Once there was a man. The man had a wife. The wife was having an affair. With a doctor. One day, the doctor and the wife were involved in a car crash. It killed them both. That's not a very happy story but it gets worse and it gets weirder.
The man, now both cuckolded and widowed, grew a second head. Right next to his existing head. Or at least he believed he had done so. Nobody else could see it. There was no evidence whatsoever that he had two heads. But he firmly believed he did. What was, perhaps, worse was that the second head was that of the doctor who had had an affair with the man's wife and was now dead.
The two heads didn't get on. The doctor head tried to run things but the original head wasn't having that. Eventually the situation got so bad that the man got a gun and shot the doctor head clean off. From that moment on he no longer believed he had a second head. Which would have been at least something positive in this rather grim story if it wasn't for the fact that when shooting the second head off he managed to injure his own head and that those injuries would eventually kill him.
Thinking you have a second head would seem, quite clearly, a sign of serious delusion and it was just the sort of story I was hoping to hear when Dr Ema Sullivan-Bissett, a reader in philosophy at the University of Birmingham, spoke at Davy's Wine Vaults last night for Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub.
Her talk, Is it normal to be delusional?, didn't just involve telling weird and wonderful stories. Fun though those bits were. Her particular interest is in how we view, and treat, people with delusions. Ema's view is that they're not as odd as they might seem. Certainly not when you look at the beliefs we consider normal.
By normal, we don't mean rational, logical, or even sensible. Some examples were given and they ranged from the slightly cheeky to the downright disturbing. Take, for example, a fan of Tottenham Hotspur (an example used because Ema's partner is one) who, each season, truly believes his team will win the league. Spurs last won the league in 1961 and are currently in sixth place, twenty five points behind Manchester City. There are, quite clearly, much better teams in the league but that doesn't stop Spurs fans thinking that, somehow, they'll end up on top.
Wishful thinking! What about, to go all Richard Dawkins, somebody who believes in God. Or gods. There is no empirical evidence whatsoever for the existence of a god and there never has been. There is a shitload of empirical evidence of evolution. But when people believe in God, most of us don't say they're deluded (though, to be fair, I do). We say they have 'faith'.
What about when people believe in conspiracy theories, when they believe Covid is caused by 5G, when they believe the Earth is flat, or when they believe that Hillary Clinton runs a cannibal paedophile ring? These beliefs are outlandish, nonsensical, and, in most cases, very very dangerous. But they're not, statistically, considered abnormal.
Because a significant number of people believe them to be true. Not very many people believe they have a second head or that their child has been abducted by aliens and replaced by an imposter. Most of those who study delusion believe there are two factors in what causes delusion:-
(1) A major event that may cause shock, trauma, or grief - like for instance your wife dying in a car crash along with a doctor she's having an affair with.
(2) The way that the person involved processes that shock, trauma, and/or grief.
Take, for example, two women, Emma and Gemma. Emma's married to Barry, Gemma's married to Gary. One day Emma and Gemma have a car crash (car crashes cropped up a lot last night) and something happens to them which results in them having strange reactions when they next meet with Barry and Gary. They still recognise their husbands, they still look the same, but the affective feeling we all feel when we see someone we love (a partner, a child, a parent, a close friend) isn't working because of some injury caused by the accident.
Emma, being a rational and logical person who respects science, realises that the reason she feels weird about Barry is because something has happened to her. She seeks help and the situation is remedied. Gemma. who gets her news from social media and anti-vax websites and already believes in poltergeists and lucky horseshoes, jumps to quite a different conclusion. She believes aliens (which, in her mind, obviously exist among us) have kidnapped Gary and replaced him with some kind of android lookalike.
It was Ema Sullivan-Bissett's contention that that isn't really all that different to believing in a flat Earth or that birds aren't real (and have all been replaced by drones by the US government). It was her belief, quite an inclusive one I thought, that if we can extend what we consider as normal behaviour to those that believe in demonstrably untrue conspiracy theories we should extend it to include those that believe their partner has been kidnapped by aliens or those that have grown second heads.
I didn't agree entirely with her premise (though it certainly carried some weight) but she spoke knowledgeably, enthusiastically, and with a great deal of humour about the subject and even chucked in some (voluntary) audience participation which proved that when it comes to reasoning logically we are all incredibly fallible.
Following a pint in the Spanish Galleon Tavern, veggie pie and mash in Goddard's, it all made for a lovely evening. Thanks to Jade for keeping me company, thanks to Professor Chris French for hosting, and thanks to Dr Ema Sullivan-Bissett for giving us all something to think about. Next month it's Dr Anna Stone with 'The appeal of conspiracy theories and why people feel so passionate about them' which sounds like a highly suitable follow up.
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