PAUL, on 23 May 1997 you wrote to me,

Jacob, ...I read your mention of the patient unaware of his blindness.... Could you provide Serendip a longer description of your observations?

Nothing else. I have worked with hypnosis, therapeutically and experimentally. My experience tells me that it is possible to create the following two states: First, blindfolding the subject, telling him that he is able to see, and letting him bump about. Second (the obverse), a seeing person being told that he cannot see. By means of fMRI (brain imaging) it might be observed that the vision center is activated differently in the two experimental settings.

Please... tell me more about yourself, since you so obviously have interests/thoughts related to my own.

I was born and grew up in Cali, Colombia, where I graduated as a MD. Started a teaching career, which later included Basic Sciences studies at Tulane and Hematology at Utah (I was actually interested in Psychoanalysis, which was too expensive to learn).
Later on, Visiting Research Professor at Hadassah H. U., and at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, NY. Moved to Israel in 1971, was Head of Hematology Service in a Hospital in Haifa until my retirement several years ago. I read 'Science,' 'The Sciences,' and 'Sc. Am.' I write some speculative short essays, and enjoy interpreting some parts of Genesis. I have always loved teaching. Occasional letters of mine have been published in The Jerusalem Post, and one in Newsweek (on "Hallowed be the Father"). Only I, out of the whole extensive family, has expressed an inclination to be a 'deep' thinker.
One of my daughters is a "Repentant" Habad follower. Some of my Biblical interpretations have spun from conversations with her and her husband. He has developed an organization with vast reaches, which has performed 5,000 brith-milah in 5 years, mostly on immigrants from the former URSS.

I tend to agree with you on "in-built need for order," certainly on the importance of "Cartesian doubt," and on the likelihood that it is undeveloped in "cultists." Am less sure than you that there is a sharp border between "normal" and "abnormal".

Perhaps there is no 'absolute normal' or is very rare, forcing us to rely on a Gauss curve. Slight deviations from the mean (let us say due to a minimal point mutations in some brain-mind function gene) would then have to be accepted as "within an acceptable deviation").

I am not at all sure there will be found to be any close relation between genes and cults.

Neither am I, but not skeptic.

There are too many levels of complexity in genes and in beliefs, with too many additional factors operating at each level.

Undoubtedly, yet I am just speculating on the possibility of having eventually a Science of the Mind, as Freud hoped.

Freud imagined an in-built antagonism between a need for order and a need for novelty/risk taking.

I have forgotten a lot of what I read from Freud, yet novelty/risk-taking sounds to me as a latter-day definition, lately studied with fMRI. My impression is that Freud's opposite of Life ('order') was Thanathos, the death wish.

Perhaps yours is not a bad overall characterization of how the brain works, with cultists at one extreme of a continually shifting balancing act in which we all engage, and for reasons which include --but are not limited to-- genetic factors.

If both of us tend to reason in that direction --about some aspects of the mind's 'work'-- then we consider all ways of 'believing' based on all sorts of irrelevant thought platforms, as manifestations unavoidable. But that's due to the fact that the knowledge of the workings of the brain-mind are only just emerging. Nobody nowadays is too eager to express unbased opinions about quantum mechanics, because it doesn't touch a raw nerve. The advances on Evolution, on the other hand, don't enjoy a comparable good luck. On the other hand, you and I have credentials for delving on brain-mind-thinking...