The Self Illusion

by Bruce Hood

  At the time, Jim was also working on Alzheimer’s disease and needed control data to compare with patients. He persuaded members of his family to have their brains scanned and provide blood samples to match against the clinical sample. Every one of his relatives’ brain scans was normal – except one – his own. Jim discovered that he had the identical lack of activity in the orbital cortex that he had observed in the psychopathic killers. The irony of the neuroscientist discovering that he also had the same abnormal brain pattern as the killers was not lost on Jim.87

  About a month later at a family barbecue, he was pointing this irony out to the other family members when his eighty-eight-year-old mother, Jenny, suggested that maybe he should do a little research into the family history, as he might be surprised. What Jim discovered was truly shocking. It turned out that his ancestor, Thomas Cornell, was infamous in American history as the killer of his own mother in 1667, the first documented case of matricide. But it didn’t stop there. There were another seven murderers in the line of the family from which Jim was directly descended! This was worrying. Jim looked for other evidence. Did he have the genes associated with aggression and violence? He had the blood taken from the Alzheimer study analysed. Jim’s blood was positive for the warrior gene and he had all the genetic risk factors that could predispose him to become a killer. At the time, geneticists likened the odds of Jim possessing this constellation of genes to walking into a casino and throwing double-six fifteen times in a row.

  According to the biology, Jim should have been a natural born killer and a menace to society, but he wasn’t. Why not? Dr Jim Fallon used to be the type of scientist who followed a fairly genetic determinist line, believing that your genes pretty much determine your outcome, but his discoveries in brain imaging and genetics forced him to rethink his own rigid view of human nature. He had to accept that in his case the role of the environment had protected him, and in particular the nurturing from his own parents had played a major part in the way he turned out. This is because, from the very start, Jim was a special birth for his parents. His mother had four miscarriages in a row before Jim was finally born. It would be a long time before his mother had any more children and so Jim was treated as a precious child with a lot of attention and affection directed towards him. He believes all this nurturing offset the warrior gene that could have sent him off on a path of destruction.

  Jim has avoided a life of crime and violence but recognizes that he still has many of the personality attributes of low orbital cortex activity. However, he recognizes that his own flaws may be residuals of his genetic predisposition. Rather than harming people, Jim simply does not make a strong emotional connection with others. He does not generally care about other people, especially those who are close to him, and he recognizes that he is close to the edge of being a psychopath.88 I expect that we all know someone like that.

  Incubated in Terror

  How does someone become a psychopath? Bruce Perry is a psychiatrist who believes that the origins of human violence can be traced to the environment in which we raise our children. If that environment is lacking in appropriate role models and examples of how to behave and treat others, then children fail to develop an appropriate moral dimension to their sense of self. Combine that with the stress of poverty and lack of education necessary to raise one’s self out of these conditions, and you have a recipe for disaster. Perry was called as an expert witness in several high-profile cases – the Columbine High School massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Waco siege. He is a highly acclaimed and respected scientist who argues that human violence is a vicious cycle that begins early in development. To illustrate his case, Perry describes an example of a pointless teenage murder:

  A fifteen year old boy sees some shoes he wants. Another child is wearing them – so he pulls out his gun and demands the shoes. The younger child, at gunpoint, takes off his shoes and gives them up. The fifteen year old puts the gun to the child’s head, smiles and pulls the trigger. When he was arrested, the officers are chilled by the apparent lack of remorse. Asked later whether he could turn back the clock and do anything differently, he thinks and replies, ‘I would have cleaned my shoes.’ His bloody shoes led to his arrest.89

  Perry thinks such blindness to the plight of others is a form of retardation that results from a lack of appropriate emotional and social interaction as a child. This is an extreme case of Bowlby’s social isolation, in which the child has failed to develop a moral dimension to the sense of self. Like Bowlby, Perry argues that such retardation is a consequence of not exposing the child to appropriate experiences in which negative emotions are triggered but are then resolved. Without this experience, vulnerable children fail to lay down the models of appropriate behaviour during sensitive periods of social development.

  According to Perry, this failure is due to the disruption of the development of neural circuitry that regulates behaviour. If you remember back to the organization of the functional structures of the brain, the lower brain systems are the origins for impulsive behaviour, including aggression. Perry argues that regulated behaviour depends on the relative strength of activation arising from the lower, more primitive portions of the brain and the modulating inhibitory action of higher cortical areas. Factors that increase the activity or reactivity of the brain stem, such as chronic stress and abuse, or that decrease the moderating capacity of the limbic or cortical areas, such as isolation and neglect, will increase an individual’s aggression, impulsivity and tendency to be violent. Only by raising children in nurturing environments can we provide the experiences within the right context that enable them to regulate their impulses and drives.

