i can’t unsee that now

In my twenties, my friend briefly dated a girl called Kehinde. She was lovely. But the relationship only lasted a few months.

One night she told me that, in Yoruba culture, her name is used to denote the second of two twins. Taiwo is traditionally the twin born first. She told me that Kehinde means she or he who waits. According to one Yoruba story, Taiwo is understood as being sent ahead to taste or inspect the world.

I thought this was pretty cool.

Since then, I’ve met an implausible number of Nigerian twins.

I want to say at least six people called Kehinde, and probably four called Taiwo, but possibly more. I only began counting after I found out what the names meant.

Statistically, that seems pretty absurd, right? I mean, I live in London, and there are plenty of people of Nigerian descent in London. But I became a bit obsessed with the idea that something weird was happening here, that Nigeria, for reasons that I simply had to uncover, had some probabilistically impossible tendency to produce twins. Was this some kind of remarkable synchronicity, or had I discovered something incredible about the differential cell-cycle activities of one particular West African lineage?

I know. Pretty stupid, right?

About ten years ago, I saw a young man in clinic who was experiencing a first episode of psychosis. One of the bits of evidence that he seemed very attached to, and which for him confirmed that something remarkable or strange was happening, was the frequency with which he saw the time 11:11 on a clock or watch.

It began to hit him with such regularity that he realised it was a sign of some sort.

He soon developed a range of delusions and other symptoms, but eventually did well with treatment, although he never stopped noticing 11:11.

After the first time I met him with my neurology colleague, Ester, I started to notice 11:11 on my watch with surprising frequency, particularly in the mornings. I pointed this out to Ester, and she confessed that the same thing had started happening to her too.

For a while, every time we looked at our phones and it was exactly 11:11, we would message each other. I think we once managed a run of twelve days straight. Weirdly, it seemed to get easier for us as the days went on.

I know. Pretty stupid, right?

The other day, I saw a child asking their parents why so many adopted children are of a different ethnicity from their parents. I’d never really thought about it. But in the subsequent week, I saw what I thought were at least three examples of this.

I know. Pretty stupid, right?

About ten years ago, somebody told me about the existence of the soap opera effect on digital televisions. It’s weird, because after that I found watching films at family gatherings, like Christmas, a lot more unpleasant.

I know. Stupid, right?

The other day, I was assessing a patient who had really bothersome earworms and couldn’t seem to get rid of the spontaneous musical imagery that appeared in their head. They had also started to notice that, with alarmingly increased frequency, they would walk into rooms and forget why they had done so.

In that same consultation, going through the usual history, I asked if they ever experienced flashers or floaters.

They didn’t know what I meant by these terms, so I explained what floaters are: those little specks in your field of vision that slowly cross from one side to the other, going on their way.

They had never noticed them before. But with a look of concern, they appeared to recognise exactly what I was talking about, and thanked me profusely.

I was left wondering whether I might somehow have messed up.

I know. Stupid, right?

There is a reassuring account available, one which accounts for most of my stupidity.

Not being of Nigerian descent, until I knew what Kehinde meant, the name carried almost no information. Once I knew, it became difficult to forget.

Most times on the clock vanish immediately. I doubt there are boutiques in Ubud, or whole Etsy stores, offering merchandise with 10:47 logos printed on it. 11:11 has four identical obelisk-like strokes gathered in solemn ritual around a colon, and can be recognised in an instant.

The very many same-ethnicity adoptive families likely pass through the world without announcing themselves as adoptive in the way that mixed-race adoptive families do.

Motion smoothing, the soap opera effect famously deplored by Tom Cruise, only becomes intolerable once you have seen it and learnt what the television is doing. Perhaps Tom Cruise’s intervention, or that meme that circulates every Christmas, is doing more harm than good. Perhaps he should be arrested for the psychological violence of it.

Floaters can drift across the eye for years without ever being promoted into consciousness. Many harmless visual phenomena can be assimilated unremarked by the predictive brain. In some cases, this goes awry. Some have speculated that this might underlie visual snow syndrome, and we ourselves have published some evidence that hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (‘flashbacks’ - at least on one understanding of that term) appears to have considerable epidemiological overlap with other disorders that might sensibly be understood as disorders of dysfunctional symptom generation and/or awareness mechanisms.

