Many people experience some form of temporary depersonalisation in their lives, typically at moments of extreme fatigue or high stress, such as during a car crash, where both the established defence options of fight or flight are removed. A number of recreational drugs also precipitate similar episodes.

From the most ancient times to the present, in the crudest primitive tribe or the most magnificently ornamented civilization, man has found himself in a state of awed helplessness when confronted by the phenomena of strange illnesses or aberrations.

customes and conceipts differing from mine, doe not so much dislike [translating desplaisent] me, as instruct me[…].

This was revealed only in the experiments of ion bombardment of single crystals, because a polycrystalline material, even though its microcrystallites have a regular structure, in fact behaves like a nonarranged, random system.