  Examples of early violent behaviour are not rare. For instance, there has been a much-reported epidemic of fatal stabbings among teenagers in the United Kingdom over the past couple of years. However, the majority of children raised in impoverished backgrounds are not destined to become remorseless killers. According to Perry, they nevertheless carry the emotional scars. They tend to move through life in a series of destructive relationships, often with a profound sense of disconnection and emotional emptiness. This leads to the associated problems of addiction, crime and social poverty, thus establishing a destructive cycle for the next generation raised in this environment. Life loses its value and effectively becomes cheap, thus providing a fertile ground in which to breed a disregard for others. With over five million child victims of domestic violence in the United States alone and, worldwide, vast numbers of children impoverished by war and famine, Perry makes a convincing case that, despite our advances as a civilization, we are still raising children incubated in terror.

  Learning to Take Control Over Your Life

  As every parent knows, young children are impulsive. It’s as though they have no way of stopping themselves. They lack self-control. They dash across busy roads, laugh at fat people and shout out in public.

  This inability to control thoughts and actions has been one of my research interests for decades now as I am interested by the fact that we have to develop the capacity for self-control as children in order to be clever and successful as adults. Otherwise, we would always be at the mercy of all the different urges and drives that compete for our attention and action. Young children lack adequate ways of stopping their urges, which manifests as impulsive behaviour.

  All children go through a phase of impulsivity early in development but by the time they are ready for preschool, they are beginning to demonstrate the capacity to regulate behaviour. They can withhold doing things in order to achieve a greater goal. In medieval Germany, it was thought that, given the choice between an apple or coin, the child who could resist the temptation of the fruit and take the coin was ready for schooling. They were in control of their childish impulses and urges.

  In my laboratory, we don’t offer children apples but we do sometimes offer them marshmallows. In what is now a classic set of studies from the late 1960s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel offered four-
year-olds a plate with two marshmallows and told them that they could have one now, but if they waited while he left the room, the child could have both on his return.90 In our lab, to avoid the various ethical problems of using marshmallows, we use a similar test where we ask the child to turn their backs while we wrap a present that they can have if they wait. They are told not to turn around and peek at the present while we leave the room to fetch some tape to finish the wrapping. From behind a one-way mirror in the adjacent room, we record the child’s behaviour and how long they can wait.

  Whether it is tempting marshmallows or hidden presents, both of these situations measure what is known as ‘delay of gratification’. This is the amount of time that children can wait before succumbing to temptation – and it turns out to be a very useful predictor of how children perform on other tasks that require self-control. What was most remarkable in Mischel’s original studies was that he found that delay of gratification measured at four years predicted a child’s academic performance and how sociable they were at fourteen years of age.91 When these children were followed up as twenty-seven year-old adults, those who had exhibited better self-control as toddlers were more successful, sociable and less likely to have succumbed to drug taking.92

  The reason is simple. If you can regulate and control your impulses, then you are more patient at solving tasks, do not get bored so easily and can resist temptation. When it comes to other people, you are less selfish which makes you more likeable. Very often social interactions result in a conflict of interest between different individuals that must somehow be resolved. These coordinating abilities depend on self-control, and without it we can become antisocial.

  Regulating our self is one of the major roles of the prefrontal cortex. These brain regions operate to coordinate competing thoughts and behaviour by inhibiting the excitatory commands arising from different regions. Without the executive control of our frontal lobes, we would be at the mercy of every whim, distraction, impulse, tic or urge that could threaten to sabotage any chance of achieving acceptance by the rest of society or fulfilling the goals we have set for our future self.

  That’s why children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are thought to have poor self-control.93 They find it very hard to sit still. They can be disruptive. They cannot concentrate on a task. They are easily distractible. They are more likely to be shunned by other children and find it difficult to make friends. Their hyperactivity and impulsivity can become such a problem that the child becomes uncontrollable. For many decades, such children were labelled naughty and undisciplined. Not surprisingly, ADHD children perform below their classmates on academic tests with many requiring special schooling. Around half of the children diagnosed with ADHD grow out of it during adulthood, but the remainder still experience problems in later life. ADHD emerges in the preschool years and affects around one in twenty children with about three times as many boys as girls.94 Since the disorder was recognized in the 1970s, it has remained controversial. However, twin studies support a strong biological predisposition. If one identical twin has ADHD, then, in around three out of every four cases the other identical twin also has the disorder.

  The behaviour of children with ADHD is sometimes described as ‘wired’, as if they are on speed. This is ironic because one of the treatments is to give them Ritalin, a stimulant similar to amphetamine drugs. These drugs increase the activity of neurotransmitters that operate in the frontal lobes, which are thought to increase inhibition and the capacity to concentrate. This is why many university students who have no medical problem that requires them to take Ritalin, nevertheless use it to improve their academic performance. It helps them concentrate. In contrast, alcohol, which is a depressant drug, reduces activity of the frontal lobes and our capacity to inhibit drives, which is why people can become hungry, harmful and horny when they are drunk.

