The Self Illusion

by Bruce Hood

  Even mirror misidentification may not be all that rare. Many of us have had that fleeting experience when the face we observe in the mirror does not seem to be our own – especially when we have been under the influence of various recreational drugs that can distort reality. You can even induce mirror misidentification with hypnosis.5 But you don’t have to be wasted or in an altered state of consciousness to experience a temporary disconnection between your sense of self and your own reflection. Try this out. Turn the room lights down or better still, light a candle. Now have a good look at your self in a mirror. Stare into the eyes that are reflected back at you. Scrutinize the features of your face. After a minute or two you will experience a strange sensation. You will start to experience depersonalization. Within a minute of staring, most people start to see their face distort to the extent that it no longer looks like their own but rather that of a stranger.6 Whatever the self is that we experience when looking in the mirror, it is one that is easily disrupted when we look at it more closely.

  What do babies or, for that matter, animals make of their own reflections when they see them for the first time? Following an observation by Charles Darwin that an orang-utan did not seem to recognize itself in a mirror at the London zoo, psychologist Gordon Gallup7 developed a way of measuring self-recognition in animals by placing a small dab of odourless red rouge makeup on their foreheads while they were asleep and then seeing how they responded when they saw themselves in a mirror. If the animal noticed that something about its appearance was not quite right, Gallup argued it had a self concept – an idea of who they were.

  Gallup found that many animals, including some adult apes, could recognize themselves since they tried to remove the makeup, but that other animals failed. Numerous other studies have shown that the animals that pass the mirror test are those that live in social groups. It is surprising then that human infants do not typically recognize themselves in the mirror test until well into their second year.8 They simply treat the baby in the mirror as another baby. In effect, very young infants are experiencing mirror misidentification when they see the other baby in the mirror. Some would argue that without this self-recognition in the mirror, they have not yet constructed their own sense of their self.9

  Figure 6: Somewhere around eighteen months, human infants pass the rouge test

  Why We Lose Our Self in Reflection

  Why can’t we remember what it was like to be a baby? Why can’t we remember our infant self? What’s the earliest memory you have? If you are like most people, it will be sometime around your third to fourth birthday and really patchy. There are always the odd few (and, indeed, they are odd) who say they can remember being born – passing down the birth canal and being slapped on the bottom by the midwife. Most have no memory of self before their second birthday and, even then, the memories from around that time are fragmented and unconnected.10 It’s not that you have forgotten what it was like to be an infant – you simply were not ‘you’ at that age because there was no constructed self, and so you cannot make sense of early experiences in the context of the person to whom these events happened. You can look at photographs and recognize your self, but you cannot get back inside the toddler you once were. Why is this?

  Has the passage of time worn out the trace of your memory, like a photograph fading? This seems unlikely. An articulate twelve-year-old is equally oblivious to their own infant memories, as a forty-year-old who can remember events when they were twelve, almost thirty years later.11 The lack of memory cannot be because too much time has passed. Is it the case that babies do not form memories in the first place? Without the ability to form memories, your sense of self would be utterly shattered. This loss happened to Clive Wearing, an eminent musicologist at Cambridge University, who was struck down with Herpes simplex encephalitis in 1985. Herpes simplex is the same infection that produces cold sores, but for Clive it had infiltrated the protective tissue that protects the brain, which caused it to swell and crush the delicate structures of the hippocampus – a region where the neural circuits encode memories. Even though he survived the encephalitis, Clive was left with severe amnesia and is now unable to remember from one moment to the next. In her 2005 memoir, Forever Today, Deborah Wearing describes her husband Clive’s tormented existence:

  It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before … ‘I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything,’ he would say. ‘It’s like being dead.’12

  Probably the most harrowing aspect of Clive’s condition is that he still remembers fragments of his previous life and knows exactly who Deborah is – each time he sees her, he runs tearfully into her arms like the reunion of long-lost lovers when in reality she may have only left the room minutes earlier. Without the ability to store new memories, Clive is permanently trapped in the here and now. He maintains a diary in an attempt to keep track of existence but this makes for painful reading: ‘2.00 p.m. – I am awake for the very first time. 2.14 p.m. – I am now conscious. 2.19 p.m. – have just woken for the first time.’ Each previous entry is crossed out as he asserts that he has only just become conscious. Deborah describes how one day she found Clive holding a chocolate in one hand and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand as if practising a magic trick.13 Each time he removed his hand he was amazed by the appearance of the chocolate. Without the ability to form new memories, everything that is out of sight is out of mind for Clive Wearing.

