zero. Motion, then, is not an unusual departure from stasis, but stasis an unachievable imaginary

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.

It involves remaining open, and yet being able to receive something which is, in the end, quite specific and particular. (In this, it is somewhat like prayer.)

Attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us. The altered nature of attention can appear to abolish parts of the world, collapse time and space, eviscerate emotion, and render the living inanimate. It is a profoundly moral act.

To quote Lewontin again: ‘An organism is less like a machine than it is like a language whose elements … take unique meaning from their context’. Analyses of individual words and their possibilities of meaning can be an essential first step: without a knowledge of the words, we cannot grasp the whole. But at the same time, it is only the meaning of

Brains and minds are living, constantly adapting, interconnected systems. And they are conscious. A brain disease or mental illness, then, is a change in a person’s whole way of being in the world.

Two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold. Any attempt to suppress science (I distinguish science sharply from technology), for whatever reason, is dangerous and wrong.

‘magical ideation’ is by definition not in itself delusional, though it may be on a continuum with delusion. It simply suggests a greater willingness to consider connexions, some of which are no doubt non-existent, but some of which may simply not be recognised in the current Western standard model. As science advances, it successively reveals that