the willing suspension of disbelief

If you write fiction, you know how careful you must be to include details that make your story believable. You are in charge of creating realistic characters. You have to build a world the reader can visualize and understand. What happens there must be consistent and plausible given the story line. Even so, you may be asking the reader to suspend disbelief...to accept the fact that dinosaurs can coexist with astronauts, for example, or that extinct creatures can come back to life, or that your hero's superpower is mental telepathy.

"A piece of writing has to seduce the reader.

It has to suspend disbelief and

earn the reader's trust."

~Po Bronson~

If, on the other hand, you write nonfiction, you need to focus on the facts, and communicate them with accuracy and clarity. This, too, may require the reader to suspend disbelief as you discuss new discoveries that challenge the old...for example, recent observations and speculation about the immensity and complexity of the Cosmos. How viruses mutate. How you can hear a multiplicity of sounds, including each one's volume and pitch, how you discern harmony and melody, and how you assign meaning to them, all at the same time. Beautiful music. Approaching storm. Childhood lullaby. When you pause to think about it, it's hard to believe. In fact, it's hard to believe much of what we are learning about how the human body functions.

Advances in modern medical technology have made it possible for us to observe and understand, for the first time, how the human body takes care of itself. How it fights off infection. How a bruise just fades away. How a broken bone heals. The fact that a patient recovers after a heart attack or stroke is enough to challenge anyone's concept of reality. Still, that's the easy part...

"The body is a remarkable mystery,

capable of untold feats

of self-preservation and healing."

~J. Upledger~

...because, every day, we're learning more about how the body sustains and heals itself without any conscious awareness, attention, or effort on our part. Meaning that much of what the body does to keep itself healthy, and what it takes to heal, is under subconscious control.

We have long recognized the "placebo effect": This takes place when, unbeknownst to the patient, he is "prescribed" a useless sugar pill by his physician, but he recovers just as he would had he been given a proven drug. This is believed to happen because the patient trusts his doctor, and believes he is getting a real medication that is known to work for his condition. He expects to get better. In other words, healing depends on the patient's conscious thoughts about it.

"Your body's ability to heal is greater

than anyone has permitted you to believe."

~Unknown~

But then, there's this: Diabetes has subsided, and skin lesions have disappeared under hypnosis, suggesting there is an unconscious component to healing. This has been shown to correlate with the patient's belief that healing is occurring because of the hypnotic suggestion that it is. Just the thought of it.

And this: Patients with Multiple Personality Disorder have been observed to change not only their voices and mannerisms as they morph into different personalities, but to change their eye color. Scars observed in one personality can disappear as another personality emerges. And their EEG changes, suggesting that the mind is intrinsically involved in the transformations that are observed. 

We don't know how that happens, yet...but in medicine, as in writing, it requires the willing suspension of disbelief to even imagine it.

"It is now life and not art

that requires the willing suspension

of disbelief."

~Po Bronson~

jan