We live in a world increasingly preoccupied with information or data. We attach value to the accumulation of more and more information. We believe that this will grant us greater control over the circumstances of our lives, or enable us to reach beyond ourselves.

Rather than informing an appropriate course of action, the more immediate, visceral, intensely powerful, emotional - possibly blunter - response can overwhelm the slower, more elaborately calibrated, evaluative system. We become paralysed by fear. We lose a sense of control and panic ensues. Our thoughts are distorted and we become disorganised by fear. In this frenzied state of mind we cannot respond to reason.

It is a curious paradox that schizophrenia might be imagined as a condition of being both less or too much of whomever we might be. An intricate balance is lost.

In this state all is noise and chaos and devoid of meaning. It is difficult to imagine: our lives are so much more made up of light and sound and thoughts and feelings that form meaningful patterns and which help us to make sense of our lives and may grant us pleasure. The patient experiencing a psychotic episode is robbed of these harmonies. We cannot know the mind of another, and certainly not the mind of a psychotic other, but we can imagine that such noise, such a dissolution of meaning, would be intolerable. In this context it becomes understandable that a person in such a state should urgently seek to find or construct meanings and, in this process, to employ themes that are culturally or spiritually familiar - albeit often in deeply strange ways, given the disorder of mind.

As Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his coauthors show in their book Noise, when a system devolves into such a “random scatter of ideas” (their definition of noise), decision-making and coordination suffer, and dysfunctional conflict may abound, because people can’t agree on what to do, how to do it, and what bad or good work looks like.