by Paul Singh
A folie a deux has the potential to be transmitted to a third and the fourth person, often family or close friends or relatives. When this occurs, and there are now more than two people who share this delusion, it is called a group delusion. The story of the twelve apostles of Jesus seeing his resurrected body is a perfect example of this. These are typical triggers through which all major religions are born and then spread around the world, from one to two to three to a group and then to entire nations. A small group soon becomes a cult. Often there is a charismatic leader of the group. Group dynamics are the dominant factor in group delusions. Typically, individual members of the group surrender their will to the charismatic leader, who causes them to turn off the parts of their brain that deal with reality testing.
Recent experiments by psychologists actually confirm that the reality testing part of the brain literally shuts off when followers are in the presence of a charismatic leader and that it is not just a matter of social pressure or peer pressure as one would tend to think. It is not just a matter of the need to belong or feel that you matter to someone of importance or to feel part of something bigger than you. This phenomenon is the same as the hypnotizing of a crowd, in which the crowd’s brains turn off the reality testing aspect of their neocortex. Neuroscientists and neurologists have now confirmed this phenomenon to be true in several experiments using fMRIs (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Why would one wish to turn off their reality testing skills in the presence of a charismatic leader is not a mystery anymore. It must have had some adaptive advantages for our hominid ancestors in Africa.
One of the hallmarks of group delusions is that conformity with the social group is emphasized and enforced. This is a natural tendency that we humans share, but group delusions emphasize conformity beyond normal expectations. It often also involves an "Us versus Them" mentality, of purity and salvation verses impurity and damnation. This is the most common theme found in all major and minor religions and cults of the world. When the small group of deluded folks grows in size, it becomes a mass delusion that can span countries and even continents. Psychological factors, illusions of perception, fallacies, fantasy creation and social conformity are factors that are involved in the various types of mass delusions throughout man’s history. All organized religions are prime examples of this.
Some examples of large scale mass delusions in history are the witch-trials of 1692 and the witch-hunts in Europe for three hundred years because of the fear of the spread of evil. Such delusions can involve entire countries or even entire hemispheres. A non-religious example of this is the mass paranoia of the McCarthy era, a delusion rooted in the fear that communism would take over the world. Another example of a form of mass delusion is the delusion that spread due to the fear of alien invasion caused by people naively believing Orson Welles’s radio hoax of 1938. And still another example of a mass delusion is the fairy sightings that were common in Europe for centuries. Such delusions are often culture specific. In some cultures these may manifest themselves as sightings of the Virgin Mary or of UFOs or of Big Foot. But the best examples of collective wish fulfillment delusions are found in the history of organized religions.
Our Cognitive Biases
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations are drawn in an illogical fashion. We all have cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are forms of heuristics. A heuristic is a mental short-cut or a rule of thumb that we subconsciously apply that works most of the time but often leads to making erroneous conclusions when one or more of our assumptions about the situation are not correct. Heuristics are brain mechanisms that evolved over time in our nervous systems for the survival of our species. They are built into the brain as a result of the brain’s trial- and error approach which works most of the time and helps us live worry-free lives, because they allow us to quickly make sense of what we experience and to know how to respond quickly to new challenges. The worst kind of bias is when we are not aware of what we are thinking. That is why it is important to get into the habit of thinking about thinking. Cognitive biases affect the way we argue and the way we think. Our minds take the path of least resistance by offering simple solutions to complex situations. We quickly draw conclusions that best fit the patterns previously presented to our brains in our own past history of interactions with external reality. Heuristics rule our lives unless we make a concerted effort to step out of these processes and think in a more critical manner.
Cognitive biases are numerous and pervasive, and have a powerful influence over our modes of thinking. Heuristics are practical and are usually handy in solving problems because we had to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of survival in hostile environments throughout our evolutionary past. But often enough, heuristics can lead to completely incorrect conclusions, especially today, in our own complex modern world.
The availability heuristic is a powerful one in its influence over our thinking. What is immediately accessible, we assume, must be important or influential or true. The assumption is that if we can think of an example of something, then that thing must be common or representative. I know doctors in my community who will immediately assume that flu is going around in the community because they see three flu patients in the course of just one week. But it might not be flu at all. It might be nothing more than statistical coincidence, a clustering of events, or stringiness in the random data. Probability statisticians know that such clustering events are not unusual and do not necessarily represent any real change in the environment.
Our emotional brains rule our lives. Although we have now evolved a neocortex, we are still not fully evolved to use it well enough because we lack of emotional intelligence. Presence or absence of emotional intelligence refers to our brain’s tendency or lack thereof to be able to filter its emotions through the frontal lobes to use them appropriately. There is often a conflict between the emotional parts of our brain and the neocortex, and the emotional brain is almost always the winner.
