by Bruce Hood
What’s your intuition? If you walked into the machine would the duplicate of you have the same memories? We conducted a straw poll online with sixty adults to get a sense of their intuition about duplicating hamsters and themselves in our machine. We asked whether the identical copy created by the machine would have the same body and memory? Around four out of five adults agreed that both the copied animal (84 per cent) and human (80 per cent) would have the same body. About half (46 per cent) thought the hamster would have the same memories compared to just over a third when it came to the human (35 per cent). So overall, adults thought that bodies were more likely to be copied compared to memories and this belief was stronger when related to humans compared to hamsters.
Back in the lab, we repeated the hamster study a number of times with variations to check the results and found the same basic pattern. About one third of children from four to six years thought that the second hamster was completely different on both mental and physical properties. Maybe they did not believe that the machine could copy something alive. Another third thought that the second hamster was identical on all properties. However, the interesting group was the remaining third of children who thought that the physical properties but not the memories were copied. In other words, they believed that the machine worked but could not copy the mind, just as the adults did.
In another version, we found this uniqueness effect of memories was stronger when we gave our first hamster a name, suggesting that it really does have something to do with identity. It’s remarkable how naming an animal confers a new sense of identity, which is why you should not name your livestock if you intend to eat your animals. The uniqueness and identity conferred by names may also explain why young children are often affronted when they first learn that they share their name with another child.
We think our findings show that children begin to appreciate how minds and memories, in particular, create the unique individual. Earlier, we saw there is an increasing awareness of other people’s mental states from four years of age as shown by the ‘theory of mind’ research. Initially, young children appreciate that other people have minds. As they develop, children come to increasingly appreciate the importance of their mind and the contents of their mind as being different to others and unique.
By the time we are adults, most of us think that our autobiographical memories are crucial to our sense of self. Our bodies could be copied but not our memories. Our memories are what make us who we are. Aside from the science fiction movies we have already discussed, anyone unfortunate in real life to witness the decline of a loved one with rapidly progressing dementia, which destroys memory, knows how the person’s identity and sense of self can unravel. That loss of identity is one of the reasons why memory failure is considered such a traumatizing symptom for relatives because the sufferer no longer recognizes those around him.
Once again, neurologist Oliver Sacks reminds us how we rely on others to create our sense of self-identity. One of his patients, a former grocer called William Thompson, had Korsakoff’s syndrome, that produced a profound amnesia so he was unable to remember anything for more than a second or two – just like Clive Wearing who we encountered earlier. He lived in the eternal present and was unable to generate a stable sense of self. In one exchange, Sacks walked on to the ward in a white coat to see William who greeted him:
‘What’ll it be today?’ he says, rubbing his hands. ‘Half a pound of Virginia, a nice piece of Nova?’
(Evidently he saw me as a customer – he often would pick up the phone on the ward, and say ‘Thompson’s Delicatessen.’)
‘Oh Mr. Thompson!’ I exclaim. ‘And who do you think I am?’
‘Good heavens, the light’s bad – I took you for a customer. As if it isn’t my old friend Tom Pitkins … Me and Tom’ (he whispers in an aside to the nurse) ‘was always going to the races together.’
‘Mr. Thompson, you are mistaken again.’
‘So I am,’ he rejoins, not put out for one moment. ‘Why would you be wearing a white coat if you were Tom? You’re Hymie, the kosher butcher next door. No bloodstains on your coat though. Business bad today? You’ll look like a slaughterhouse by the end of the week.’13
It was if William reeled effortlessly from one self-reflected identity to the next depending on who he thought Sacks was. He was oblivious to his circumstances. He had no awareness that he was a Korsakoff’s patient in a psychiatric hospital but rather, as Sacks put it, had to ‘literally make himself (and his world) up every moment’. Unlike the woman with Tourette’s Syndrome who could not stop incorporating the mannerisms of others, William used the identity of those around him in order to create his own identity.
Being in Two Minds
Constructing a plausible story is known as confabulation and found in various forms of dementia as the patient attempts to make sense of their circumstances. Remember TH who could not recognize himself in the mirror and thought his reflection belonged to his neighbour who had snuck into the house? However, we can all confabulate to some extent even though we are not aware we are doing this. These produce the biases, selective interpretations, reframing and cognitive dissonance processes in which we are less objective than usual. We are all naturally inclined to interpret the world in terms of meaningful stories and this probably reflects the activity of a system known as the ‘interpreter’ which appears to be localized to the left hemisphere.14
We are not aware of this system normally as our brain processes are effortlessly and invisibly integrated below our levels of awareness. We simply experience the output of the interpreter as our conscious appraisal of our situations, our thoughts and our behaviours. After all, we are our minds and if that is largely constructed by unconscious processes why should we ever become aware of the so-called interpreter? However, the activity of the interpreter was revealed by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga in his research on split-brain patients.
