That's a Strange Idea
What does that have to do with what we were talking about? We all have presented or thought about presenting that question to someone. The implicit “accusation” is that we believe our interlocutor has found relevance where none exists, or that they are ascribing more relevance to their idea than is warranted. In psychology jargon, the former would be called “aberrant salience” and the latter, “anomalous salience.” We might then dismiss the speaker as being emotionally or cognitively deficient. So, one more question: Is such thinking crazy? Aberrant salience, by definition, is deficient. In fact, it is often regarded as a common feature of thought on the schizophrenia spectrum. But anomalous salience is not necessarily deficient; in fact, it literally could lead to a so-called quantum leap in human knowledge. For instance, in 1935, Erwin Schrödinger combined the ideas of subatomic particles (quanta) with influence distance, to describ...