The Self Illusion

by Bruce Hood

  This is why memory researcher Mark Howe argues that babies who fail the Gallup mirror test lack a sense of self, and so their memories are disconnected events – impressions that do not seem to make sense in any meaningful way.32 In order for memories to possess meaning, they have to be embedded within the self. However, Philippe Rochat, who has made a lifetime study of self development, argues that the mirror test in humans is actually a measure of being self-conscious about how one looks to others.33 He reasons that, at eighteen months, infants are not bothered with what they look like to others and so are not particularly concerned if they have a red smudge on their nose. Somewhere around the second year, children are more concerned with their appearance and how they look to others.

  This self-conscious account would explain the surprising finding that mirror self-recognition with the rouge test is not universal. In one study of Kenyan children between two and seven years of age, Rochat found that only two out of 104 children removed a sticker, which previously had been surreptitiously placed on their forehead, when they looked in a mirror. Why? It cannot be that they do not have self-recognition in a mirror. They have seen and groomed themselves plenty of times in front of a mirror. Rather, Rochat argues that, unlike their American counterparts, Kenyan children are not sure what to do in this unusual situation. They don’t know whether they should remove a sticker from their forehead that must have been placed there by the strange Western scientist visiting the village.

  This is a fascinating twist on Gallup’s self-recognition interpretation. It may be that passing the mirror test is not necessarily a measure of self-recognition, but rather a measure of embarrassment in the context of others. The mirror test reveals the point at which you become more concerned by what others must be thinking about you. However, before you can be self-conscious, you must first appreciate that others are thinking about you. You need to have a concept of what you are in order to compare that self with the expectation of others. And before you can have that expectation, you need to understand what is on their mind.

  Theory of Mind

  If we are worried about what others think of us then it stands to reason that we need to understand what’s going on in other peoples’ minds. We need to figure out what they are thinking and for that we need to develop a ‘theory of mind’. This term was originally coined by David Premack who wanted to know if chimpanzees understood that others had thoughts and what those thoughts might be.34

  Most of us assume that people do things because they want to. In other words, they have thoughts about goals and intentions that motivate their actions. Again, this is something that is so familiar that we take it for granted when it comes to humans, but there is good evidence that this capacity takes time to develop and may not be shared with all members of the animal kingdom.

  Animals can pay attention to humans and their actions, but it is not clear that they understand that others possess minds that support those actions. Animals do not engage with their human keepers in social behaviours such as imitation and copying. And yet, we are inclined to attribute sophisticated mental states to animals. Do you remember the female gorilla, Binti, which saved the little boy who fell into her enclosure at a zoo near Chicago back in1996? We watched in amazement as this wild animal gently picked up the limp body of the three-year-old boy and carried him to the door where the paramedics could attend to him. The world’s press was quick to attribute empathy and care to Binti, but what they did not know was that she had been trained by her keepers to bring a doll to them in anticipation of her possible pregnancy.35

  Even our closest primate cousin, the chimpanzee, can be a distant relative when observed in the wild. Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, observed a chimpanzee named Passion who repeatedly kidnapped the babies of other mothers and, with the help of her own children, consumed them. Despite our inclination to anthropomorphism – the attribution of human qualities to non-humans – we are unique as a species in our capacity to formulate the complex mental states of others that serve as our bread and butter in daily social interactions.

  That capacity starts early. There is ample evidence that human infants are pre-adapted by evolution to seek out other humans and engage with them.36 For example, babies pay attention to what others are looking at so they understand the link between gaze and actions – people tend to want what they look at. If an adult stares longer at one of two different toys, but then picks up the toy they were not looking at, babies are surprised.37 Where we look reveals the focus of our interest and desires, and this is something the baby understands intuitively.

  Expressions are also a good indicator of what someone else is thinking. When an eighteen-month-old infant is offered broccoli or crackers, they usually choose the salty biscuits. Crackers are much tastier than broccoli to a baby. However, if they watch an adult wrinkle their nose at the sight of crackers, but make a smiley ‘num num’ face to the vegetable, the baby knows to offer them the broccoli if the adult then asks the baby to pass them something to eat.38 The baby can figure out what the adult likes.

