With our super-plastic neocortices and well-organized senses, Homo sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world. We are uniquely skilled at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile when it comes to letting that information shape who we are. And when we are deprived of sensory information, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, we conjure sometimes fantastical information-rich worlds from the darkness to feed our inner informavore.

We need something more, perhaps something transcendent and unconfined by  reason to grant some necessary meaning to our lives. That need seems to be something quite fundamentally human, whether or not we are considered mad.

It is not simply to be unafraid of otherness - it is to seek out and attach value to otherness and in this way to extend ourselves and assert our humanity.

The mind cannot escape the brain. We are bound to the machinery of ourselves.

How to process the escalating torrent of information available to us in a useful way is not clear, but the predicament is a way of imagining madness.