Making sense of complexity

When I was 28, I came down with a strange illness that took two months to diagnose. To distract myself from the awful possibilities – leukemia, lupus and other scary things – I immersed myself in a book, Gödel, Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

Wickedly brilliant and challenging, it kept my conscious mind conveniently engaged throughout the whole, frightening episode. (This summer, my son has been wrapped up in my now dilapidated copy. Happily, the state of his health had nothing to do with it.)

Coincidentally, astonishingly, Hofstadter was only 27 himself when he wrote this Pulizer Prize-winning book, one that appeared to examine patterns in mathematics, art and music. It seems, though, that his readers got it wrong. It was really about the way the mind works.