The normal brain is really a tale of two cities on the left and the right. Gazzaniga demonstrated that you could reveal the autonomy of the two hemispheres by selectively feeding different information to each. To do this, he presented words and images on the left and right side of a computer screen while the patient stared at a spot in the middle. This ensured that each hemisphere processed stimuli on the opposite side and because they were no longer connected to each other through the corpus callosum, there was no exchange of information. For example, if the words ‘Key’ and ‘Ring’ were briefly flashed in the left and right halves of the screen respectively, the patient reported seeing the word ‘Ring’ because this was processed by the opposite left hemisphere that controls language. However, if the patient was asked to choose the corresponding object from a selection on the table, they would pick up a key with the left hand that was controlled by the right hemisphere. Experiment after experiment revealed that the two hemispheres were functioning independently of each other. In one study, a naked man was flashed into the right hemisphere causing the female patient to laugh but not be able to say what it was she was finding amusing. Her left hemisphere was unaware of the naked man and so could not explain what was amusing.
Sometimes, however, the patients make up a story to make sense of their unconscious activity. In one classic example told by Gazzaniga, one of his split-brain patients, Paul, was shown a snow scene in this left visual field and a picture of a chicken foot in his right visual field, and asked to choose the correct image from a selection on the table. He picked out a picture of a shovel with his left hand and a picture of the chicken foot with his right. When his attention was drawn to the discrepancy, and he was asked why he had chosen two different images, Paul replied, ‘Oh that’s simple, the chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need the shovel to clean out the chicken shit!’
Gazzaniga has proposed that there are not two separate minds or selves in these spilt-brain patients. Rather, the mind is a product of the mental processes of the brain that are shared across the two hemispheres. Language has the ad
vantage of providing the narrative output, so the interpreter in the left hemisphere is able to articulate a coherent account to integrate the different pieces of information. Normally theses processes are a collaborative effort with information streaming in from all the different processing regions. But in the spilt-brain patient there is no shared communication is possible. Presented with the choices of the right hemisphere that are inconsistent with the information in the left, the interpreter reconciles the difference with a plausible story.
What the split-brain studies reveal is that the self illusion is really the culmination of a multitude of processes. These usually work together in synchrony to produce a unified self but when inconsistencies arise, the system, strongly influenced by language, works to re-establish coherence. Probably one of the most compelling examples of this process comes from a personal anecdote that Gazzaniga15 tells that comes from the late Mark Rayport, a neurosurgeon from Ohio. During one operation on a patient in which Rayport was stimulating the olfactory bulb, the brain region associated with smell, the patient reported experiencing different aromas depending on the context. When the patient was asked to reminisce about a happy time in his life, stimulation of the region produced the sensation of roses. Rayport then asked the patient to think about a bad time in his life. This time stimulation of the same cluster of neurons produced the sensation of rotten eggs! This anecdote suggests that the neural networks of the brain store associations that fit together into a coherent story. In many ways, confabulation in the patient unaware of the true nature of their surroundings or disrupted brain processes is the same storytelling we all use to make sense of the inconsistencies that punctuate our lives when we deviate from the normal storyline of what we believe we are our selves.
Know Thy Self
Psychologist Dan McAdams proposes that when it comes to making sense of our lives, we create narrative or personal myths to explain where we have come from, what we do and where we are going.16 This is the narrative arc of our lives – the background, the struggle, the climax and resolution that people readily attribute to the story of their lives. For example, some may see themselves as victims of circumstances beyond their control, reinterpreting events to fit with this perspective. Another could take the same set of circumstances and cast themselves as the resilient hero, triumphing over adversity to get where they are today. Presumably these myths reflect the influences of culture and those close to us when it comes to providing a meaning to our lives. These accounts are myths because they are not grounded in reality but rather follow a well-worn narrative path of a protagonist character (our self) and what the world throws at them. In some individuals, the reality is complete fantasy, as in the case of Tania Head.
