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

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

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 was another route to hypersanity, one which, compared to madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a back door way, there was also a royal road strewn with petals and sprayed with perfume?

This is a book about thinking, which, astonishingly, is barely taught in formal education. Our culture mostly equates thinking with logical reasoning, and the first few chapters examine logic, reason, their forms, and their flaws, starting with the basics of argumentation. But thinking is also about much more than logical reasoning, and so the book broadens out to examine concepts such as intelligence, knowledge, and truth, and alternative forms of cognition that our culture tends to overlook and underplay, including intuition, emotion, and imagination.

If Hypersanity fails to live up to its tall promise, it should at least make you into a better thinker. And so you can approach the book as an opportunity to hone your thinking skills, which, in the end, are going to be far more important to your impact and wellbeing than any facts that you could ever learn. As BF Skinner once put it, ‘Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.’

Burton guides the reader to unlearn, rediscover, and return to wholeness. It is a journey out of Plato’s cave… —The International Review of Books

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

★★★★★ 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 who matter in your world. —Jamie Bee, Amazon.com Top 50 Reviewer

Burton is never short of an interesting and sharp judgment. —Prof Peter Toohey, Psychology Today

I would encourage anyone to read and re-read the book’s last seven chapters … [Hypersanity] 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 

About the author

Dr Neel Burton FRSA is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine-lover who lives and teaches in Oxford, England. He is a Fellow of Green-Templeton College in the 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 featured in the likes of Aeon, the Spectator, and the Times, and been translated into several languages.

Contents

Introduction

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

Final Words

Thinking Beyond Thinking

‘Hypersanity’ is not a common or accepted term. But neither did I make it up. I first came across it while training in psychiatry, in The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967) by RD Laing. In this book, the Scottish psychiatrist presented ‘madness’ as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. For Laing, the descent into madness could lead to a reckoning, to an awakening, to ‘breakthrough’ rather than ‘breakdown’. 

A few months later, I read CG Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), which provided a vivid case in point. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung broke off his close friendship with Sigmund Freud, and spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’. As Europe tore itself apart, he gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found ‘the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’. As the war burnt out, he re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the primo materia for a lifetime’s work’. 

The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots. Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (d. 323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Ancient Greek means something like ‘uninhibited thought’, ‘free speech’, or ‘full expression’. Diogenes used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing an ignited lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply, “I am just looking for a human being”—thereby insinuating that the people of Athens were not living up to, or even much aware of, their full human potential. 

Jung and Diogenes came across as insane by the standards of their day. But both men had a depth and acuteness of vision that their contemporaries lacked, and that enabled them to see through their facades of ‘sanity’. Both psychosis and hypersanity place us outside society, making us seem ‘mad’ to the mainstream. Both states attract a heady mixture of fear and fascination. But whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling, hypersanity is liberating and empowering. 

After reading The Politics of Experience, the concept of hypersanity stuck in my mind, not least as something that I might aspire to for myself. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, the implication is that mere sanity is not all it’s cracked up to be, a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities, and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception. As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things, and become fanatics or otherwise destructive people. It is not just that the merely sane are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of themselves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture—and all, ultimately, for fear of losing themselves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life—mysterious, magical life—slips through their fingers. 

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 way, there were also a royal road strewn with sweet-scented petals. 

This is a book about thinking, which, astonishingly, is barely taught in formal education. Our culture mostly equates thinking with logical reasoning, and the first few chapters examine logic, reason, their forms, and their flaws, starting with the basics of argumentation. But thinking is also about much more than logical reasoning, and so the book broadens out to examine concepts such as intelligence, knowledge, and truth, and alternative forms of cognition that our culture tends to overlook and underplay, including intuition, emotion, and imagination. 

If Hypersanity fails to live up to its tall promise, it should at least make you into a better thinker. And so you can approach the book as an opportunity to hone your thinking skills, which, in the end, are going to be far more important to your impact and wellbeing than any facts that you could ever learn. As BF Skinner once put it, ‘Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.’

Purchase now from Amazon or Apple, or go back to the Ataraxia series page.