Free The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering Page B

of the clinical coin from autism is the disorder of paranoid schizophrenia, in which the term “paranoid” captures the essence of a theory of mind gone completely wild. These individuals see personal signs and messages in nearly everything. The experience of apophenia (seeing patterns of connections in random or meaningless events) that is more or less endemic to the psychology of these patients is especially telling. For example, University of Edinburgh psychiatrist Jonathan Burns writes,
    Patients with schizophrenia seek meaning in the bizarre phenomena of their psychoses. Theistic and philosophical phenomena populate their hallucinations, while the frantic search for, and misattribution of, intentionality must lie at the heart of symptoms such as thought insertion, ideas of reference and paranoid delusions. 14
     
    But even cognitively normal, nonschizophrenic people often have trouble not seeing hidden messages in natural events. One of the things that has always intrigued me about human psychology is the fact that our minds so often make decisions without first consulting our knowledge and beliefs. A scientifically headed, otherwise rational person can say with absolute conviction and sincerity, “I do not believe.” And yet, when the conditions are just right, the physiology, emotions, even behavior of such individuals would seem to say otherwise. Very often, we’re entirely unaware of these contradictions in our thoughts, or at least circumspection is rare. But every now and then, there’s something of a collision between the rational and the irrational.
    In my case, I tend to become most acutely aware of the fact that my mind has a mind of its own whenever some coincidence of events serves to trigger thoughts of my dead mother. Yes, she “lives in my heart,” metaphorically speaking. But whatever is left of Alice Bering—those smiling, laughing eyes that welled up so quickly with giant teardrops; her sense of humor; fingers that would rake gently against the scalp of my feverish head when I was a boy; the worried knot between her brows that reflected unspoken despair; even the cancer that took this all furiously away—has for ten years been turning to dust in a satin-lined, walnut casket buried six feet beneath the Florida sun–soaked earth in the middle of a crowded Jewish cemetery.
    Now, I believe, without any tremor of agnostic hesitation, that the whole of my mother’s existence is presently encapsulated as a fragile artifact in this lonely tomb. I also believe that her mental life ended before my eyes in one great, exasperated sigh on a grim January evening in 2001, “like the light ash of a butterfly wing incinerated in a forest fire,” as Camus said about his long-dead father. 15 On several occasions since then, however, I’ve caught myself in a rather complicated lie, one in which, at some level, I’ve leapt to the conclusion that my mom still has a very active mental life—which, of course, I can perceive only by using my theory of mind.
    During the long sleepless night that followed in the wake of her death, for instance, my own mind registered the quiet harmony of the wind chimes jingling outside her bedroom window, and I’d be lying if I said that my first thought was not that she was trying to communicate a gentle message to me in the guise of this sweet device. I did not believe this to be the case; I knew very well that, at that very instant, her body was probably being fussed over by a coroner’s assistant in scrubs miles away. But my beliefs at that moment were irrelevant. My brain happily bypassed them and jumped to translation mode: she’s telling me everything is okay .
    Yale University philosopher Tamar Gendler recently coined the term “alief” to describe just this sort of quasi belief—more primitive than a full-fledged belief or even imagination—in which a mental state is triggered by ambient environmental factors, generating very real emotional and behavioral