The Night the Blades Stopped Whirring

OR: Waiting for chime three

Image created with ChatGPT (who, apparently, doesn’t understand how Roman numerals work…)

A few weeks ago, I slept in a room with a ceiling fan. The fan must have been ever-so-slightly loose or uneven in its rotation: Each time it completed a revolution, once every half-second or so, it made a small clicking sound.

Lying in the dark, trying to drift off to the click-click-click of the fan, I observed with dismay that the sound was not fading into the background: I was not—as I’d hoped when I first noticed the clicking—habituating to it like white noise. Instead, every time I began to lose consciousness for a fraction of a second, I would be snapped back to alertness by the next instant’s turn.

But then, blessedly, the clicking stopped.

Or, rather, it didn’t stop entirely—but it went silent long enough for me to be able to fade off for at least a minute or two before being awakened again when the sound resumed. This happened a few times. Groggily, I wondered what could explain the sporadic pattern by which the clicks were cutting in and out—whatever the cause, I was grateful to be catching at least a couple winks.

For several minutes, this chain of events repeated (the clicking would stop, and I’d fall asleep; the clicking would resume, and I’d wake up), before I realized suddenly I had it backwards: It wasn’t that silence was allowing me to lose consciousness—it was that losing consciousness was creating the illusion of silence during the periods of blackout.

In other words, the clicking was constant; it was only my sense of hearing which was cutting in and out.

I see, in this experience, two lessons.

The first is yet another reminder that our perception of the world is not reality but rather a projection of reality. This projection is subject to error and manipulation. It may seem as if the ceiling fan has stopped—or, alternatively, it may seem as if someone is intentionally trying to harm you, or coerce you, or put obstacles in your path—but some fraction of the time, these are simply illusions our minds create to make meaning out of idiosyncratic sense data.

The second is that, in the famous words of Steve Jobs: “you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” The insight isn’t just true in the broad metaphorical sense that we can only put experiences in context in hindsight—it’s true in a literal, perceptual sense.

In order to detect a pattern (or, for that matter, deviation from a pattern) we need a baseline level of repetition. By definition, we cannot observe repetition until it has happened a few times. This means that sometimes we don’t realize until the third or fifth or tenth iteration what is actually going on—not because we’re oblivious, but because we did not have the information to establish the truth: The first time the clicking stops, it’s entirely possible that the fan really has gone silent; once this happens a few times, we need a different explanation.

The late philosopher Daniel Dennett describes this principle using a different auditory example:

Think the phenomenon of being engrossed in a book, in a room where there’s in fact a clock that has chimes. And at some point the clock starts chiming, and at about chime three you are distracted. You find you can retrospectively realize, “Oh that’s chime three.” You weren’t aware of chimes one and two. You become fully conscious at chime three, but that’s when you become conscious of times one and two, [and] they’re just as punctate. The time when consciousness happens as opposed to the event that you’re conscious of—that’s a very adjustable, variable thing. [emphasis mine]

I suspect that sometimes, in these moments of epiphany, we draw the wrong lesson: How could I not have noticed chimes one and two? we think. How ridiculous to think the fan was cutting in and out when really it was just my perception? We imagine that if only we were working harder, or paying better attention, or thinking more critically, we could reach the answer sooner.

But sometimes, really, all we have to do is wait for the pattern to emerge.