  But none of this people-watching really requires a theory of their minds. Likes and dislikes can be easily worked out by simply watching whether people smile or frown. We do this all the time, looking for external markers of behaviour that reveal preferences. Even animals can do this.39 As many pet owners can attest, animals learn when their masters are angry or pleased with them, but this does not require understanding what is on their master’s mind. Rather, to prove that we can understand what is really on someone else’s mind, we have to appreciate when they hold a mistaken or false belief.40 A belief is simply an idea that we think is true; but sometimes we may be mistaken. If you can understand that someone holds a false belief, then you can imagine what they are thinking even when what they are thinking is factually wrong. That’s a powerful level of insight into someone else’s worldview. For example, if you show me a confectionery box and ask me what is inside, then I am likely to say sweets or candy, depending which continent I am on. However, if you open it up and reveal that it actually contains pencils, then I will realize I was understandably mistaken. My belief was false. Three-year-olds will also make the same mistake.41 After all, they don’t have X-ray vision. But if you now ask me to imagine what my neighbour would reply if he were asked what is inside the box, I know that he too will make the same mistake as I initially did. I can understand that he will not know what is actually in the box. In contrast, a three-year-old will assume that someone else who comes along will know that there are pencils in the box and answer, ‘Pencils’. They don’t appreciate that others will also come to the wrong conclusion about what’s in the box and can hold the same false belief. By four years of age, most children understand that people will answer, ‘Candy’, when asked what’s in the box.

  Psychologists think that young children initially lack a theory of mind when it comes to understanding mistaken beliefs.42 It’s as if they cannot take another’s perspective. In one classic experiment, children see a doll called ‘Sally’ hide her marble in a cupboard before she goes out. When she is out, another doll, ‘Anne’, comes in and takes Sally’s marble and hides it in the kitchen drawer. The critical question is where Sally thinks her marble is. When children watch this scenario, three-year-olds think that, on her return, Sally will look in the kitchen drawer for her marble, whereas four-year-olds say that she will look in the cupboard. Clearly, when you understand that people can hold false beliefs, you can lie to them to make them think something that isn’t true. When you consider how so much social manipulation involves deceiving others, you can understand why having a theory mind is a valuable tool. You can outwit others by leading them to false assumptions.

  An underdeveloped theory of mind in children also explains why they can make such bad liars. Initially, when a child realizes that punishment is imminent – ‘Did you eat the cake?’ – they simply say no, despite the fact that they have chocolate cake smeared across their face. Only later do children get more
sophisticated in generating plausible stories for why they might have the tell-tale chocolate on their face – invariably they blame someone else.

  Theory of mind is really a form of mental perspective-taking – understanding things from another’s point of view – a ‘he thinks that she thinks’ sort of thing. In order to do this, you have to be able to keep track of what developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik43 calls ‘counterfactuals – the woulda-coulda-shoulda’s of life’. Counterfactuals are what enable you to imagine different scenarios, including what people may do in the future, based on what you know now. It’s how we second-guess others and, to do that, we have to possess the mental machinery to generate different possible outcomes and play them out in our heads. This is going to happen mostly in situations of social competition where you have to anticipate what others will do next, which maybe explains why theory of mind emerges earlier in children who have siblings.44 The constant battle to keep place in the pecking order means that children have to learn to outwit their brothers and sisters.

  Mindblindness

  Not everyone develops a theory of mind. In his book, The Empathic Brain, neuroscientist Christian Keysers45 describes his encounter with a young graduate student, Jerome, who is finishing his PhD in theoretical physics. His colleague Bruno Wicker introduced Jerome who, on entering the room, spoke with a flat voice and never looked Christian in the eyes.

  Bruno: ‘We would like to ask you something.’ (Bruno shows Jerome a box of Danish cookies.) ‘What do you think is in this box?’

  Jerome: ‘Cookies.’

  Bruno then opened the box to reveal a set of colored pencils instead of the expected cookies.

  (His female research assistant then enters the room.)

  Bruno: ‘What do you think she would think the box contains?’

  Jerome: ‘Colored pencils.’

  Here is a man with the mental capacity to think about abstract properties of the universe that would baffle most of us and yet he cannot imagine what someone else might think is inside a cookie box. Jerome has autism – a developmental disorder that affects around one in 500 individuals,46 though this figure appears to be on the increase and depends largely on how you define it. In general, autism can be thought of as a disorder with three major disabilities: a profound lack of social skills, poor communication and repetitive behaviours. It is regarded as a spectrum disorder because individuals vary in the extent to which they are affected. Most are intellectually challenged, some are within the normal range, and a few may have rare abilities such as being able to tell you what day of the week any date in history falls upon. But all individuals with autism spectrum disorder have problems with social interactions.

  These individuals have a problem with social interaction because they lack the repertoire of developmental social skills that enable humans to become the expert mind-readers. Over the course of early childhood, typical children increasingly become more sophisticated at understanding other people because of their developing theory of mind. By the time they are around four years of age, an average child sees other people as being goal-directed, purposeful, having preferences, desires, beliefs and even misconceptions.

  Not only do typical children become intuitive mind-readers, but they also become councillors as well. They begin to understand other’s sadness, joy, disappointment and jealousy as emotional correlates of the behaviours that make humans do the things they do. Again, by four years of age, children have become expert at working the social arena. They will copy, imitate, mimic and generally empathize with others, thereby signalling that they too are part of the social circles that we all must join in order to become members of the tribe. They share the same socially contagious behaviours of crying, yawning, smiling, laughing and showing disgust.

