the timboucher experience

I’m currently going through another of Philip K. Dick’s novels, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer which is I think the last one published before he died. Not sure if it’s actually the last one he wrote. In any event, like so many of his novels, there are characters who experience various kinds of mental illness. One character, Angel, administers a shorthand sort of test for schizophrenia to another character, Bill. The test is called “The Benjamin Proverb Test” and it consists of asking the person to interpret the meaning of several proverbs in a row. Supposedly, if you’re schizophrenic, you have trouble with this although details I’m finding online are rather sketchy. It seems that when a proverb has a concrete meaning as well as a metaphoric interpretation, that’s when they get confused.

Schizophrenics are generally capable of producing and understanding language very well, however figurative language poses problems. For instance, the figurative proverb, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss,’ has both literal and idiomatic meanings. Schizophrenics always interpret this type of expression literally. As Titone further explains, “There are hundreds of different idioms, and some employ metaphors that have no plausible meaning, such as, ‘paying through the nose’.” Interestingly, schizophrenics have no difficulty understanding expressions with only metaphorical meanings, but they become confused when an expression has multiple meanings. Titone has discovered that, different areas of a schizophrenic’s brain are involved when processing idioms with both literal and metaphorical meanings.

Another website has this to say on the matter:

The schizophrenic does not generalize correctly and exhibits an apparent defect in sorting out the relevant and irrelevant features of the situation. One schizophrenic interpreted the saying “A stitch in time saves nine” as “I should sew nine buttons on my coat”. He gave overly personalized and concrete meaning to a common proverb. In addition to concretization, the schizophrenic may show over-inclusion. His ideational and verbal behavior is filled with many irrelevant items, and as a result, it is difficult to make sense out of his stream of talk. One gets the impression that language for him has become a means of self-expression rather than a means of communication. His verbal productions seem either empty or obscure.

I’d guess this all relates to what I found in an earlier post, about what the actual experience of schizophrenia is like, where the borders between self and not-self break down, and everything seems intensely loaded with meaning, a meaning which becomes so complex as to be extremely difficult to communicate. Anyway, interesting stuff.

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