Finding the Sweet Spot of Confidence

Finding the Sweet Spot of Confidence

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

—Charles Darwin

When Ursula Mercz was admitted to the clinic, she complained of headaches, back pain, and dizziness severe enough that she could no longer work. Over the following month her condition deteriorated. She struggled to locate the glass of water she put next to her bed. She couldn’t find the door to her room. She walked directly into her bed frame.

Ursula was a seamstress in her midfifties, and she hadn’t lost her dexterity: she was able to cut different shapes out of paper with scissors. She could easily point to her nose, mouth, arms, and legs, and had no difficulty describing her home and her pets. For an Austrian doctor named Gabriel Anton, she presented a curious case. When Anton put a red ribbon and scissors on the table in front of her, she couldn’t name them, even though “she confirmed, calmly and faithfully, that she could see the presented objects.”

She was clearly having problems with language production, which she acknowledged, and with spatial orientation. Yet something else was wrong: Ursula could no longer tell the difference between light and dark. When Anton held up an object and asked her to describe it, she didn’t even try to look at it but instead reached out to touch it. Tests showed that her eyesight was severely impaired. Oddly, when Anton asked her about the deficit, she insisted she could see. Eventually, when she lost her vision altogether, she remained completely unaware of it. “It was now extremely astonishing,” Anton wrote, “that the patient did not notice her massive and later complete loss of her ability to see . . . she was mentally blind to her blindness.”

It was the late 1800s, and Ursula wasn’t alone. A decade earlier a neuropathologist in Zurich had reported a case of a man who suffered an accident that left him blind but was unaware of it despite being “intellectually unimpaired.” Although he didn’t blink when a fist was placed in front of his face and couldn’t see the food on his plate, “he thought he was in a dark humid hole or cellar.”

Half a century later, a pair of doctors reported six cases of people who had gone blind but claimed otherwise. “ One of the most striking features in the behavior of our patients was their inability to learn from their experiences,” the doctors wrote:

As they were not aware of their blindness when they walked about, they bumped into the furniture and walls but did not change their behavior. When confronted with their blindness in a rather pointed fashion, they would either deny any visual difficulty or remark: “It is so dark in the room; why don’t they turn the light on?”; “I forgot my glasses,” or “My vision is not too good, but I can see all right.” The patients would not accept any demonstration or assurance which would prove their blindness.

The Roman philosopher Seneca described a woman who was blind but complained that she was simply in a dark room. The clinical cases illustrate Anton’s syndrome: unawareness of blindness associated with brain damage. For everyday thinking, I draw an analogy with failing to recognize the limits of our own knowledge and judgment.

We all have blind spots in our knowledge and opinions. The bad news is that they can leave us blind to our blindness, which gives us false confidence in our judgment and prevents us from rethinking. The good news is that with the right kind of confidence, we can learn to see ourselves more clearly and update our views. In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life, since our minds don’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly.