The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  At its most basic level, a story is a description of something happening that contains some form of sensation, or drama. It is, in other words, an explanation of cause and effect that is soaked in emotion. Human thinking must take this form because we are biologically incapable of removing the feeling from it. That is how our thoughts are delivered.

  And complex brains create complex stories. In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Professor Lewis Wolpert writes that, aside from their understanding that germs and food can cause sickness, ‘there is a quite widespread belief among children that illness is a punishment for wrongdoing.’ From an early age, a simple observation of a person falling sick is liable to become a narrative of good and evil and vengeance for sin. We are natural-born storytellers who have a propensity to believe our own tales.

  A series of remarkable scientific discoveries, going back to the nineteenth century, have bolstered this view. They have assigned it a word, which describes what we do when we unknowingly invent explanations for behaviours and beliefs whose causes we are actually ignorant of: confabulation.

  In 1889 the German psychiatrist Albert Moll recounted telling a hypnotised woman, ‘After you wake you will take a book from the table and put in on the bookshelf.’ When she came too, she had no conscious memory of having been given this instruction. And yet she dutifully picked up a book and slid it into a space on the shelf. When Moll asked her why she had done this, she said, ‘I do not like to see things so untidy. The shelf is the place for the book, and that is why I put it here.’ She had confabulated a reason for her behaviour, which was actually caused by Moll’s instruction. She thought that she knew why she was putting the book away, but the reason she gave was just a story that her brain had told her, and that she had believed.

  Seventy-three years later, researchers at Columbia University injected epinephrine into some study participants which, unbeknown to them, would make their heart race, their face flush and their hands tremble. Some of the participants were then placed in the company of an angry person, others in the company of someone happy. The subjects with the angry person reported feeling angry, confabulating a fake reason for their heightened physical sensations. The happy ones did likewise. A control group, who had been informed about the effects of epinephrine, correctly put their bodily responses down to the drug. The other participants, though, experienced identical physiological effects and yet confabulated themselves into completely opposing moods. Writes the celebrated neuroscientist Professor Michael Gazzaniga, ‘If there is an obvious explanation, we accept it. When there is not an obvious explanation, we generate one.’

  The most startling revelation of confabulation, though, has come from the study of people who suffer from such severe epilepsy that, in order to prevent them having potentially catastrophic global attacks, they have the two hemispheres of their brain surgically separated. These ‘split-brain’ patients have been the subject of a series of profoundly remarkable experiments by Professor Gazzaniga. They revealed the disorienting extent to which we all confabulate, all of the time.

  It is a peculiarity of our neural architecture that each half of the brain receives information from, and controls the actions of, the opposite side of the body. The left is master of the right, the right is master of the left. Why this is remains a mystery (although some speculate that it is a mechanism for helping us move the appropriate limb towards sources of light). The hemispheres are not identical. In the majority of people, the left side is specialised for language and verbal communication, while the right is effectively mute. By itself, the right hemisphere can take information from your senses, but it lacks some essential word- and speech-generating circuitry. This means that it cannot, by itself, ‘talk’. In normal brains, this doesn’t matter as the two hemispheres are connected and information can travel freely between them. But the right hemisphere of a split-brain patient cannot speak. It is, in effect, silenced.

  Because this is a slightly complex idea to explain, I’m going to use some colloquial language that some science-literate readers might object to, because of its imprecision. For those people, I should acknowledge that, very strictly speaking, regions of the brain don’t ‘talk’, only people do. Furthermore, no implication should be drawn from what follows that the left hemisphere equates to consciousness whilst the right does not. Anyhow, for everyone else …

  In order to study confabulation, Gazzaniga developed a method of communicating with only the ‘silent’ right hemisphere of a split-brain patient. He began by showing it a picture of a hat. When the professor asked the patient what he had seen, he said that he didn’t know. Because the right hemisphere lacks this critical language and speech circuitry, it could not ‘tell’ the patient that it had seen the hat, so he didn’t know that he had. But when Professor Gazzaniga asked the patient to point with his left hand (which is controlled by the ‘speechless’ right hemisphere) at what he had been shown, it correctly fell upon the hat. The patient knew, but he did not know.

  You might be pausing, now, unsure whether you have understood that correctly. This person felt no awareness of having seeing the hat – he had no apparent memory of it whatsoever – and yet, when he was asked what he had seen, he pointed straight at it? That is correct. It really is that strange.

  It gets weirder. In his most famous test, Professor Gazzaniga flashed a picture of a chicken claw to a man’s left hemisphere and a car covered in snow to his right. He then asked him to point to images that represented what he had seen. One hand went to a chicken, the other to a shovel. Remembering that the patient didn’t realise that he had seen the car covered in snow, and therefore no clue as to why he was pointing at the shovel, Professor Gazzaniga asked him to explain his choices. ‘Oh, that’s simple,’ he said. ‘The chicken claw goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.’

