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From Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, which will be published in December by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Among the recent discoveries of neuroscience is that radical self-delusion can have an organic source. Doctors have long encountered patients whose capacity for denial and confabulation is so extraordinary that they seem in the grip of pathological certainty, like Hamlets in reverse. Some suffer from anosognosia, a neurological disorder that keeps people from recognizing their own physical or mental conditions, even such dramatic ones as partial paralysis. Blind people who have Anton syndrome are convinced that they can see,…

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