Impostors

Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates... When I pointed it out to my roommate, he said, 'Do I know you?'

-- Stephen Wright

But life does imitate art. BPS Research Digest reports:

Capgras syndrome in which the patient believes their friends and relatives have been replaced by impersonators was first described in 1923 by the French psychiatrist J.M.J. Capgras in a paper with J. Reboul-Lachaux.

Now Alireza Nejad and Khatereh Toofani at the Beheshti Hospital in Iran have reported an extremely rare variant of Capgras syndrome in which a 55-year-old woman with epilepsy believes her possessions have all been replaced by substitute objects that don’t belong to her. When she buys something new, she immediately feels that it has been replaced.

The poor woman is living inside a Stephen Wright joke. I dread the day when someone replaces all my blog postings with exact duplicates.