by Bruce Hood
However, just like false memories, sometimes our authorship of action can be mistaken. For example, when we make a plan to do something, we can forget whether we actually did it or not. If you ask subjects to imagine breaking a toothpick a number of times, and then a week later ask them to recall their actions, they have difficulty deciding whether or not they actually did break a toothpick.20 It’s like trying to remember whether you actually posted a letter or simply imagined that you did – did you or did you not? And the irony is that, by forming a mental picture of the action, we become more confused. Simply watching someone perform an action such as shaking a bottle can also lead to the false memory that we were the one who did it.21 Whether we imagine an action or observe others, we can mistakenly attribute our self as the actor. The reason gets back to the builtin mirroring system in our brain that responds to actual movements, imagined movements and the movements of others. If there is an author of actions, then sometimes they may make stories up or plagiarize the work of others.
Wegner thinks that the authorship of actions is like the mind’s compass that helps us navigate through the complexity of our daily lives. Like an autopilot, it steers the ship depending on the heading, conditions and the direction of magnetic north. There is no captain at the helm reading the compass because that would steer us straight back to the illusory self in control.
You Are Feeling Very Sleepy
‘If you focus on my watch, you will feel sleepy. You will find that your eyelids are getting heavy. You will want to keep your eyes open but you are unable to do so. The more you try to keep them open, the more you want to sleep.’ This routine should sound familiar as the commanding instructions of the hypnotist who uses them to make people relinquish control of their actions. Hypnotism is probably one of the best examples where people seem to abdicate their personal sense of free will.
Why is this? Hypnotism seems like some magical power that others have to exert control over us – like some external energy emanating from the eyes or the beckoning fingers of the hypnotist with the piercing stare and goatee beard. It is usually portrayed in popular culture as a paranormal power that the hypnotist possesses to overcome the will of others. However, this is the myth of hypnotism. Hypnotism works because not only do we instinctively mimic others, but we also tend to do what they ask of us in the right situation. If you couple that with induction techniques that place us in a state of relaxation, giving us the sense that we are not in control our bodies, then it is fairly easy to hypnotize someone. Even when we know we are being manipulated, we still give in. There’s nothing paranormal about it.
Imagine the typical dinner party scene where we have eaten too much, but the host urges us to have a bit more cake, ‘Go on, just one little piece won’t hurt.’ Most of us have encountered such social coercion and most of us give in, as the pressure to comply is so great. The same coercion would not really work in a restaurant and we would be mighty suspicious of the waiter who insisted that we eat more. In most restaurants (aside from the very expensive ones where many of us feel intimidated and comply to the authority of the maître d’) we are the ones in charge and do not capitulate to others. The dinner-party scenario is different because it is primarily a social event where we submit to the will of the group or the person in charge. We become susceptible to the influence of others we wish to please. This is because we are naturally inclined to be compliant towards others.
In hypnosis, we are similarly asked to submit to the authority of others to the extent that we end up engaging in behaviours that we would not necessarily think we would freely do. Also, we are willing victims. Many seek out a hypnotist for treatment or to help them stop smoking or lose weight. Others pay good money to go see a stage hypnotism show where we expect to see normal people doing daft things out of their control. In both of these situations there is an expectation that hypnosis will work and therefore we are willing to comply.
Techniques vary, but most hypnotic states are induced by a sequence of progressive compliance. For stage shows, the hypnotist works fairly rapidly to select the most suggestible members of the audience by getting them to engage in some motor act, such as clasping their hands tightly. He then tells them that their hands are stuck together with glue such that they cannot unclasp them no matter how hard they try. This simple technique will identify those who are willing to accept the suggestion of the hypnotist. Other induction techniques rely on various motor illusions such as trying to keep one’s palms separate when held at arm’s length. Our arms will naturally move together in such circumstances as our muscles fatigue, but by simply telling the individual that they have no control and allowing them to witness the involuntary actions of their bodies, it is a simple next step for many to begin to give up their sense of personal control. From then on, the hypnotist can focus on these individuals and manipulate them. Around one in ten of us22 is highly suggestible, which means that any decent sized audience will have more than enough suitable volunteers who can be made to bark like dogs or eat onions that taste like apples.
Contrary to common wisdom, hypnotized individuals are not mindless. Most of them report that they are aware of their actions but that they no longer feel as if they have control over them. Some report a dream state. Many say that they felt hypnotized, which probably says more about their expectations about what they should say. It is worth noting that those who think that they would be easily hypnotizable tend to be the ones who actually are.23
There are many different accounts about how hypnotism actually works. Various measures of brain activity indicate that those who are hypnotized are in an altered state of consciousness.24 However, another school of thought is that hypnosis is simply exaggerated role-playing.25 Because humans are so obliging, some of us are inclined to adopt roles expected of the group. The academic debates over what is actually going on during hypnosis are still raging, but it is fair to conclude that hypnotism is a real phenomenon in which individuals behave and think that they are no longer in control. Their sense of free will has been temporarily hijacked by the hypnotist and the social situation they find themselves in.
