ISBN 9781913260002 (paperback), 210 pages

Hone your rational and extra-rational thinking skills to unleash your full human potential.

I have found power in the mysteries of thought. —Euripides

I would encourage anyone to read and re-read the book’s last seven chapters … Neel Burton has challenged me as a reader but also as an educator, and made me wonder what I have been teaching and why. —Malcolm Nicolson, former head of development for the International Baccalaureate

RD Laing presented madness as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, then mere sanity is not all it’s cracked up to be—a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. But what if there were another route to hypersanity, one that is less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging than madness? What if, as well as a back door, there were also a royal road?

This is a book about thinking, which, astonishingly, is barely taught in formal education. Our culture tends to equate thinking with logical reasoning, and so the book begins with the fundamentals of argumentation, logic, and their many pitfalls. But thinking is much more than reasoning. It is also about intelligence, knowledge, truth, intuition, emotion, imagination, insight, wisdom, and inspiration—the many ways in which we make sense of ourselves and the world. Thinking at its fullest—that is hypersanity.

By learning to think more clearly, more differently, and more creatively, we can begin to transcend the assumptions that confine us. We become more resistant to manipulation, more confident in the face of uncertainty, and better able to live deliberately rather than merely react to circumstance. If hypersanity is possible, it begins here.

If Hypersanity fails to live up to its tall promise, it should at least make you into a better thinker. And that is no mean thing. How you think matters far more to your wellbeing and your impact on the world than any collection of facts you happen to remember. As BF Skinner put it, “Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.”

What an intriguing book! It truly is a book that makes you think about thinking … You will understand not only your own thinking better but also the thinking of others. —Jamie Bee, Amazon.com Top 50 Reviewer

There is more golden wisdom flowing from these pages than can be explained in an overview. —Grady Harp, Amazon.com Top 100 reviewer

Contents

1. Arguments
2. Fallacies
3. Questions
4. Answers
5. Enemies
6. Rhetoric
7. Language
8. Languages
9. Reason
10. Intelligence
11. Knowledge
12. Memory
13. Science
14. Magic
15. Truth
16. Intuition
17. Wisdom
18. Inspiration
19. Insight
20. Emotion
21. Music
22. Imagination

About the author

Dr Neel Burton FRSA is a psychiatrist and philosopher. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, and the recipient of the Society of Authors’ Richard Asher Prize, the British Medical Association’s Young Authors’ Award, the Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Award, and a Best in the World Gourmand Award. His work has appeared in Aeon, Psychology Today, and elsewhere, and has been translated into several languages.

From the author

There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I’m talking about.

While training in psychiatry, I came across an unfamiliar word that lodged in my mind and never left it: hypersanity. It appeared in RD Laing’s The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967), in which the Scottish psychiatrist presented madness as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness. He called this state hypersanity. For Laing, the descent into madness held out the possibility of reckoning, awakening—of “breakthrough” rather than “breakdown”. 

A few months later, I read CG Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), which seemed to offer a vivid case in point. In 1913, after breaking with Sigmund Freud, Jung entered a prolonged period of psychological turmoil that led him into what he called a “confrontation with the unconscious”. Looking back, he regarded this descent not as a detour from his life’s work but as its indispensable beginning, finding in his madness “the prima materia for a lifetime’s work”. 

Yet the idea of hypersanity did not begin with Laing. Although the word is modern, the aspiration is ancient. When Diogenes the Cynic was asked to name the most beautiful of all things, he replied: parrhesia—uninhibited thought, fearless speech, full expression. He wandered through Athens in broad daylight carrying a lit lamp, and when people asked what he was looking for, he replied, “I am just looking for a human being.” His point was not that that people were absent, but that genuine humanity was rare. 

Jung and Diogenes both appeared mad by the standards of their day. Yet each possessed a depth and acuteness of vision that enabled him to see through the assumptions and complacencies of ordinary life. Psychosis and hypersanity can each set us at odds with society, attracting the same uneasy mixture of fear and fascination. But whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling, hypersanity is liberating and empowering. 

But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, the implication is unsettling. Mere sanity is not all it’s cracked up to be. It may even be, by comparison, a state of dormancy and dullness, with less vital potential than madness itself. Many people who are perfectly “normal” live within a restricted world of unquestioned assumptions, confused priorities, and quiet self-deception. They become prisoners of lives they have mistaken for reality—rarely stepping outside themselves to glimpse beauty, possibility, and the larger picture. 

We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. 

But what if there were another route to hypersanity? One that, compared with madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a back door, there were also a royal road? 

The question is not whether hypersanity exists. The question is whether we are prepared to settle for mere sanity.

Some of the ideas in this book are explored in the following articles:

• Why Imagination Matters
• The Psychology and Philosophy of Intuition
• The Psychology and Philosophy of Wisdom