“Are electrosensitive patients crazy?” – Focus

Hi, I have electro sensitivity and I want a protected environment at my workplace. At work they say I am mentally ill. Is this true?

The rationalist tries to “think” his way to a truth that does not correspond to the reality that surrounds us. It is therefore necessary to believe that what we see and feel through our senses is not reality, but a filtered image of something we cannot comprehend. Otherwise, you are an empiricist. Both schools are problematic because hypotheses that are not based on empirical evidence can be as crazy as you like, but at the same time it is very easy to fool the human mind. It is enough to look at the famous Müller-Lyer illusion, which shows two horizontal lines of equal length, but with arrows and “lobes” at the ends, respectively, to see this:

Austrian The philosopher Karl Popper got around the problem by requiring that every hypothesis be falsifiable. You can therefore have almost any hypothesis. In order to arrive at the truth, one then tries to falsify it. That electrosensitivity is due to hypersensitivity to electricity is a perfectly valid hypothesis, regardless of whether or not you can find an underlying mechanism that you find likely. The hypothesis that electrosensitivity is due to a disorder in the brain of the person suffering from this condition is also valid.

In order to verify this phenomenon, experiments were conducted on people suffering from electrosensitivity, where electrical devices were hidden behind a screen and turned off and on without the person being tested knowing about it. The studies clearly indicate that there is no relationship between the symptoms of electrosensitivity and the operation of electricity. It was not possible to find any kind of time delay. The hypothesis in the experiments is that electrosensitivity is not caused by electricity but has psychological causes and the experiments were unable to refute this hypothesis.

One should not ignore people's suffering, but at the same time it is clear that the sensitivity may not be due to any force field, but has more complex causes, even if some people with electrosensitivity feel better after electrotherapy. Until proven otherwise, this improvement should be viewed as due to the incomprehensible capabilities of the human brain. Just like the placebo effect.