Superstitious Rituals
Superstitious behaviour also makes some of us feel compelled to do things beyond our control.26 Do you avoid stepping on cracks in the pavement? How about throwing salt over your shoulder if you accidentally spill some? Do you have a lucky charm? These are just some of the superstitious rituals that many of us have. Although we may be aware that these superstitions cannot influence outcomes, many of us feel the need to act them out just in case. Some of these superstitions come from culture, handed down over the years to the extent that we lose the original context in which they first appeared. Most of the important events that punctuate our lives such as births, religious festivals, marriages and times of important change are peppered with old superstitions that have become traditions. In such instances we act them out because that is what is expected.
There is also a whole host of personal superstitious behaviours that many of us entertain. They can take on a degree of compulsiveness that undermines our ability to rein them in with reason. This is because of two mechanisms that operate in our brains. First, our brains have evolved to seek out patterns in the world and attempt to generate explanations for why things happen. Second, in situations where outcomes are important, we get stressed by uncertainty and feel the need to do something so that we have the illusion that we can control events.
We naturally see the world in terms of causes and consequences, so when something happens, we assume that some causal event preceded it and start looking around for suitable candidates. The problem is that we often identify causes that are not responsible. This generates a cognitive illusion known as ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’, which translates from the Latin as ‘after this, therefore because of this’. It is particularly obvious in superstitious behaviours. In one experiment, participants were presented with a machine that had levers and lights.27 The most important thing about the machine w
as that it delivered rewards at random intervals. The people taking part in the experiment thought that the machine could be operated to pay out rewards if the correct sequence was discovered. Very soon, individuals were performing elaborate sequences, believing that their actions determined whether the machine paid out or not. One woman thought that jumping up and down on the spot was what triggered the reward. In fact, there was no causal link between their actions and the outcomes.
In real life, the most common examples of superstitious behaviours come from sports and gambling, two activities associated with a lot of random chance and luck. You might have a particularly successful time at the blackjack table. This leads you to try and work out what was unusual about the events leading up to that success so that you can repeat the winning formula. Maybe it was a particular shirt you wore or something that you ate. The next time round you try out the same behaviour again and, if successful, you have the beginnings of a superstitious ritual. When David Beckham played for AC Milan, his fellow teammates developed a superstitious ritual of always patting the England striker on his bottom after scoring a goal for good luck.28 Well, at least that was the reason they gave.
The second reason superstitions form is that they are a means of coping with uncertainty. Superstitions are typically found in situations where there is an element of risk.29 Rituals provide the individual with an illusion of control that they are doing something to influence outcomes when in fact they have no control whatsoever. If you remove an individual’s perception of control, then they experience uncertain situations as stressful, thereby generating anxiety that impairs both the immune system and the capacity to think clearly.30 Enacting superstitious rituals inoculates us from the negative excesses of stress. This is why you often find superstitious behaviour in dangerous occupations.31
Firemen, pilots, sailors and soldiers hold just some of the jobs that are associated with risk and superstitious rituals. My favourite is the Russian cosmonauts and their pre-launch ritual. Before Charles Simonyi, the billionaire who oversaw the creation of Microsoft Office, hitched a ride on the Soviet rockets that rendezvous with the orbiting international space station, he joined in with his companions’ ritual of urinating on the back wheels of the bus that takes them to the launch pad.32 This superstition originated when Yuri Gagarin was caught short on the first manned space flight and has now become a ritual for all who travel on Russian rockets.
The problem is that, if you consider outcomes as both things that do or do not happen because of some action you did or did not take, then just about everything becomes a candidate for rituals. When these rituals start to rule your life, so that they control your actions, you are entering territory where there is no freedom to choose because your emotions have got the better of your free will.
The Cleaning Lady
Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is a loss of self-control and free will that is more disturbing and debilitating than harmless superstitions. I used to drive past an elderly lady on the daily commute to my office in Bristol from my home in the country. Occasionally, I saw her chatting to neighbours but most of the time she was bent over at an alarming angle with her face as close to the ground as possible. At first, I thought she must have dropped something valuable or spotted an extraordinary insect on the sidewalk. What was she looking for I wondered? One day, I slowed the car down enough to discover what she was up to. With delicate precision, she was picking minute particles of debris off the pavement and gathering them into her other free hand. She was cleaning the street outside her house. Sometimes she resorted to using a hand brush and pan, but most of the time she seemed to prefer the meticulous and laborious hand technique.
This old lady had an obsession with dirt. I never talked to her or visited her but I bet my bottom dollar that her house was immaculate. There would not be one thing out of place. Everything would be spotless and in exactly the right place. The towels would be neatly folded, and brand-new soap would be at the side of the hand basin. The toilet paper would be folded at the end and everything would smell of disinfectant. I expect that having achieved a level of unearthly cleanliness within her own domain, she had taken to the street around her house, where the wind and daily passers-by conveniently dropped fragments of debris for her to focus on.
