I just had a stomach-groping feeling not long ago. I was paying my grosseries with three bills. The girl, however, said it was about ten euros less than I was supposed to give. I looked at the money again; I'm sometimes absent-minded so it's possible, especially since I had just handed in the wrong bonus card. But in my opinion and with my maths I was correct and I said it. She disagreed again. When we disagreed for the third time I was already worried: had I finally lost it? Luckily I hadn't. For some reason she was mistaken.
What I kept wondering on my way home was my own reaction. My first thought was that there must be something biologically wrong with my brain if I'm seeing a 10€ bill in a 5€ bill. It's just so weird that my first potential disease was the worst: "A brain tumor!" Why is it that when something's wrong people tend to assume the worst? Statistically brain tumors are rare and therefore a hallucination is unlikely to be caused by a tumor. In everything else we think according to Occam's razor -the less assumptions an explanation requires, the more likely it is to be the right explanation- but not with illnesses. Brain cancer, bening tumors, haematomas, strokes... it seems that being wrong just isn't an option.
