Unsafe conviction

We are more often (and often more) convinced about things than we really should.

In his book On being certain, neurologist Robert Burton recounts an anecdote involving a young woman suffering from acute encephalitis, who was convinced she was dead. She refused all medical care — “there is no point treating a dead person”, she argued. Her physician tried to persuade her that she was wrong, and eventually had the idea of asking her to put her hand on her chest to feel her heartbeat. The patient agreed that there was a pulse, but instead of also agreeing with the doctor’s suggestion that she was therefore not dead, she concluded that, since she was dead, it was possible for dead people to have a heartbeat. (She eventually recovered and stopped thinking she was dead, but remained convinced that dead people can sense their heartbeat.)

Not long after I read this for the first time, my nonagenarian father, who is beginning to show signs of dementia, started to have episodes — usually immediately after waking up — in which he is convinced that he is dying. Since the first occurrence, he must have made the claim literally several hundreds of times (obviously wrongly so, every single time). Nonetheless, despite being into amateur dramatics in his younger years, he was genuinely dead (!) serious every time. I have tried many times to come up…