  The child psychologist Jean Piaget believed that infants begin life just like Clive – unable to remember anything that cannot be immediately perceived. He thought that infants lacked the capacity to form enduring memories of the world around them.14 However, we now know that Piaget’s vision is not entirely accurate because infants can form memories. Babies learn in the womb and that requires forming a memory in the neural networks of our brain. Hundreds of experiments conducted on young infants over the past thirty years require them to possess memory that can be surprisingly enduring. For example, three-month-olds who learn to kick their legs to activate a mobile that is tied to their foot by a ribbon will remember that experience one month later.15 If you bring them back into the lab they start kicking much faster compared to infants who never had the initial training. So it can’t be true that young infants do not have any memories. Whatever memories they may possess, however, do not become part of the self story that most of us rehearse and recall when we are much older and asked to reminisce.

  Rather, the question is what kind of memories do infants form? One possibility is that they only have memory for events when you place them back in the same situation, which is why they can learn and remember things they have encountered before. For example, in 1999, memory researchers contacted a dozen students who had taken part in a memory test in which they saw fragments of pictures presented for one to three seconds to test if they could remember them. Even though they saw them only briefly, students could recognize the pictures. Not too amazing, you might say, until you discover that this memory test took place in 1999, seventeen years after the original study! The students were now full adults with busy lives and some could not even remember taking part in the original study back in 1982 at the University of Minnesota. Yet stored somewhere in their memory networks were traces of the original experience because they identified pictures that they could not remember having been shown.16

  Even Clive Wearing seems to have this ability to learn, but he can’t remember that he has learned. It’s like unconscious knowledge. Both Clive and young babies may not have the ability to consciously recall or reflect upon previous experiences. In contrast, most of us can recall what we had for breakfast yesterday by actively reconstructing in our minds the events. That requires a different kind of memory that psychologists call ‘episodic’ – one that reflects the actual experience of remembering the e
pisodes that punctuate our lives.17 Memories of these episodes are crucial for constructing the self story and those which are particularly personal are known as autobiographical memories – those events that we can recall in which we are the main player.18 One might be tempted to assume that our autobiographical memories are accurate recollections but, just like any memory, they are not like photographs or recordings. One of the greatest discoveries in psychology is that human memories are reconstructed and malleable. We do not have a recording of our own personal experiences in our head like some video archive. There are no microfilms in our memory banks.

  Memories are constantly active – like a story being retold over and over again. Moreover, when we encounter related new experiences, we interpret them in terms of our existing memories, which in turn are transformed by the new experiences. We are constantly integrating the here and now into our past. Consider the following powerful demonstration. Read the following list of fifteen words and try to remember them as best you can. Take a couple of seconds on each word to memorize it well.

  thread

  pin

  eye

  sewing

  sharp

  point

  prick

  thimble

  haystack

  thorn

  hurt

  injection

  syringe

  cloth

  knitting

  Now turn to the end of the chapter and answer the questions to see how good your memory is. Most people fail this test19 and yet they are pretty sure that they got the right answer, which makes the effect all the more dramatic. How can most of us be so convinced and yet so wrong?

  The neural networks encountered earlier show how all information is stored as a pattern of activation across networks of neurons. You falsely remember the occurrence of the word that was never presented because it was related in meaning to the other words in the list. In the neural networks that process language and meaning, the pattern representing the word you believe you encountered was triggered as part of the collateral activity of all the other words that were processed and encoded. When one considers that memory is constant neuronal updating, it is remarkable that we remember anything at all with good clarity.

  In 1932, the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett, one of the few psychologists ever to be knighted, demonstrated that memories are not exact copies of past events, but rather, are reconstructed – like stories.20 Similar to the game of Chinese Whispers, every time the story is told, and retold, it changes. In fact, completely false memories can be constructed simply by asking leading questions. In what are some of the most influential experiments in human psychology, Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated that if you show adults a video event of a car accident, and then ask them leading questions such as, ‘Did the white car jump the red light?’, adults correctly deny that there was a white car in the sequence.21 However, if several weeks pass and the adults are asked to recall the video, they are more likely to report seeing a white car jump the red light even though it was never in the video. The mere mention of a white car during the initial questioning has now become incorporated into their memory. The neural networks that encoded the memory have become contaminated with neural activations of networks designed to scrutinize the memory for the presence of white cars and red lights. Likewise, when children are told they were once lost in a shopping mall, they can give vivid recollections about the event even though this event never actually happened.22

