Finding fact in feeling

We live in a world that heralds objectivity. Data, statistics, controlled trials – these are the currencies of truth. Yet all science starts from the subjective: human experience. We can only study the world from inside our own minds, and those minds are hardly neutral observers.

As the naturalist John Muir put it: ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’. No phenomenon – psychological or physical – exists in isolation. I was reminded of this one day on my commute from Amsterdam to Delft. On a crowded train, absorbed in my own thoughts, a small child brought me back into the world by pressing her juice box into my hands. For a moment there was no separation between us. Philosopher Chuang Tzu captured this kind of contiguity: ‘The baby goes without knowing where he is going … he merges himself with the surroundings and moves along with it’. Children act from sensation before concept, reminding us of the embodied origins of thought.

That rawness of experience is powerful, but it can also be bewildering, both for those who live it and for those who seek to explain it. The mystery of Havana Syndrome offers an example of how subjective experience became an object of scientific inquiry.

Since around 2016, U.S. diplomats and their families stationed in Havana and elsewhere described troubling symptoms: buzzing sounds, headaches, nausea, confusion. These experiences were deeply personal, yet they did not remain mere anecdotes. Institutions like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and intelligence agencies gathered testimonies, conducted brain scans and cognitive assessments, and tracked biomarkers.

We must remember that experience will always exceed what can be measured

In March 2024, the NIH published neuroimaging findings comparing around 80 individuals reporting ‘anomalous health incidents’ to carefully matched control groups. The results showed no MRI-detectable brain injuries and no significant differences in most clinical measures. However, the symptoms were undeniably real.  A critical literature review, Havana Syndrome: A Post Mortem by Bartholomew & Baloh (2023), argues that the cases better fit mass psychogenic illness, or stress reactions amplified by social and political contexts.

In my view, we need scientific rigour to study experience, yet we must remember that experience will always exceed what can be measured. Lived reality should guide the maps we draw, even as those maps themselves inevitably reshape our understanding.

Havana Syndrome makes this clear: the mind (in interaction with other minds) produced bodily symptoms that transformed lives, while the scientific study of those very stories gave the experiences visibility and weight in the world. The paradox between subjectivity and objectivity is not something to solve but something to stay curious about. I find it especially in my own work on loneliness, where no dataset can ever capture the complexity of what people live. And maybe that’s the point: the mystery is what keeps us asking, looking, listening.