  He instantly told a story that explained his inexplicable behaviour – a story that he believed. It was a confabulation that would go down in neuro-scientific history.

  It did not end there. In further brilliant examples of confabulation, Gazzaniga flashed the command ‘Walk’ to a patient’s right hemisphere. When he did just that, and the researchers asked him why he had got up, he replied, ‘I’m going to the house to get a Coke.’ Using the same methods, the professor triggered various moods in patients. When he told the right hemisphere of split-brain patient ‘JW’ to laugh, she laughed. When Gazzaniga asked her why she was laughing, she said, ‘You guys come up and test us every month. What a way to make a living.’

  These split-brain patients were special only because the communication between their two hemispheres had been severed. The instant confabulations that they were making – I’m walking because I’m thirsty, I’m laughing because you’re idiots – were not caused by this surgery. The surgery simply enabled Gazzaniga to catch these brains in the act. We all confabulate in this way. First we behave. Then we explain. What Gazzaniga’s experiments revealed was the profoundly disturbing fact that our own explanations for our own actions and beliefs can have no basis in truth – and yet we believe them utterly. We are storytellers. That is what we do.

  Gazzaniga theorises that the verbal left hemisphere of our brain contains an ‘interpreter’ that is driven to constantly narrate our actions, explaining them even though it has no access to the reasons why we are behaving as we are. Recalling a test where a visual stimulus was used to put a patient in a bad mood, only for her to blame her bad feeling on the experimenter, Gazzaniga writes, ‘Ah, lack of knowledge is of no importance, the left brain will find a solution! Order must be made. The experimenter did it! The left-brain interpreter takes all the input coming in and puts it together in a story that makes sense, even though it may be completely wrong.’ In his book Human he adds that the right hemisphere bases its judgements on ‘sample frequency information, whereas the left uses the formation of elaborate hypotheses … [but] the left’s tendency to create nonsensical theories about random sequences is detrimental to
performance. This is what happens when you build a theory on a single anecdotal situation.’ You could also say that this is what happens when you take a homeopathic remedy, begin to feel better and conclude that the remedy worked. Your interpreter module has told an invented story about cause and effect that you believe. Your surely held belief is a confabulation.

  There appears to be a lack of consensus on exactly how much of our conscious reasoning is confabulation. Opinions range from those of Professor David Eagleman, who says that ‘the brain’s storytelling powers kick into gear only when things are conflicting or difficult to understand,’ to those of Harvard Professor of Psychology Daniel Wegner, who argues that even our sense of having free will is a confabulation – a story that seeks to reassure us by giving a sense of agency and purpose. Eagleman, meanwhile, writes that if we do possess free will, it ‘can at best be a small factor, riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.’

  When I ask Professor Jonathan Haidt what he believes, he tells me that his position is ‘nuanced. We don’t have free will in the strictest sense of “I am the uncaused causer of my behaviour.” That’s a kind of craziness. Our behaviour is caused largely by forces we’re not aware of. On the other hand, we’re not puppets that are just dancing around to external causes. Our actions are shaped by forces that we would endorse as legitimate, such as our values.’ I wonder what he thinks of the narrower question, of whether or not we have free will over the things that we believe. Using the example of climate change, I put it to Professor Haidt that our opinion on whether or not it is man-made could actually have an entirely emotional source and be nothing to do with reason. ‘That’s true for partisans,’ he says. ‘If you come to the question already on the left or the right, then that’s correct. But there are surely some people who are not part of any team who have looked at the evidence and come to their conclusion – I don’t doubt that.’

  But regardless of whether or not we have free will (and the arguments for it seem – to me, at least – to be distressingly thin), neuroscientists and psychologists widely agree that confabulation is real and universal. To ever really know ourselves is simply not possible. We tend to generate stories to explain the mysteries of what we do and believe. When called upon to justify our beliefs we automatically become confabulators – innocent liars defending unconscious decisions that we were not even aware of making.

  The principles of confabulation – if not its narrowest academic definition – can be found lurking in other crucial areas of the human condition, too. The shapes of its engineering can be found in the mechanisms of memory, in morality and in dreaming.

  A 1962 study by Professor Daniel Offer demonstrated how vulnerable our autobiographical memories are to being rewritten. Offer’s team interviewed more than seventy male teenagers about their lives, before revisiting them thirty-four years later to check how accurate their recollections were. What were they like back then? Confident? Shy? Curious? Academic? What were their beliefs about the world? ‘Remarkably,’ concluded the team, ‘the men’s ability to guess what they had said about themselves in adolescence was no better than chance.’

  Social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson believe that we use ‘confabulations of memory’ to ‘justify and explain our own lives.’ In Mistakes Were Made they write that our sense of personal autobiography only seems coherent as a result of ‘years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villains, an account of how we came to be the way we are … the problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service.’

  Warped indeed, and invented. Whether they are generated in ordinarily healthy individuals or psychotic patients, completely false memories are easily formed and can be dreadful to those whom they haunt.