  Confabulations of memory are not restricted to the young and naive. Piaget used to describe the time when there was an attempt to abduct him as a young child.23 Years later, he had vivid memories of how his nanny fought off the would-be abductors. However, eventually racked by guilt, the nanny confessed that she had made the whole abduction story up so that Piaget’s parents would be indebted to her. Half the adults shown a doctored photograph of themselves as children taking a hot-air balloon ride recall the fictitious event and can describe it in detail.24 Even Elizabeth Loftus, the world’s greatest authority on false memories, is not immune to them.25 When she was only fourteen years old, Loftus’s mother drowned in a swimming pool. Thirty years later at a birthday party, Loftus’s uncle reminded her that she had found her mother’s body. Over the next couple of days, the lucid memories of that terrible moment came flooding back to haunt Loftus, except that these memories were false. Her uncle had made a mistake. Loftus had not discovered her mother’s body but rather it had been her aunt. Later, Loftus said, ‘The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth.’

  Memory as a Compost Heap

  We all know that we forget things but to discover that a recollection is completely fabricated is something else. It is shocking because it makes us question our own minds. If we all can vividly remember events that never happened then this undermines the reliability of memory and ultimately the reality of our self. This is because part of the self illusion is that we know our own minds and recognize our own memories. But we are often mistaken. The reason we find false memories so shocking is that most people do not understand how memory works. Psychologists Dan Simons and Chris Chabris recently surveyed 1,500 US adults and discovered fundamental misunderstandings held by the general public.26 About two out of three adults (63 per cent) thought that memory works like a video camera, recording experiences that can be played back later. Half of the respondents believed that once a memory was formed it was unchanged and reliable. These misconceptions have lead to comparison with other ways of storing information that evoke some notion of a permanent store. A common metaphor is to liken human memory to a vast library storing volumes of information, which is wrong. Human memory is neither like a computer hard drive nor a pre-industrial blank slate upon which experience writes a trace.

  If any metaphor is going to capture memory, then is more like a compost heap in a constant state of reorganization.27 Just like the garden refuse that you put on the compost heap, experiences are laid down with the most recent still retaining much detail and structure but, with time, they eventually breakdown and become mixed in and integrated with the rest of our experiences. Some events stand out and take a long time to decompose but they are the rare instances. The remainder becomes a mush. When it comes to memory, Dan Simons reminds us that, ‘People tend to place greater faith in the accuracy, completeness and vividness of their memories than they probably should.’28

  Our self illusion is so interwoven with personal memories that when we recall an event, we believe we are retrieving a reliable episode from our history like opening a photograph album and examining a snapshot in time. If we then discover the episode never really happened, then our whole self is called into question. But that’s only because we are so committed to the illusion that our self is a reliable story in the first place.

  Not Total Recall

  In Hollywood’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s brilliant story, ‘We can remember it for you wholesale’,29 Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the role of Douglas Quaid, a freedom-fighter on a Mars colony who has had the false memories of a construction worker on Earth implanted into his brain. The movie adaptation, Total Recall,30 is a roller coaster ride with a plot full of twists and turns. What makes it relevant to the discussion of self is that the identity of Quaid changes as the content of his memory is altered. This is why Elizabeth Loftus was so appalled to discover that she held false memories. It means that we are not necessarily who we think we are. Our identity is the sum of our memories, but it turns out that memories are fluid, modified by context and sometimes simply confabulated. This means we cannot trust them and our sense of self is compromised. Note how this leaves us with a glaring paradox – without a sense of self, memories have no meaning, and yet the self is a product of our memories.

  This may be why there is no memory of the infantile self. As an infant we did not have the capacity to integrate our experiences into meaningful stories. We did not have world knowledge. Most important, we did no
t have an idea of who we were. We did not have an initial sense of self to integrate our experiences. That requires world experience and, in particular, learning from those about us who spend so much time in our company. Somewhere around two years, children start to have conversations with parents about past events. Kids whose parents spend a lot of time talking to them and discussing past events when they were between their second and fourth birthday had much better memories about their lives when they were between twelve and thirteen years old. It is not simply language, but the way parents discuss events with their children. By scaffolding their children’s early experiences the kids were able to organize their experiences into a meaningful story. This is because it is easier to remember stories that relate to us when we become a main character. The adults had the experience and the context to organize the events into a coherence that made sense to the child, which lead to better encoding and storage in their brains.31 One thing we know from decades of psychological research is that meaning and context improves memory.