Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  One’s parents—or whoever are hard to distinguish from one’s parents—have something approaching a dedicated hotline to acceptance, not as potent as hypnotic suggestion, but sometimes close to it. Many years ago, my five-year-old daughter, attempting to imitate the gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s performance on the horizontal bar, tipped over the piano stool and painfully crushed two of her fingertips. How was I going to calm down this terrified child so I could safely drive her to the emergency room? Inspiration struck: I held my own hand near her throbbing little hand and sternly ordered: “Look, Andrea! I’m going to teach you a secret! You can push the pain into my hand with your mind. Go ahead, push! Push!” She tried—and it worked! She’d “pushed the pain” into Daddy’s hand. Her relief (and fascination) were instantaneous. The effect lasted only for minutes, but with a few further administrations of impromptu hypnotic analgesia along the way, I got her to the emergency room, where they could give her the further treatment she needed. (Try it with your own child, if the occasion arises. You may be similarly lucky.) I was exploiting her instincts—though the rationale didn’t occur to me until years later, when I was reflecting on it. (This raises an interesting empirical question: would my attempt at instant hypnosis have worked as effectively on some other five-yearold, who hadn’t imprinted on me as an authority figure? And if imprinting is implicated, how young must a child be to imprint so effectively on a parent? Our daughter was three months old when we adopted her.)

  “Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them” (Dawkins, 2004a, p. 12). It is not surprising, then, to find religious leaders in every part of the world hitting upon the extra authority provided them by their taking on the title “Father”—but this is to get ahead of our story. We’re still at the stage where, Boyer claims, our ancestors were unwittingly summoning up fantasies about their ancestors in order to relieve some of their quandaries about what to do next. An important feature of Boyer’s hypothesis is that these imagined full-access agents are not typically deemed to be omniscient; if you lose your knife, you don’t automatically suppose that they would know the whereabouts of your knife unless somebody stole it from you or you dropped it in an incriminating place during a tryst—unless, that is, it was strategic information. And the ancestors know all the strategic information, because they are interested in it. What you and your kin do is of concern to them for the same reason it is of concern to your parents, and for the same reason it matters to you what your children do and how they are perceived in the community. Boyer’s suggestion is that the idea of omniscience—a god who knows absolutely everything about everything, including where your car keys are, the largest prime number smaller than a quadrillion, and the number of grains of sand on that beach—is a later wrinkle, a bit of sophistication or intellectual tidying-up much more recently adopted by theologians. There is some experimental evidence in support of this hypothesis. People have been taught since childhood, and hence will avow, that God knows everything, but they don’t rely on this when reasoning un-self-consciously about God. The root idea, the one that people actually use when they are not worrying about “theological correctness” (Barrett, 2000), is that the ancestors or the gods know the things that matter the most: the secret longings and schemes and worries and pangs of guilt. Gods know where all the bodies are buried, as the saying goes.

  3 Getting the gods to speak to us

  Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

  —Napoleon Bonaparte

  But what good to us is the gods’ knowledge if we can’t get it from them? How could one communicate with the gods? Our ancestors (while they were alive!) stumbled on an extremely ingenious solution: divination. We all know how hard it is to make the major decisions of life: should I hang tough or admit my transgression, should I move or stay in my present position, should I go to war or not, should I follow my heart or my head? We still haven’t figured out any satisfactory systematic way of deciding these things. Anything that can relieve the burden of figuring out how to make these hard calls is bound to be an attractive idea. Consider flipping a coin, for instance. Why do we do it? To take away the burden of having to find a reason for choosing A over B. We like to have reasons for what we do, but sometimes nothing sufficiently persuasive comes to mind, and we recognize that we have to decide soon, so we concoct a little gadget, an external thing that will make the decision for us. But if the decision is about something momentous, like whether to go to war, or marry, or confess, anything like flipping a coin would just be too, well, flippant. In such a case, choosing for no good reason would be too obviously a sign of incompetence, and, besides, if the decision is really that important, once the coin has landed you’ll have to confront the further choice: should you honor your just-avowed commitment to be bound by the flip of the coin, or should you reconsider? Faced with such quandaries, we recognize the need for some treatment stronger than a coin flip. Something more ceremonial, more impressive, like divination, which not only tells you what to do, but gives you a reason (if you squint just right and use your imagination). Scholars have uncovered a comically variegated profusion of ancient ways of delegating important decisions to uncontrollable externalities. Instead of flipping a coin, you can flip arrows (belomancy) or rods (rhabdomancy) or bones or cards (sortilege), and instead of looking at tea leaves (tasseography), you can examine the livers of sacrificed animals (hepatoscopy) or other entrails (haruspicy) or melted wax poured into water (ceroscopy). Then there is moleosophy (divination by blemishes), myomancy (divination by rodent behavior), nephomancy (divination by clouds), and of course the old favorites, numerology and astrology, among dozens of others.4