  In further unwelcome developments, Professor Haidt has demonstrated that our explanations of our own moral beliefs are also mostly confabulations. To test this, he wrote a series of quick stories that involve ‘harmless taboo violations.’ One, for example, involves a man buying a chicken from a supermarket, and having sex with it before cooking and eating it. In another, a woman cuts up an American flag and uses it to clean her house. When Haidt told these tales, people generally experienced disgust for the man’s actions and felt that the woman had been disrespectful. Their emotions had formed powerful responses. The models in their unconscious minds had given their verdict – now they had to confabulate their reasons for it. But these were victimless offences. How did people justify their negative feelings? Many simply invented victims. After 1,620 harmless offence stories were read out, 38 per cent of people insisted that someone actually had been harmed. In his book The Righteous Mind Haidt recalls that when he and his colleagues would politely remind them that there were no victims, they would ‘say things like, “I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t think of a reason why.” They seemed to be morally dumbfounded – rendered speechless by their inability to explain verbally what they knew intuitively.’

  Professor Haidt is perhaps the foremost expert on the psychology of moral reasoning. He writes that, rather than it being a process that we use in order to discover truth, ‘moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people … Don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly … We are selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.’

  The brain’s powers of confabulation can be experienced vividly when we are asleep. Sometimes, an area of the brain stem causes a ‘myoclonic jerk’ – thought to be a release of muscle tension. Your brain will likely weave a dream to explain this sudden spasm, and you will find yourself falling – down stairs, off a tabletop, on black ice.

  Of course, it should not be a surprise that we confabulate when we are asleep. As we have already discovered, one of the most disturbing revelations of neuroscience is that our sense of being ‘out there’ in the world is an illusion. We are stuck inside our skulls and the rich sensory landscape of sights and sounds and colours and smells that we think we are moving about in is actually a reconstruction. As neuroscientist and sleep expert Dr Stephen LaBerge has said, ‘Asking why we dream is like asking why we are conscious. We dream because the brain is designed to make a model of the world whenever it is functioning.’

  In The Ego Tunnel, neuroscientist and philosopher Thomas Metzinger notes that ‘the dream ego does not know that it is dreaming … The dream ego is delusional, lacking insight into the nature of the state it is itself generating.’ In this sense, the ‘dream ego’ is little different from its daytime version. Whether awake or asleep, we are deluded into believing that we are ‘the invisible actor at the centre of the world’.

  Our brains create the world in which we exist – they also create us. Perhaps the greatest model that the brain creates is that of you – the ‘I’, the coherent individual, the soul who inhabits the body.

  Starting with its basic lessons of cause and effect, the brain builds its models and uses them to create a virtual reality for us to exist in. This virtual reality is, in important respects, highly accurate. But it is narrow: our limited senses mean that we are unaware of most of the sounds and sights around us. It is biased: our intellectual worlds are skewed, primed to see and favour ‘pre-approved’ information. It is emotional: our feelings largely define our thinking. It is prejudiced: we remain a tribal species. It is selfish and egotistical: we are fooled into believing that we are wiser, more moral, more capable, better looking and with more hopeful futures than is true.

  Our brain generates a model of a simply experienced, physical body that is moving through space. It imbues that body with a thinking mind th
at believes it is a single, coherent whole, but is actually a conglomeration of warring parts. It suspends that ‘self’ in a world that is simultaneously physical and emotional. It gives it memories and hopes – a place in time, in past and future. It covers many of the cracks with confabulation – innocent lies that we tell ourselves to keep the illusion steady, and ourselves happy.

  We confabulate tales that make us believe that the ‘I’, and not all those frighteningly uncontrollable external causes, are the commanders of our behaviour. We confabulate tales that explain how pranayama made us better; to account for the transformative effects of meditation. We confabulate tales to justify our emotional conviction that there really are satanic baby-eating cults. When he was in his psychotic state, Rufus May confabulated a tale about being recruited as a spy that made sense of the extra dopamine in his brain. Dopamine is a neurochemical that is implicated in the identification of ‘prediction errors’, or surprises. When we experience something that conflicts with our neural models we need to explain it by grafting it into the narrative that we tell of the world. Dopamine helps to tell us when our models need updating. Rufus’s excess dopamine resulted in his attending to lots of extra-vibrant, vital, salient detail. He had become too sensitive to stories.

  The benefits of story-making have been explored by Professor of Psychology Timothy Wilson. In Redirect, he considers how disturbing it has been for the human species to have gained the unique ability to ponder concepts such as hopelessness and death. ‘It is so unsettling to think such thoughts,’ he writes, ‘that we have developed narratives that provide comforting answers … worldviews that explain creation, the purpose of life, and what happens after we die, thereby helping us deal with the terror of gazing into the sky and seeing ourselves as insignificant specks … many studies show that religious people are happier than nonreligious people.’