  However, there may be another way of controlling your self rather than drugs. Delay of gratification tasks reveal that children who manage to delay are not just sitting there staring at the marshmallow and using willpower to control their urges. In fact, that would be the wrong thing to do. Rather, the children use different strategies to take their mind off the temptation. Very often they distract themselves by singing a song or doing something with their hands to take their mind off the temptation. In fact, coming up with alternatives might be the secret to resisting temptation. You can even train children how to distract themselves or tell them to imagine that the marshmallow is only a picture and not real. All of these strategies reduce the attention-grabbing properties of the goal, thereby making restraint more possible. It also means that self-control is something that can be practised, which explains the counterintuitive finding that children raised in very strict households perform worse on delay of gratification. By being too controlling, parents do not allow children to develop their own internalized self-control,95 which might explain many of the stereotypes of individuals who have led sheltered lives, running amok when they are no longer under the control of others.

  But who is this person who is out of control, if not the juvenile self? Who is distracting who? Some colleagues argue that the whole notion of self-control seems to demand that we accept that there is a self in the first place to lose control. Where is the illusion of self here?

  One way to think about it is to imagine the self constructed like a spider’s web but without the spider. Each strand represents an influence pulling on the overall structure. The self is the resulting pattern of influences pulling together, trying to find a common ground. These are the thoughts and behaviours that compete for our activity. Some strands are stronger than others and, if they snap, the shape of the web can become distorted. In the same way, our lives are made of different strands holding our self together. The young child without self-control is still constructing his webs of influence and has not yet established ways of offsetting the strong impulses that want to take over. The arrangements of strands are self-organizing by the fact that they are competing. There need not be a self at the centre of the web holding it together.

  The Essential Self

  The self can be thought of as something at the core of someone’s existence. This is sometimes referred to as the essence of who someone is. People often refer to a person’s essential properties – what they are really like. In many ways, the self illusion could become an argument about whether the essential self really exists. This notion of essence is worth considering further.

  Imagine that I take your wedding ring or any other object of sentimental value and, using some futuristic machine, I replace it gradually, atom by atom, until it no longer contains any original material but it is indistinguishable from the ring that existed before the processing. Would it still be the same ring at different stages? Most would accept that a ring with a few atoms replaced was essentially the same ring. A ring with everything replaced was essentially different. But at what stage would the ring transform identity and why would one atom alone make the difference? Also, if this process was gradual, most people would be inclined to say that it was the same ring maintaining identity over time even if it contained none of the original ring. But imagine that we recombine all the material from the original ring so that we now have two rings. Which is the original? Does the identity of one object suddenly cease to exist when another is reconstructed?

  Clearly the identity of material objects is called into question under these circumstances, but what about the identity of persons? Imagine we perform the same sort of replacement using a person. Philosopher Derek Parfit uses these types of scenario to challenge the reality of the self.96 He asks us to imagine replacing a person cell by cell so that the original person no longer contains any of the physical material before the process started. In one example, he asks us to imagine replacing our cells one by one with those from Greta Garbo. At what point do we become the famous Swedish actress? When does our self become her self? Using such logic, Parfit dismisses the notion of an essential sel
f in the first place.

  These are compelling thought experiments that challenge our intuitions about the nature of reality and identity. Frustratingly, there are no right and wrong answers to these questions, and the academic exchanges between philosophers highlight the disagreements that these scenarios generate among those who have pondered them professionally for years. However, to the man in the street, they reveal a common psychological intuition that there must be some enduring self that exists independently of the physical body – an essential self that defines who we are.

  When we think essentially, we believe that an internal property exists that refines the true nature of things and this way of reasoning emerges somewhere around the third to fourth birthday. In her seminal book, The Essential Child, Susan Gelman97 makes a convincing case that essentialism is a naturally developing way of thinking, that children use to chop up the living world into all the different species. When children learn that all dogs are members of the same group, then they do so on the basis of assuming that all dogs must have some form of doggy essence inside them that makes them different from cats which have catty essence. They understand that if you change the outward appearance of the dog so that it now looks like a cat, it is still essentially a dog and will behave like one.

  In truth, this distinction could be made at the biological level when it comes to considering the DNA sequences of both species, but few children are ever told about genetics and yet they assume there must be an invisible property that differentiates the animals. Essentialism operates initially in young children’s reasoning about the biological world but eventually becomes part of categorizing the important things in their world in general. This is especially so when they come to see others as unique individuals with unique minds.