  One of the more plausible arguments made by Julian Jaynes in his brilliant but quirky and unreliable book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), was that this riotous explosion of different ways of passing the buck to an external deciding-gadget was a manifestation of human beings’ growing difficulties with self-control, as human groups became larger and more complicated (chapter 4, “A Change of Mind in Mesopotamia,” pp. 223–54). And as Palmer and Steadman have more recently noted, “The most important effect of divination is that it reduces responsibility in decision-making, and thereby reduces the acrimony that can result from bad decisions” (2004, p. 145). The free-floating rationale is obvious enough: if you’re going to pass the buck, pass it to something that can’t duck the responsibility in turn, and that can be held responsible if things don’t go well. And as usual with adaptations, you don’t have to understand the rationale to benefit from it. Divination—what Jaynes called “exopsychic methods of thought or decision-making” (p. 245)—could have risen in popularity simply because those who happened to do it liked the results enough to do it again, and again, and then others began to copy them, and it became the thing to do even though nobody really knew why.

  Jaynes noted (p. 240) that the very idea of randomness or chance is of quite recent origin: in earlier times, there was no way of even suspecting that some event was utterly random; everything was presumed to mean something, if only we knew what. Deliberately opting for a meaningless choice just to get some choice or other made, so one can get on with one’s life, is probably a much later sophistication, even if that is the rationale that explains why it was actually useful to people. In the absence of that sophistication, it was important to believe that somebody somewhere who knows what’s right is telling you. Like Dumbo’s magic feather, some crutches for the soul work only if you believe that they do.5

  But what does it mean to say that such a method works? Only that it actually helps people think about their strategic predicaments and then make timely decisions—even if the decisions themselves are not any better informed by the process. This is not nothing. In
fact, it could be a tremendous boost under various circumstances. Suppose that people facing difficult decisions typically have all the information they need to make well-grounded decisions, but just don’t realize that they do, or just don’t trust their own judgment as much as they ought to. All they need to get them out of their funk and stiffen their spine for resolute action is…a little help from their friends, their imagined ancestors hovering invisibly nearby and telling them what to do. (Such a psychological asset would be jeopardized by skeptics going around pooh-poohing the integrity of divination, of course, and probably that recognition—even if subliminal and unarticulated—has always motivated hostility toward skeptics. Shh. Don’t break the spell; these people need this crutch to keep their act together.)

  Even if people are not, in general, capable of making good decisions on the information that they have, it may seem to them that divination helps them think about their strategic predicaments, and this may provide the motivation to cling to the practice. For reasons they can’t fathom, divination provides relief and makes them feel good—rather like tobacco. And note that none of this is genetic transmission. We’re talking about a culturally transmitted practice of divination, not an instinct. We don’t have to settle the empirical question now of whether divination memes are mutualist memes that actually enhance the fitness of their hosts, or parasite memes that they’d be better off without. Eventually, it would be good to get an evidence-based answer to this question, but for the time being it is the questions I am interested in. Notice, too, that this leaves wide open the possibility that divination (under specific circumstances, to be discovered and confirmed) is a mutualist meme because it’s true—because there is a God who knows what is in everyone’s heart and on special occasions tells people what to do. After all, the reason why water is deemed essential to life in every human culture is that it is essential to life. For the moment, though, my point is just that divination, which appears just about everywhere in human culture (including, of course, among the astrology-seekers and numerologists who still inhabit our high-tech Western culture), could be understood as a natural phenomenon, paying for itself in the biological coin of replication, whether or not it is actually a source of reliable information, strategic or otherwise.

  4 Shamans as hypnotists

  Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined.

  —Samuel Goldwyn

  Divination is one genus of rituals found throughout the world; healing rituals conducted by local shamans (or “witch doctors”) are another. How did it arise? In Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond showed that, to a first approximation, in every culture on every continent, human exploration over the centuries has discovered all the local edible plants and animals, including many that require elaborate preparation to make them nonpoisonous. Moreover, they have domesticated whatever local species have been amenable to domestication. We have had the time, intelligence, and curiosity to have made a near-exhaustive search of the possibilities—something that can now be proved by high-tech methods of genetic analysis of domesticated species and their closest wild relatives. It stands to reason, then, that we should also have done an excellent job of uncovering most if not all the locally available medicinal herbs, even those requiring elaborate refinement and preparation. So powerful and reliable have these search procedures proved to be that pharmaceutical companies have in recent years invested in anthropological research, energetically acquiring—by theft, in some cases—the fruits of this “primitive” R & D by the indigenous populations in every rain forest and remote island. This eager appropriation of the “intellectual property rights” and “trade secrets” of economically naïve peoples is, however deplorable, an excellent instance of the cui bono? reasoning of evolutionary biology. R & D is expensive and time-consuming; whatever information has stood the test of time, replicating through the ages, must have paid for itself somehow, so it is probably worth plagiarizing! (Cui bono? It may have paid for itself by helping a long line of tricksters dupe their clients, so we mustn’t assume the payment was a benefit for all parties.)

