Schrödinger’s Misophonia

Via Schopenhauer via Labatut

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
The image is a quote from the novel in question. It reads: "If he closed his eyes, he could hear the clicking of the spoons in the canteen, the movement of the chess pieces in the recreation room, the shriek of the steam in the laundry. Rather than ignore them, he concentrated on them, trying to drown out the sound of Miss Herwig's breath, that thin thread of air that could barely enter through her swollen throat and was incapable of filling her lungs."

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously saw a commonality¹ between intelligence and a sensitivity to noise, which may have been on the mind of author Benjamín Labatut when, in the novel When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), he put² physicist Erwin Schrödinger through the misophonia wringer.

¹“On Noise” from Studies in Pessimism

²Adrian Nathan West, translator 

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