A closer look
Billionaire Howard Hughes spent his final years trapped in horrifying loops of repetition, proving that checking the stove five times doesn't make you feel safer—it destroys your reality. This is a failure of metacognitive monitoring. The more intensely an obsessive-compulsive brain scrutinizes a memory (like locking a door), the more the memory degrades. By endlessly re-checking, you paradoxically convince your brain that the action never happened, trapping yourself in an infinite loop of manufactured doubt.