  However, individuals with autism lack this repertoire of social skills.47 They are effectively ‘mindblind’.48 Alison Gopnik captured this notion of mindblindness in her terrifying vision of what it must be like to be at a dinner party if you have autism:

  Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs, and stuffed into pieces of cloth, they shift and protrude in unexpected ways . . . Two dark spots near the top of them swivel restlessly back and forth. A hole beneath the spots fills with food and from it comes a stream of noises. Imagine that the noisy skin-bags suddenly moved towards you, and their noises grew loud, and you had no idea why, no way of explaining them or predicting what they would do next.49

  No wonder individuals with autism find direct social interaction frightening. If you can’t figure out other people, social encounters must be intensely baffling. They cannot easily infer what others are thinking and generally withdraw into activities that do not involve people. Maybe this is why many individuals with autism often do not like direct eye contact, do not copy, do not mimic, do not yawn, retch, laugh or join in with the rich tapestry of social signals we share as a species.50

  Temple Grandin provides remarkable insight into what it’s like to suffer with autism.51 She has a PhD and is one of the world’s authorities on animal husbandry, but she is also a highly intelligent or ‘high-functioning’ individual with autism, able to provide a window into what it is like to be mindblind. Temple was diagnosed with autism from early childhood. She went to progressive schools and eventually college, but always had difficulty interacting with other people. She could not understand or predict their behaviours and so turned her attention towards animals, which seemed less complex. She could get inside the minds of animals better than she could humans, and eventually went on to study animal welfare and developed techniques to soothe and calm cattle before slaughter. Humans, on the other hand, were unpredictable. Temple taught herself to study people – to pay close attention to their routines and behaviours. In this way she was able to predict what they would do in familiar situations so that she could behave appropriately. She described her experience of predicting other people’s behaviours to Oliver Sacks, as being like ‘an anthropologist on Mars’, a phrase which would go on to become the title of one of Sacks’ bestsellers.52

  Although there is no definitive neurological test for Temple’s condition, autism must be some form of brain disorder. The incidence of autism is higher in identical compared to non-identical twins, which suggests that there is a genetic component to the disorder.53 Autism is also on average four times more likely in boys compared to girls, which again, strongly implicates a biological basis. To date there is tantalizing evidence based on brain-imaging studies that regions in the front part of the brain – most notably the fronto-insular- (FIC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) that are activated by social interaction in normal individuals – operate differently in individuals with autistic spectrum disorder.54 The ACC is like an ‘alarm centre’ that monitors goals and conflicts, including social interactions. If these interactions do not go according to plan, if people start to get the wrong idea out us, we get anxious. These regions are part of the mirror neuron system that activate when we imitate others either voluntarily or have our experiences hijacked by watching others.

  So far, the brain-imaging studies of the mirror system in individuals with autism are inconclusive and, according to Christian Keysers, indicate that the system is not broken but may be very delayed in development because such individuals are not attending to the relevant information during normal social encounters.55

  Others have targeted specific types of neurons. Neuroscientist John Allman at the California Institute of Technology has proposed that the social deficit in autism may be a lack of a special class of spindle neurons, called Von Economo neurons (VENs), after their discoverer who located them in 1925.56 VENs are cortical neurons with highly connective fibres that are thought to branch out to different brain regions that are activated by social learning. This may explain why VENs have only been found in species that are particularly social, including all the great apes, elephants, whales and dolphins.

  Humans have the largest population of VENs found only in the FI and ACC areas – the
same regions that may be disrupted in autism. VENs are thought to work by keeping track of social experiences – a strategy that would facilitate a rapid appreciation of similar social situations in the future. They form the neural networks that provide the basis of intuitive social learning when we watch and copy others. VENs may help to create and sculpt the self from copying and reading others.

  One intriguing discovery is that the density of VENs in these social regions increases from infancy to reach adult levels somewhere around the fourth birthday in typical children – a time when most child development experts agree that there is noticeable change in social interaction skills and an emerging sense of identity. This may also explain why autistic individuals, who have disrupted VEN regions, have difficulty working out what the rest of us simply know without having to think very much. I recently discussed this with a good friend who is the mother of a high-functioning daughter with autism. Her daughter compensated for her condition by asking those around her to write down a description of who they were and their life stories as a way of understanding them. This was because she was unable spontaneously to integrate information and backgrounds to generate narratives to describe others. Without this capacity to read others and integrate socially, someone with severe autism is going to have a very different sense of self that does not include those around them. I can only speculate as I do not have autism, but I would imagine that individuals with severe autism inhabit a solitary world, very much in isolation from others.