Our self-centred way of constructing the story means that we only pay attention to those events as we see them being related to us. This personal myth is constantly being revised and updated throughout our life by both conscious and unconscious processes and re-emerges at times either through deliberate retelling to others to explain who we are, or at times of insight when something from our past seems to become surprisingly poignant or relevant. Even cultures continually recycle the same old stories in the form of myths.17 For example, Star Wars may have been set in the future but it is just as much a Greek myth as Homer and The Iliad. We like stories that are about journeys and conflicts, with goodies and baddies. The same is true for our own personal stories.
The problem with self-narratives is that we are the ones writing the story, which means our myths are open to all manner of distortions of what we think we should be like. This has been called the ‘totalitarian ego’ in which we repress, distort and ignore negative aspects of our lives that do not fit with our idealized self-narrative.18 For example, we tend to remember information that fits with our idealized self and conveniently ignore that which does not. If we believe that we have a particular trait of personality then we selectively interpret events that are consistent with that belief. In fact, we can easily interpret general statements to make them seem particularly relevant to us. For example, how accurate is this description of your personality?
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.
Spookily accurate isn’t it? In 1948, psychologist Bertram Forer gave a personality test to his students and then provided them with an individual analysis based on their performance.19 In fact, every student got the description above as their ‘unique’ analysis. Just about everyone thought the analysis was an accurate description but Forer had, in fact, assembled the analysis from various different horoscopes to prove that the descriptions were sufficiently general as to apply to most people. This effect, known as the ‘Barnum effect’ after the showman who famously quipped, ‘We’ve got something for everyone’, shows that our self-stories are probably more similar than we imagine. Also the Barnum effect is particularly strong when the analysis contains many positive traits that support the inherent bias most of us hold.20 Most of us think that we are funnier, smarter, better looking and kinder than the average person, which, of course, is statistically impossible. Some of us have to be less funny, less clever, less beautiful and crueller to balance up the sums.
The Barnum effect reveals that we all entertain illusions of a unique self, which turns out to be remarkably consistent and familiar between different people. Our uniqueness is closer to the average than we think. Also, if you look at the sort of generic statements in Forer’s description, most are all to do with how we think others perceive us, social anxieties and concerns that we are more complicated than others realize. Again, this is more damning evidence that most of us are preoccupied with what others think and less independent that we imagine!
Swimming in the OCEAN
Although the Barnum effect reveals that we share many beliefs and attitudes, we are clearly not clones of each other like aphids or other simple organisms. When we describe different people, we come up with varied accounts that emphasize those characteristics that we think are the most notable. Even babies are not identical. We are born with different temperaments and form varying patterns of social attachment that appear to be strongly influenced by continual interaction with the environment. In short, we believe in the concept of personality – a stable set of characteristic styles of behaving, thinking and feeling that define us as individuals.
Assessing personality is a major industry backed up by decades of research showing that some people are better suited to particular occupations. The science of personality can be traced back as far as the Greek scholar Theophrastus (c.371–c.287 BCE) who described his fellow Athenians in terms of a limited number of characters.21 More recently, psychologists have argued that personality is the culmination of a combination of five distinct traits or the ‘Big-Five’ model of Openness (the willingness to try new and imaginative experiences), Conscientiousness (the extent of self-disciplined organization), Extraversion (the extent of social gregariousness), Agreeableness (the willingness to help others) and Neuroticism (the extent of insecure self-centred worry): OCEAN for short.22 The Big-Five approach is one of the most commonly used measures of personality assessment to predict how happy people are with their lives,
the quality of social relationships, life expectancy and even job success and satisfaction.23
With such high praise for the Big-Five, one might be tempted to conclude that personality psychologists have dispelled the self illusion – that there is indeed a core personality that defines each of us. However, in seeking to find stable measures of the Big-Five, personality theorists have ignored the variation in the OCEAN scores that can come about by changes in the different situations and roles we adopt.24 For example, students were asked to consider themselves in five roles that that they typically occupy at that time in their life: as a student at college, as a temporary employee working to put themselves through college, as a friend of other students, as a child of their parents and as a romantic partner. They were then assessed on the OCEAN measures which revealed both inconsistency and consistency in their personality. The inconsistency was that individuals varied on their self-assessment of OCEAN measures over the different roles they imagined themselves in but as a group they were consistent on which personality factors were most prominent in each role. On the Big-Five measures, respondents were consistently most Open to experience when they were in the role of the romantic partner, most Conscientious in the employee role, most Extraverted when they were in the friend role, least Agreeable in the student role and most Neurotic in the student role.