Statistics, Probability and the Brain
We as a species have evolved with a very poor sense of statistics, probability, and geometric progressions. Deprived of a good sense of probability, physicians literally waste hundreds of billions of dollars every year in unnecessary screening testing of their patients. They make diagnoses without paying attention to the prior probability of base rates. This leads to further unnecessary testing, surgeries, and harmful invasive procedures with harmful side effects.
Literacy in statistics and probability helps us understand the law of large numbers, the significance of “deep time,” and the likelihood of coincidences that we consider bizarre or unusual but which are not unusual after all. Coincidences simply follow the laws of mathematics, but our innumeracy makes us look upon coincidences as miraculous events.
It is amazing how many superstitions arise from lack of understanding probability. An understanding of probability helps us understand what our universe looks like, but, unfortunately, our brains did not evolve to understand any of this. We are terrible at understanding coincidences and geometric progressions. If we win a lottery twice in one month, especially if it is a large amount, we almost always believe that this can’t be just a coincidence and that some mysterious force must be at work; perhaps God is on our side and everything happens for a reason. This is referred to as “the meaning bias.” It turns out that it is not God on our side when we win a lottery but simply the laws of mathematics. The probability of one particular person winning lotto twice a month is abysmally low, but the odds of any person anywhere winning lotto twice a month are quite high.
You need only 23 people in a room for there to be more than 50 percent chance that two people will have the same birthday. And you need only 50 people in a room for there to be a 97 percent probability that two people will have the same birthday. Most people will find it hard to believe that if we could fold a thinnest piece of paper 43 times, it would be thick enough to reach the moon.
> Once on my weekly drive from southern California to northern California (to shuttle between my two satellite medical practices), I stopped on the highway for nature’s call. When I opened the car door, my screw driver fell out of the car without my realizing it. I realized what happened after I drove off, but I soon forgot about it. Three weeks later, when I was driving back on my weekly trip, I stopped on the side of the highway for nature’s call once again. And when I opened the car door there was the screw driver! What are the odds of that happening? If I didn’t understand the laws of probability, I might have thought that God had performed a miracle. But there was no miracle involved at all. Just the laws of probability.
In 2008 after the financial crash, my financial situation was seriously compromised. On my long drive to San Francisco, I looked at the odometer and noticed the mileage was at 42,500. In deep thought, I said to myself that all my financial problems would disappear when my car hit the 100,000-mile mark. I was engaging, of course, in wishful thinking, but when I hit the 100,000 mark two years later, my financial problems did in fact disappear. I received a phone call while I was driving and my wife informed me that lots of money poured in unexpectedly from a settlement and our financial problems disappeared. Once again, if I didn’t understand the laws of probability I would have thought I was another Nostradamus. Frankly, my predictions were more accurate than all Nostradamus’ predictions of a lifetime put together.
Thirty-five years ago, in India, a friend of mine who was a botanist, as well as a self-made astrologer, a bright young man, told me, when he heard that I was about to immigrate to the United States, that my life would be very lonely and difficult till later in life. In fact, he told me that his astrological calculations showed that there was not much hope for me till the age of 42. He saw nothing but trouble for me ahead. He said I would have no money, no wife, and no children for as far in the future as he could see. I was 20 then. It turned out that my friend was right. Nothing good happened to me till I was 42—no well paying job, no wife, no love, and no children. This has not made me believe that his astrological calculations meant anything. I can’t prove it but based on my current knowledge, which I Iacked then, I believe that he did an intelligent “cold reading” of me and made his prediction based on it. This is what psychics always do. Cold reading is a method where you let the believer do all the hard work while you just make guesses based on what you learn from the believer in the course of conversation.
Here is another example from my own life. When I was 20 years old, about the same time I left for America, I had a friend who was a farmer with very violent temperament. He would get into a sword fight on the drop of a hat. I jokingly read his palm and told him that I had bad news for him—he would not live beyond the age of 32 (he was 30 at the time). And I was right; he was shot and killed by the police when he was 32. Did that mean I had psychic powers? Of course not. I had simply performed a cold reading on this person. He had a violent temper and it was very possible that his temper would someday cost him his life.
Just a few years ago, Sylvia Brown, a famous American psychic, told a family that their child had died and that he was sandwiched between two rocks. Sylvia Brown is an expert cold reader. She knew that the probability of this person’s being dead was extremely high, almost certain, since this person had been missing for a very long time. In this case, surprisingly enough, the missing person was found to be alive years later and Sylvia’s lie was exposed. Nonetheless, believers continue to believe her scamming and pay her 700 dollars an hour on the phone for consultation and wait months for appointments. It seems there is no limit to the public’s gullibility.
The Myths of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self
Hopefully, the background discussion on the behavior and functions of the brain discussed so far will be valuable in understanding the rest of this chapter, which illustrates examples of how free will, consciousness, and the self, are also active constructions of the human brain.
