A Mind of Its Own

by Cordelia Fine

  In fact, our emotional brains leave a whole variety of judgments vulnerable to the influence of our moods. When you are walking on the sunny side of the street, your worries really do seem to be left behind on the doorstep. Life seems more satis fying, the grim reaper seems less industrious, politicians even seem less offensive when you are in a cheerful frame of mind.10 And it can be a remarkably trivial event that tints our spectacles in this rosy fashion. In one classic experiment, a researcher lurking in a shopping mall posed as a company representative and offered some customers (but not others) a small gift, to ‘introduce them to the company’s products’.11 Then a second researcher standing a short distance away asked them (as part of a ‘customer survey’) to rate the performance of their cars and televisions. The free gift was about as desirable as the contents of a mid-range Christmas cracker. Nonetheless, it put the customers who received it into a rather jolly mood, compared with the others. These happy customers – clutching their newly acquired nail-clippers – rated their cars and TVs significantly more positively than did the customers without gifts. In another well-known experiment, when researchers rang students on either a sunny or a rainy day, and asked them about their current happiness and their satisfaction with life in general, the students contacted during fine weather were in better moods than the students contacted while it was raining.12 In line with what we’ve already learnt, their weather-influenced mood affected the students’ satisfaction with their lives: students contacted on sunny days were more satisfied with their lives.

  Even our perception of something as physically grounded as pain can be swayed by lightness of heart, and not simply because we are distracted from our physical symptoms. I must confess that, pregnant for the second time and reading a list of pain-management techniques for labour, I scoffed loud and hard at the suggestion that expectant parents keep the birthing room sweetened with the smell of aromatherapy oils. Yet research suggests that, even when we are completely focused on our bodily discomfort, the lifting of mood that comes from a pleasant olfactory environment can reduce suffering. Volunteers were asked to rate the intensity and unpleasantness of heat pain applied to their arm.13 At the same time, their nasal region was suffused with either a pleasant or an unpleasant smell. The volunteers’ ratings of the intensity of the pain weren’t much affected by whether they were inhaling a delicious scent or a foul stench. However, their mood was very sensitive to the prevailing aroma. With spirits lifted by fragrant wafts, the volunteers found the pain significantly less unpleasant, compared with their experience when the odour was unpleasant. (Despite the findings of this experiment, I have yet to hear a new mother utter the words, ‘Yes, labour was pretty tough … until Darren fired up the aromatherapy burner, that is.’)

  Gloom has just the opposite effect on our view of the world around us. Life seems more hazardous, relationship conflicts seem more of our own doing, and racial minorities seem less likeable when we are in a bad mood.14 Psychologists are still squabbling over exactly how and when moods influence our judgments.15 However, it looks as though at least some of the time our moods mislead us in the same way that misattributed arousal can. If we haven’t registered why we’re in a particular mood, then sometimes we erroneously use that mood to inform our opinions about things. In the experiment in which students were asked about their lives over the phone, on either sunny or rainy days, some students were asked casually at the start of the interview, ‘By the way, how’s the weather down there?’ These students didn’t let their present mood colour or confuse their judgments when it came to their feelings about their life satisfaction. Reminded by the telephone surveyor that their mood was probably due to the weather, these students successfully and appropriately must have dismissed their spirits as irrelevant to the question in hand.

  It is certainly disquieting that our emotions and moods have such an impact on our judgments. However, as the weather-sensitive telephone survey experiment shows, at least we can sometimes protect ourselves from the undulations of our humour, so long as we are aware of being off our usual emotional keel. Yet emotion’s meddlesome fingers can act more surreptitiously still, striking so early on in the process of interpreting what is around us that there is no hope of resistance. For emotions enjoy the dangerous ability to affect what we experience, not just how we interpret it. To see how even mildly experienced emotions influence perception, researchers manipulated people’s mood using happy or sad music and films.16 Then the volunteers watched two movies of the face of an actor. In one movie, the actor’s beaming smile gradually faded until his expression was neutral. In the other movie, it was a sad pout that disappeared into neutrality, frame by frame. The task of the volunteer was to stop the movie at the point they felt that the person they were watching was no longer happy (or sad). The volunteer’s artificially induced mood had a remarkable effect on their perception of the actor’s facial expression: cheerful volunteers saw a smile lingering for longer than they did the frown. To the eyes of the gloomy volunteers, however, it was the mopey face that reflected their own state of mind that made the most protracted departure from the actor’s face. The world may not really be smiling with you when you smile; it might just look that way thanks to the misleading gloss applied by the emotional brain. Our visual experiences are so compelling, so real and seemingly objective that it is hard to acknowledge the furtive role played by the brain in creating what we see. Could it really be that the unpleasant look that you saw, plain as day, pass over your spouse’s face has more to do with your own frazzled mood than that fleeting arrangement of her facial features? It is all but impossible to believe, but the research suggests that her protestation of innocence may actually be genuine.

