(Image: Darren Hopes)
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one ’t believe impossible things.”
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“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
In , believing impossible things would have been seen as a sign of mental imbalance. Today, we know that it is quite normal. Six before breakfast is probably about par for the course.
Belief is like a personal guidebook to reality: it tells us not just what is factually correct but also right and good. It fundamentally informs our behaviour. It would be nice to think these guidebooks are reliable and dispassionate, but it has become clear that they are not. Beliefs are largely a product of our fallible psychology, gut feeling, the company we keep and biological differences such as how easily we scare (New Scientist, 4 April, p 28). It couldn’t be any other way: if we had to form our beliefs using direct experience and verification, we would struggle to get to grips with even the basics of physical reality.
That isn’t to say anything goes. Well-adjusted adults usually have a fairly stable, internally consistent belief system largely anchored in reality. That still leaves room for contradictions, magical thinking, the supernatural, the paranormal and all manner of other impossible things – not just before breakfast but all day, every day.
Research by and colleagues at the University of Cardiff, UK, has found that . These are mild versions of beliefs that could get you diagnosed with a mental illness – that your family have been abducted and replaced by impostors, for example. Most of us seem untroubled by them.
So “normal” belief is a big tent. It is normal to believe unswervingly that God exists. It is also normal to believe unswervingly that (s)he doesn’t. Ditto all the political, social and economic beliefs that we endlessly debate.
It’s hard to argue even that beliefs a given society might deem unacceptable – racism, for example, or apostasy – aren’t “normal” beliefs. Unless you are genuinely deluded, you are probably normal. But then again, delusions feel like real beliefs, so the only way to check that yours are “normal” is to consult a psychiatrist. And believe what they say.
Read more: “Is your mind normal? 7 reasons it probably is“
