Is Schizophrenia 'Normal' for Writers?

As you will be perfectly well aware—possibly to the point of boredom, I write stories.

They are, by and large, science fiction stories.

Often they are really about other things but they are wrapped up in the guise of science fiction because that is where I am comfortable in my head.

I have written, briefly, about perceptions before (http://davidleyman.blogspot.com/2011/05/perceptions.html) so there is no point in beating that to death again but...

There is ALWAYS a ‘but’.

...just to be absolutely clear, our whole existence—for all of us, is inside our heads. Our world(s) is in our brain and that brain projects everything outside our heads so that it seems that reality is external. It is not.

Our senses, five of them, relay external events to our brain through the nervous system. Our nose, via the olfactory lobes, detects smells. Smells trigger memory responses faster and more efficiently than any other sense. Why? Because, it is suspected, there are only two nerve synapses between the olfactory lobes and the part of the brain (sensory receptor) that deals with smell. That makes the information input rapid.

Why is smell important? Because, over millions of years we have all been hard-wired for survival. Everything we have learnt is adapted for survival. Everything.

We see a movement out of the corner of our eye and we automatically look at it. We cannot help it. We have to make an assessment of it to determine if it is a threat or not. It exists now when we drive, for example. We see a movement, look at it and assess the speed and direction of the other vehicle, we make a split-second calculation to see if it is on a collision course with us. The long-term memory kicks in to find out if this has happened before; what was the response then? Did it work? If it was successful we may find ourselves pursuing a course of action that will extricate us from a potentially lethal situation.

Perception. Smell gives us that sense of security, too. It is about survival. From a time when we never washed and so we smelt our enemies and friends and knew the difference because we smelt differently.

Do we smell in dreams? Do we taste in dreams? We certainly hear and see but the other senses may be lost to us because they are looking to protect us while we sleep.

But what if your reality, when you are awake, includes smell, touch, taste? Does that make that reality real. What if you have two realities in your head that tells you, your brain, that both are real because you can sense all five senses. Which one is the actual one?

Could we, reasonably, say that one reality is false but the other is not? After all, the senses are connected in both realities.

You may argue that in only one reality do you remember your childhood and that makes it the real one. Does it? What if you remember your childhood in both or that both realities had a common childhood that then branched out at some point to give you an alternative existence?

Now which one is real? The one that you ‘revert’ to when you go to eat?

What if you die in the other reality. Do you also die in this one?

Your perceptions in both realities can be equally real as, indeed, your perceptions of one reality can be convincing even if they are not what actually happened to you. We ‘see’ things in our memory in the way that we feel that they ‘should’ have happened rather than what really happened.

Example:

Several witnesses are asked if they saw an accident. They will say, “Yes.”

Did they?

For the most part they will have heard a ‘bang’ and then turned to look at it (automatic reaction—survival mode).

They will have seen the aftermath and not the actual accident. Their brain will fill in the details as to what might have happened built on past experience, knowledge and the part that they actually did see.

But it is all real to them even if it was only a version of reality.

So it is with writers. We ‘see’ things in our heads but we also smell things, taste things and feel things. We hear what goes on in our surroundings and in the conversations our characters have.

But they are not just characters, are they? They exist, they have lives, they are real.

When they die, we are sad if we love them and glad if we hate them.

They do this in their reality that we are privy to.

It is real.

All of it.

We just write it down.