Heroes Not Zombies

Have you noticed how we use the word “count” in two very different ways? We use it to describe numbers….we can count the number of leaves on a seat, the number of patients on a waiting list. We can count what can be measured. But we also use “count” to describe what matters, what we can rely on… “I can count on you”, or “That doesn’t count”.

These two uses slip into each other and give us the impression that only what can be measured, matters. Here’s Iain McGilchrist….

“Problems began only when science started to categorise whole swathes of experience as inadmissible evidence. What can be measured was alone henceforth real. This is obviously untrue: love, merely to take one example, is both real and immeasurable.”

It just won’t do to dismiss the entirety of individual narrative and subjective experience as “anecdote”, as if actual human life doesn’t matter.

This is a problem I came up against again and again at work. If we take a purely materialistic approach, we focus only on disease, on pathology….what can be measured. But time and again patients present with their highly individual experience of illness, with all kinds of invisible and unmeasurable symptoms, from pain, to fatigue, dizziness, nausea etc.

Iain McGilchrist is right to give the example of love which isn’t measurable, but surely should “count” when we try to understand what’s real.

When it comes to human beings I’m a lot more sceptical of numbers (measurements and statistics) than I am of what they tell me, of their personal descriptions of subjective experience, of their narratives.