This cleaning lady had the telltale signs of OCD which affects about one in fifty members of the general public. In many instances OCD reflects concerns about the consequences of failing to do something – lock doors or turn off power switches. The most common one that most of us experience is the checking and then rechecking that we have taken our passport when travelling. No matter how many times we confirm that we have it, for reassurance we still feel compelled to check.33 Many of us also have routines that punctuate our daily lives and we prefer not to deviate from them. It might be the way you read the sections of the morning paper in a specific order or how you typically start off your workday. Sometimes these routines become rituals that control and dominate our lives. In one notable case, a British boy with Tourette’s had OCD that compelled him to step correctly on a white road marking. On the morning of 11 September 2001, he neglected to fulfil his compulsion and ended up traumatized because he believed that he was personally responsible for the attacks.34
The OCD Circuit
The symptoms of OCD are the obsessions (the relentless intrusive thoughts, usually about something bad happening) and the compulsions (the repetitive, ritualistic behaviours often enacted to alleviate the obsessions).35 Karen, a thirty-four-year-old mother of four, used to obsess that some harm would befall her children unless she carried out certain counting rituals. For example, when she smoked and drank coffee, she had to smoke four cigarettes in a row and drink four cups of coffee, otherwise something bad would happen to her children. She knew this was irrational, but if she didn’t perform her counting ritual, she experienced extreme anxiety.36 This sets up a feedback loop in behaviour whereby performing the ritual alleviates the mental anguish and strengthens the grip OCD has over its sufferer.
What starts this cycle of ritual off in the first place? The obsessions that plague sufferers typically derive from concerns that could pose a real threat such as contamination fears. What appears to go wrong is the evaluation of the perceived threat and the proportional balance of engaging in behaviours to address those concerns. This must be due to a brain disorder that is as yet not fully understood but may be linked to Tourette’s syndrome. There is certainly a heritability factor with OCD, running higher in families, and more common in identical than non-identical twins.
One current theory37 is that there is an imbalance of activity of the PFC, the ACC and the caudate nucleus (CN) of the basal ganglia – the so-called ‘OCD circuit’. Functional imaging reveals that activity within this corticobasal ganglia network is higher in OCD sufferers compared to normal individuals, and increases during provocation of symptoms, but that it is attenuated following successful treatment.
The PFC supports the executive functions for planning and suppressing thoughts and behaviours while the ACC interconnects the frontal lobes with the limbic system of the midbrain and is related to motivation. Together, the PFC and ACC may signal the perceived importance of stimuli that trigger ritualistic behaviours. The CN is involved with initiating intentional behaviours. For example, disruption of this region can result in the inability to start movements (as in Parkinson’s disease) or an inability to stop movements (as in Huntington’s disease). Drugs that increase activity of the serotonin neurotransmitter, which decreases the activity of the CN, have been found to alleviate the symptoms of OCD. But that does not mean that the disorder is caused by overactivity of the CN. Rather, it may simply be a consequence of the behaviour, which is why therapies that work to limit the compulsions seem to produce a reduction in caudate nucleus activity as well.
The work on the brain circuitry of compulsions and ritualistic behaviour is another clear line of evidence to support the proposition that the self most of us experience
is an illusion. This work reveals that we are in constant conflict with competing goals and drives and for some unfortunate individuals, pathological behaviours reveal when the competition gets out of balance. This is the web metaphor again. You might argue that these victims have a self that is not in control and would prefer not to have to engage in rituals in the same way that an addict would prefer not to be addicted. However, evoking an idealized notion of what we would want to be does not mean that this individual, the Great Selfini, necessarily exists.
Ego-Depletion
The young Japanese actress is a quietly spoken, twenty-four-year-old former ballerina, with a perfectly symmetrical angular face and long dark hair – so typical of Asian beauties. Aoyoma has large almond eyes and an enchanting smile. She is the director’s on-screen visualization of vulnerability and innocence. But her performance in the infamous torture scene in Takashi Miike’s cult horror, Audition (1999), is so shocking and indelible that it instantaneously propelled this movie into cinematic notoriety. Believing that all men lie, the beautiful but psychotic Aoyoma tells her lover that, ‘Pain never lies,’ as she proceeds to stick needles into his eyes, chirping sweetly, ‘Kiri … Kiri … Kiri’ (‘Deeper … Deeper … Deeper’). She then amputates his left foot with a wire saw, laughing gleefully, like an innocent child as we watch the bloody gore, hear the sound of serrating bone and the ‘ping’ as the wire recoils through the stump. It is so cinematically graphic that most people in the audience squirm in their seats, cover their eyes or simply walk out of the cinema.