The psychosis (break from reality) known as schizophrenia involves symptoms such as paranoia, trouble thinking logically, socially unusual behaviour, and suicidal thoughts. The “hollow mask illusion” is a common visual misconception that causes most healthy people to view the concave side of a mask as though its features were convex or sticking out in their direction. This illusion occurs because we fill in the hollows with our expectations, accumulated over a lifetime of observing and committing to memory convex faces. Curiously, people with schizophrenia see the hollow mask as just a hollow mask and have an increased ability to see hidden patterns in reality (“The Faulty Weathermen of the Mind” – Nautilus magazine, Issue 52, Page 59 – reporting the neuroscience of Paul Fletcher and Christoph Teufel.)
Many researchers believe that psychosis actually exists as a continuum, that the general population exhibits varying levels of susceptibility to it, and that these manifest in ways that do not greatly disturb the healthy person’s functioning. While full-blown psychosis or schizophrenia is obviously incompatible with a breakthrough like physically uniting everything in both space and time, a trace of it – a tiny, unrecognizable hint of its symptoms – may be vital to intuiting how unification works ie what was previously referred to as “increased ability to see hidden patterns in reality”. The hormonal and biochemical changes in the brain which accompany this barest trace of the condition conceivably result in insights into the nature and connectedness of space-time.
While this speck of psychosis would possess the great benefit of allowing discernment of the so-called “secrets of the universe” and “the mind of God”, it’d also produce problems like intermittent delusions of persecution and awkward – even totally unacceptable – social interactions. Perhaps the most well-known example in science of unacceptable interactions is Isaac Newton’s hostility towards, and clashes with, other academics. I wouldn’t be surprised if he often regretted his own hostility. Despite the tendency to be harsh and inhuman, my World Book encyclopedia says he had a sensitive nature which, besides aiding his scientific pursuits, manifested as great generosity to his nephews and nieces.
Mental health issues definitely mirror human societies Rodney Bartlett The unifying aspect are chronified moods, which lead to certain mental pathologies and reflect human suffering in respective societies. The universal aspect may be that these societal moods are non-simultaneous, in terms of social stages of human development and medical psychology.
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