Mental Deficits

Some time ago, the Surgeon General of the United States announced that, in his opinion, some 20% (or was it 25?) of Americans suffered from mental illness. I do not take this to mean that Americans are somehow crazy to an unique and unprecedented degree, but that we all are, and that a similarly rigorous (or not) study performed in any other nation –most for the moment have not had either the resources or the bloody-mindedness to make them – would discover similar rates of mental illness.

I also assume that the category “illness” referred to people who were suffering. But the scale of mental problems – or malfunction, if you will – must surely be much higher. For, surely, there are people whose brains regularly malfunction in certain areas of computation, but who do not suffer from the condition in some inordinate degree, or do not cause others excessive suffering, and who are as a result simply taken to be ungifted in some areas. And others who may not even notice, or be noticed, to suffer from these deficits.

Such areas as the ability to manipulate fractions, for example; or tone recognition; or the ability to manage one’s finances; or to sense the feelings of others, or any of the areas of computation which we assume to be natural or normal to all men, but which clearly are not.

In my case, one such deficit, one of which I am aware (there are countless others, I am sure), appears to be orientation within cities and buildings. I have no problem finding my way in nature, where I always seem aware of the cardinal directions, and the distance traveled and the distance remaining; and where by what seems to me a sixth sense I seem always aware of the position of the sun, the belichened side of trees and rocks, and so forth; but inside buildings and cities I am a complete idiot and the ease with which others negotiate them invariably amaze me. The explanation for this difference is simple: I have a faulty autolocation circuit, while my friends don’t.

So this is one rather glaring mental deficit with which I am obliged to live. There certainly are others, some too personal to discuss; as well as some others which I have had not the chance to notice.

The word “notice” is the key idea here. If the basic circuitry is there and we function normally – or at any rate satisfactorily –in most common circumstances of our daily life – shop, cook, work, copulate, bear and feed children, our peculiar mental deficits may remain hidden from view simply because they are never called upon; never, or, at any rate, rarely enough to enable us to ignore the evidence of the malfunction when it does arise. Oh, he was just tired, we say to ourselves when an otherwise satisfactorily performing person does or says something obviously wrong; we say, he is under stress; or not paying attention; or whatever. There are countless excuses with which to cover up the evidence of mental deficit. And we want to cover it up because a mental deficit can be a disturbing thing. For one thing, what would it be like to live in a world in which we would have to assume that everybody’s brain is somehow essentially different from our own? That we are, in fact, to each other aliens?

It is this inclination to cover up, from our own eyes, the existence of a mental deficit which causes husbands not to notice that their wives are suffering from psychosis; or wives that their husbands are pathological liars, despite living together, in close proximity, for 20 or 30 years.

So, how big is the proportion of the mentally defective population? If the mentally ill are 20 or 25%, are the happily defective another 25%? Another 50%? Are the defective in fact the majority? Is being defective in fact the normal condition, and being defect-free – abnormal?

The causes of such deficits are probably genetic: all the defective individuals are simply the mistakes of the gene-swapping system which constantly rearranges different features. Their defects persist in the population, and reproduce, because, it turns out the particular circuit they lack is not actually necessary for reproduction. What they have is enough for them to get by, and they do and they leave offspring to continue the good fight.

Yet, it always surprises us when someone we have known for a long time turns out to behave oddly under a new set of circumstances. Perhaps something terrible, some trauma, happened to him in his childhood, we say to ourselves.