  That people take herbs to alleviate their symptoms or even cure their conditions is not puzzling or surprising, but why all the accompanying (and often horrifying) rituals? Anthropologist James McClenon (2002) has examined the patterns in rituals of healers all over the world and finds that they strongly support the hypothesis that what people have discovered, over and over again, is the placebo effect—more specifically, the power of hypnotism, often aided by ingestion or inhalation of hallucinogens or other mind-altering substances (see also Schumaker, 1990). Ritual healing, McClenon argues, is ubiquitous because it actually works—not perfectly, of course, but much better than the Western medical establishment has typically been willing to grant. Indeed, there is a convergence: the ailments that people go to—and pay—shamans to alleviate are those that are particularly hospitable to placebo-effect treatment: psychological stress and its attendant symptoms, as well as the ordeals of childbirth, to name perhaps the most interesting case.

  Childbirth in Homo sapiens is a particularly stressful event, and of course the timing of its arrival—unlike the traumas of accidents and hostility—can be anticipated quite accurately, making it an ideal occasion for elaborate ceremonies requiring considerable preparation time. Since infant and maternal mortality rates in childbirth were presumably as high in pretechnological days as they are now in nontechnological cultures, there has been plenty of room for a strong selection pressure for the coevolution of any treatment (culturally transmitted) and susceptibility to treatment (genetically transmitted) that could improve the odds. Just as lactose tolerance has evolved in peoples who had the culture of dairy-herding, hypnotizability could have evolved in peoples who had the culture of healing rituals.

  I hypothesize that shamanic rituals constitute hypnotic inductions, that shamanic performances provide suggestions, that client responses are equivalent to responses produced by hypnosis, and that responses to shamanic treatment are correlated with patient hypnotizability. [McClenon, 2002, p. 79]

  These hypotheses are eminently testable, and, McClenon argues, they plausibly provide sources for some of the features (rituals and beliefs) to be found just about everywhere in religions. Interestingly, there is wide variation in hypnotizability, with about 15 percent of human populations exhibiting strong hypnotizability, and there is apparently a genetic component, which is not (to my knowledge) well studied yet. Shamans tend to run in families, according to a wealth of anthropological evidence, but this could, of course, be due entirely to vertical cultural transmission (of the shamanic memes from parent to child).

  But why should human beings be susceptible to the placebo effect in the first place? Is this a unique human adaptation (depending on language and culture), or are related effects discernible in other species? This is a topic of current research and controversy. One of the most ingenious hypotheses under discussion is Nicholas Humphrey’s (2002) “economic resource management” hypothesis. The body has many resources to cure its own ailments: pain to discourage activity that can further damage an injury, fevers to combat infection, vomiting to rid the digestive system of toxins, and immune responses, to mention the most powerful. These are all effective but costly; overuse, or premature use, by the body could actually end up harming the body more than helping. (Full-scale immune responses are particularly costly, and only the healthiest animals can maintain a fully equipped army of antibodies.) When should a body spare no expense in hopes of a quick cure? Only when it is safe to do so, or when help is just around the corner. Otherwise, it might be more prudent for the body to be stingy with its costly self-treatments. The placebo effect, according to this hypothesis, is a releasing trigger, telling the body to pull out all the stops because there is hope. In other species, the hope variable is presumably tuned to whatever information the animal can glean from its
current surroundings (is it safe in its den, or in the middle of its herd, and is there plenty of food around?); in us, the hope variable can be manipulated by authoritative figures. These are questions worth further investigation.

  In chapter 3, I briefly introduced the hypothesis that our brains might have evolved a “god center” but noted that it would be better for the time being to consider it a whatsis center that had later been adapted or exploited by religious elaborations of one sort or another. Now we have a plausible candidate for filling in the blank: the hypnotizability-enabler. Moreover, in his recent book, The God Gene, the neurobiologist and geneticist Dean Hamer (2004) claims to have found a gene that could be harnessed for this role. The VMAT2 gene is one of many that provide recipes for the proteins—the monoamines—that do the major work in the brain. These are the proteins that carry the signals that control all our thought and behavior: the neuromodulators and neurotransmitters that are shunted back and forth between neurons, and the transporters within the neurons that do all the housekeeping, restoring the supplies of neuromodulators and neurotransmitters. Prozac and the many other psychoactive or mood-changing drugs developed in recent years work by enhancing or suppressing the activity of one monoamine or another. The VMAT2 gene is polymorphic in human beings, meaning that there are different mutations of it in different people. The VMAT2 gene variants are ideally placed, then, to account for differences in people’s emotional or cognitive responses to the same stimuli, and could explain why some people are relatively immune to hypnotic induction whereas others are readily put into a trance. None of this is close to proven yet, and Hamer’s development of his hypothesis is marked by more enthusiasm than subtlety, a foible that may repel researchers who would otherwise take it seriously. Still, something like his hypothesis (but probably much more complicated) is a good bet for confirmation in the near future, as the roles of proteins and their gene recipes are further analyzed.