In my old apartment, I was driven mad by the buzzing of an expensive fridge we had bought. I even called a repairman, who told me that there was nothing wrong with it. In his career, he said, he was often called out to assess fridges that, in his mind, were producing a perfectly normal amount of hum.

He said that, just from the demeanour of the person opening the door, he could usually tell whether the fridge in question was actually going to have something wrong with it.

After my now wife moved in, I didn’t mention the fridge buzz for the first few months. She has never forgiven me for the day I finally mentioned it to her. In a moment, the kitchen became a far less pleasant place for her to hang out.

In all these cases, a tiny piece of knowledge enters our lives and, all of a sudden, the world appears to contain more of the thing it describes.

There is an obvious lesson here about selective attention and the predictive brain. Learning changes the statistics of experience. We know that. After all isn’t that what education is, at its most fundamental?

The accumulation of facts is one thing, but what changes us is the acquisition of new ways of seeing. Every discipline gives us another decoder, another set of regularities that had always been present but were waiting for a mind capable of recognising them.

All of a sudden, a world became full of Nigerian twins.

I wonder how many decoders, implicit and explicit, we must all have. I wonder how many the massively parallel computing architecture of our minds generates without ever bringing them to our conscious awareness.

I wonder how many new such decoders the minds of our newly arrived silicon conspecifics might be busy figuring out as we hourly vomit up little packets of data and feed them like the squirming little baby birds they pretend to be. I wonder what psychological purchase that might afford them.

Not every decoder is benign, obviously. Some are epistemically liberating. The structure they reveal allows us to navigate the world better, or even more beautifully. Birdsong, perhaps. Cardiac murmurs, if that’s your thing.

Maybe it’s the peculiar, previously unencountered name of a German militant group. Or the way the tip of a colleague’s nose literally moves against gravity every time they smile, despite you being sure there aren’t any muscles in that part of the face.

Others may be more epistemically astringent. They recruit attention in ways that might be more difficult to assimilate. Floaters. Tinnitus. Perhaps a weird breathing pattern.

For me, it was the neck crepitus I first noticed after a COVID vaccination booster, shortly after my fortieth birthday. At the time, I was torn between blaming the COVID booster and my birthday, although I subsequently chose to absolve both.

Maybe one of the most important questions for us should be which discernments are worth teaching and which might be too dangerous.

Knowledge doesn’t just change what we know. It changes what we see, and what we are subsequently unable to ignore.

But if you know, you know, right?

There is a reason that soap opera effect meme gets shared every holiday season. The tweet or image never actually says what the settings do, and that’s the whole joke. It assumes you are already part of the club, the club that knows these are all the settings you need to turn off to get rid of the soap opera effect.

When you are part of that club, you are licensed to feel superior to your stupid cousins, who have just spent a fortune on some 4K television yet continue to watch films in a way that makes them vomit-inducingly unpleasant.

How stupid they must be, you tell yourself, patting yourself on the back for possessing the knowledge that allows you to experience the nausea they are not experiencing. How much more epistemically privileged we are, now we inhabit a world in which every new television can become a source of great discomfort.

I know. Pretty stupid, right?

Ask yourself: do you really want to tell your mum how to spot AI-generated text or images? Maybe not. You don’t want to ruin Facebook for her, do you? Now would you say the same thing about your children?

Is music better or worse now that you know how to spot Auto-Tune?

Some perceptions can flip back and forth. Many cannot. Once the new version appears, the old one becomes difficult to recover. Whether that brings liberation or suffering may depend on what has been revealed. Or perhaps it depends on you. I’m not really sure.

And yet, and yet.

It turns out, in fact, that Yoruba populations really do have one of the highest recorded rates of twin births in the entire world.

Transracial adoption really does account for a substantial chunk of adoption, at least in those countries where anyone has bothered to measure it. There really are a lot of these families, and their existence points past their visibility towards histories of migration and inequality.

It turns out that the setting on your television really is generating whole frames that were never filmed, creating a gratuitously inferred hyper-reality that may induce antibodies in the same people who like their vegetables wonky and insist they would buy all their music on vinyl if only it weren’t so expensive.

It turns out that those floaters really are in the eye.

And 11:11?

Give it a few days. Let me know how you get on.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll either thank me or you’ll hate me.

I know. Pretty stupid, right?