CAPGRAS SYNDROME AND THE ALIEN REPLICANTS
When I was a kid, I used to dismantle my toys to see how they worked. It’s something that many inquisitive kids do. The way something breaks down can give clues to how it works in the first place. Neuropsychologists are intrigued by how the mind works. They don’t go about dismantling minds, but they are very interested in broken minds. The way the mind disintegrates following damage or disease of the brain can be a really insightful way to gain an understanding of normal functioning. We know that damage to certain parts of the brain produces characteristic changes in the mind. It’s one of the reasons most psychologists are not dualists: they are very familiar with the idea that the mind is a product of the brain.
One of the more bizarre disorders that is relevant to thinking about the true identity of others is Capgras syndrome.21 This disorder is a delusional state in which the sufferer typically believes that family members have been abducted and replaced with identical replicants. Thankfully, the disorder is very rare; only a handful of cases have been reported in the literature. The delusion is associated with paranoia and can be very dangerous. Sufferers have been known to kill ‘imposters’. In one extreme case, a sufferer who thought his father had been replaced by a robot decapitated him, looking for the batteries and microfilm inside the head.22
Although the delusions usually involve significant family members, reportedly they have applied to family pets and personal inanimate objects as well. One patient thought that his poodle had been replaced with an identical dog.23 Another woman thought her clothes were replaced by items belonging to other people and would not wear them because she feared the objects would transmit an illness to her.24 When Capgras patients look in the mirror, they often don’t recognize themselves. One husband had to cover every reflective surface in the house because his wife suffered from Capgras syndrome and thought there was another woman out to replace her and steal her husband.25
I think that Capgras syndrome is what goes wrong when we lose our supersense that there are essences inside people, pets, and objects.26 It is more commonly associated with significant others because these are the individuals with whom we are most emotionally connected. One theory for the syndrome explains that our recognition systems for things work by linking the way something looks with an emotional tag.27 So you get a warm feeling when you look at your spouse, your pet dog, and maybe even your favourite car. When we look at significant others, we not only visibly recognize them but feel them as well. Like normal people, Capgras sufferers remember how they used to feel about such people and items, and they expect to get that same emotional signal.
The problem in Capgras syndrome is that this emotional tag is missing from the process, and so the sufferer is left with only the visible information. So the Capgras sufferer cannot feel that these are the same people, pets, and things that he or she used to experience before the illness. The only logical answer must be that these are not the same people, pets, or things. Rather, they must be identical copies. It’s the only way for the Capgras patient to make sense of the experience. This leads to the paranoid delusion that there is a conspiracy to replace things in the world.
Capgras syndrome is one specific illness out of a range of disorders in which patients believe things are not what they seem. These dissociated disorders reveal how important it is to have an essential perspective on the world. Without this essential sense of identity, people think that the world is a charade. It may look normal, but it lacks emotional depth. Those suffering from Fregoli’s syndrome, for instance, believe that someone else has taken on a different appearance. In the even more dissociated disorder known as Cotard’s syndrome, patients believe they must be dead because things are not what they used to feel. The world no longer seems real. Ironically, one reason why these syndromes are so rare is that brain injury to those areas that produce these disorders are usually fatal. Those who survive can have their experience of reality fundamentally distorted. The ‘something there’ that William James talked about has gone. The supersense is part of this connectedness that we all experience, even though we are not fully aware of how it shapes the way we view the world. Without it, experience loses a vital dimension.
WHAT NEXT?
How can we best explain the emerging picture I have sketched here? As we discussed earlier, young children are essentialist in their reasoning about living things. They infer hidden energies and properties to living things from early on, even though they are not taught to think this way.
However, inanimate objects can also take on essential unique properties. In particular, the first sentimental objects may be the ones that help us through the early stages of separation and being left alone as infants. These attachment objects probably soothe children by offering some familiarity each time they are placed alone to sleep. However, over the next couple of years the child becomes emotionally attached to the object. What may have started off as a simple object soon becomes irreplaceable. In the case of attachment objects, it’s as if there is an additional invisible property that makes it unique.
Maybe this is where our sense of authenticity comes from, because around the same time children begin to appreciate that certain objects said to belong to significant others have an intrinsic value over and above their material worth. In our study it was the Queen’s cutlery and cups, but it could have been Dad’s watch or Mum’s clothing. I think that this makes sense from the psychological essentialism perspective. In the same way that children’s notions of contagion develop, their essentialist beliefs may also change from a localized focus of identity to one that spreads. Somewhere around six or seven years of age, children start to think that certain objects that were previously owned by significant others take on the properties of that person. This not only explains the origin of memorabilia collecting but also the emerging fear of coming into physical contact with killers’ cardigans or other conduits of evil. What’s more, this attitude may even intensify as we grow into adults and apply essential reasoning to others in the world.
The increasing tendency toward psychological essentialism may be a result of children developing a better understanding of what it is to be unique and an individual. Arguably, as we develop into adults, we have much more sophisticated ways of thinking about others as we form many more categories with which to pigeonhole people. Also, as we saw in chapter 5, children have an increasing sense of the importance of the mind as a unique property of the individual. This is why duplication of minds with a copying machine is so unacceptable. Our natural way of thinking about ourselves and other people leads to an increasing reliance on beliefs about identity, uniqueness, and things that can and cannot connect us.
So I would argue that the behaviour of the toddler towards his grubby blanket and the obsession of a fanatical collector with owning original memorabilia reflect the same human tendency to see objects as possessing invisible properties that originate from significant individuals. By owning objects and touching them, we can connect with others, and that gives us the sense of a distributed existence over time and with others. The net effect is that we become increasingly linked together by a sense of deeper hidden structures.