One of the persistent illusions we have is that of a “coherent consciousness.” It turns out that the brain is made of scores of different complex parallel neuronal circuits each of which has a consciousness of its own. These brain regions frequently come into conflict with each other. There is no one global work space, a seat of consciousness in the brain, into which all regions of the brain report or funnel their decisions. The brain regions confer with one other and often come into conflict. The final resolution or consensus among these warring factions occurs only in the last split second before they enter our consciousness and appear to us as one coherent decision. But this is only appearance because all the processes that contribute into brain’s conclusions occur unconsciously.
A prime example of this is the visual cortex, which has a consciousness of its own. It can visualize things and can make its own conscious decisions without involving any other region of the brain. The neocortex is responsible for executive function and it has its own distinct functions with or without consulting other parts of the brain. The neocortex can either help modify or rationalize the decisions already made by the primitive emotional parts of the brain or it can override them altogether and issue its own executive orders.
A conflict can arise, for example, between the insular cortex for craving a cigarette and our neocortex. Either the neocortex wins in trying to convince the insular cortex not to smoke because it could cause cancer, or it can decide to rationalize and to support the insular cortex’s decision already made to smoke that cigarette. An infarction (stroke) in the insular cortex is known to immediately end the addictive behavior of a person who had never been successful in quitting smoking. This is an example of how one particular region of the brain, the insular cortex, has a “mind” or “consciousness” of its own.
The two main technologies used in neurobiology today are Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and the Transcutaneous Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). The TMS can be used to suppress the temporal-parietal junction, the part of the brain which deals with what philosophers call the “theory of mind.” If you suppress this region of the brain with TMS, the subjects cannot make moral judgments and they cannot judge the intentions of others and thus cannot tell if a person is guilty or not by judging his intentions. Also, by suppressing the right temporal lobe with TMS, researchers have been able to generate a sense of oneness with the universe, a spiritual experience for some. This is the part of the brain which creates the feeling of being a separate self. Infants and very small children whose brains are still developing have this great sense of oneness with everything and they lack a sense of self. No wonder some spiritual religious traditions of the East and West compare religious experience to that of going back to infancy. Suppression of this region of the brain gives rise to an experience of being one with the entire universe. Similar spiritual experiences can be achieved by suppressing this part of the brain by the use of drugs such as LSD and heroine.
Alcohol can suppress the frontal lobes, lifting a sense of social inhibition, the frontal lobe being responsible for sociality. These altered states of consciousness show that certain regions of the brain affected by drugs lose their power of influencing the over-all consciousness of the brain.
Scientists are currently working with the brain areas understood to be involved in the sense of being a self (they are located somewhere behind our forehead) and are trying to create out-of-body experiences by suppressing these areas of the brain. These regions of the brain generate out-of-body experiences when they are affected by some drugs or are deprived of oxygen due to injury or accident. This research is in progress and not all areas of the brain involved in this are yet conclusively identified. Scientists have also been able to clearly demonstrate that an out-of-body experience can be created by fooling the brain by using computer technology which feeds the visual and tactile stimuli simultaneously into the brains of subjects. A subject wears virtual reality goggles, and his picture is projected in front of him and then his shoulder is touched while the he sees
the shoulder of his avatar being touched at the same time. This simultaneity of tactile and visual sensory input into the subject’s brain immediately triggers an out-of-body experience. The subject believes that now he is living in the body of his avatar that is ten feet in front of him. He no longer believes that he lives in his own body. His body is no longer his body, but the body of his avatar. This is convincing evidence that there is a no “self” or “soul” that is separate from the brain. How else would you explain this experiment? Have we made the soul travel into the body of the avatar in this experiment? This experiment shows that there is only the brain—there is no self.
There are other experiments that show that consciousness is just what the brain does and that there is no such thing as a unified coherent consciousness. Consciousness is the final outcome of a number of regions of the brain making their contributions to the decision-making process. First, these regions often come into direct conflict with each other or one another and then come to a final resolution in which some regions win and others lose.
A split-brain experiment is a classic type of neuroscience experiment which demonstrates how different parts of our brain construct their own aggregate consciousnesses. These experiments were first done in the 1950s by Roger Sperry and Ronal Meyers and then reproduced later by many other researchers. Experiments were done on people who had the right and left hemispheres of their brain surgically severed (not completely, but up to 90 percent) to prevent seizures from spreading from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. The right hemisphere, they discovered, is non-dominant and not engaged in language. It is essentially mute. It does not understand or speak language in normally developed brains. In a classic experiment, the experimenters first exposed the subject’s right hemisphere to a picture of a bottle of coke, and then they immediately showed the subject a series of objects, one being bottle of coke. When asked to choose one of the objects, the subject picked the bottle of coke. When the subject was asked why he made that choice, the responding left hemisphere just fabricated an answer and responded, “I was thirsty.” The left hemisphere did not know the real answer because it was not involved in the first sighting. This experiment has been repeated many times and always with the same result.