‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?’
T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land
Have you ever had the sense – when alone in a room or wandering along a forest path – that someone else is there with you? A shadowy figure, perhaps. Off to the side, and just out of your line of vision. If you’ve ever felt a sensation like this… were you frightened, comforted? Or were you afraid you’d truly gone mad?
An extra presence might be perceived as benevolent. Or, as in sleep paralysis, that shadowy extra may feel malign. It is thought that in cases of sleep paralysis (in which a person is awake and conscious, but unable to move), ancient evolutionary mechanisms of threat detection are involved, but there are no clear causes for these odd and sometimes discomfiting sensations. So what’s going on?
Some individuals who perceive another presence may show signs of neurological or psychiatric disease, such as Parkinson’s, certain types of dementia, or traumatic brain injury. Damage to the temporoparietal junction, in particular, can induce the feeling of a nearby presence. Such neural disturbances may lead to the conviction that one is not actually alone, and that another presence, often perceived as a double or a vague other, is shadowing one’s life and movements.
As a former student of neurobiology, I have long been fascinated by these neurological or psychiatric ‘glitches’ in spatial and environmental perception and have explored their effects on one of the main characters in The Double.
At an isolated clinic in the Swiss Alps, a brilliant psychiatrist, Anton Gessen, attempts to decipher the strange and unsettling behaviour of his newest patient, Vidor Kiraly, a renowned neuroscientist who violently attacked a stranger, while at an awards ceremony honouring his work. What could provoke a seemingly mild-mannered Cambridge don do such a thing? Was another force guiding his psyche, or was Kiraly not actually who he claimed to be?
When a patient at the clinic goes missing, the two men pit their wits against each other in an escalating game of cat-and-mouse, where one hopes to discover the truth; and the other to avoid it at all costs.