  Our emotional feelings towards other people can also inspire the mind’s eye to engage its artistic license liberally. There is empirical proof that we can be almost literally blinded (or at least seriously visually impaired) by love or hatred; or rather – in the low-key fashion of the ethically guided modern laboratory experiment – by liking or disliking. To inspire such sentiments in unsuspecting volunteers, a stooge was trained to behave in either an exceptionally likeable or objectionable fashion.17 For some volunteers, the charming stooge (supposedly another volunteer in the experiment) sported a sweatshirt from the real volunteer’s own university. When her tardiness was commented on by the experimenter, she was winningly apologetic, and made amends by generously proffering cookies all round. In the other scenario, the stooge advertised on her clothing her allegiance to a rival university. In response to the experimenter’s mild remark about her late arrival, she snapped irritably words to the effect that if they could just cut the chat then they could all get on with it. Then, helping herself (and herself alone) to cookies, the stooge rammed in the earphones of her walkman and – in an act that guaranteed rousing feelings of enmity – cranked up the volume to a level audible to all.

  The volunteers were then assigned to be either the player or observer of a very simple computerised tennis game. By means of one of those rigged draws at which social psychologists are so proficient, the stooge was deputed to play the tennis game against the computer. The true volunteer was chosen to be the observer. Their task was to watch the game in an adjacent cubicle, and for every volley (a flash of light appearing on the screen) to indicate whether it fell in or out of bounds. Crucially, the volunteer was told that their calls as linesman would have no effect whatsoever on the game. They were merely providing the experimenter with information about the game’s clarity. The computer itself could of course determine whether the flash of light fell in or out of bounds, and points would be won or lost according to this more authoritative source. So, to belabour the point, the volunteers knew that they had no influence on the game, and that there was no purpose to be served – either benevolent or malevolent, depending on their feelings towards the stooge playing the game – by reporting untruthfully whether or not balls fell in or outside the boundary line.

  Yet remarkably, the volunteers’ sen
timents towards the stooge still biased what they actually saw. When a ball hit by the stooge fell just a few pixels within the line, volunteers still seething from her incivilities were more likely to mistakenly call it out. Balls that were actually out, but supposedly hit by the stooge’s computerised opponent, these volunteers were more likely to call as in. Equally partisan, and exactly opposite, were the perceptions of those who felt warmly towards the amiable stooge. Their errors in calling balls that were just in or out favoured the stooge over her computerised adversary. There was presumably no agenda being served, either consciously or unconsciously, by the volunteer’s mistakes, since they were well aware that they were incapable of affecting the outcome of the game. Yet their attitude towards the stooge powerfully influenced what they actually saw, at the most basic level.

  The emotional brain does not just tinker with our impression of the here and now, as we have already seen from the previous chapter. A habitually over-cheerful mental outlook goes hand-in-hand with unrealistically optimistic predictions about the future. (Conversely, those of us who are sadder but wiser seem to be more realistic about what is likely to lie ahead.) Nor does the past lie safely untouched by the emotional brain’s reparative activities. Using a strategy known as the fading affect bias, the brain tampers with our memory of events we have already experienced.18 History is rewritten such that the distressing emotions we experienced when things went wrong are looked back on as having been less and less intense, as time goes by. In contrast, the brain’s biographer does its best to lovingly nurture and sustain the vigour of memories of past joys. This differential treatment of the past leaves us susceptible to believing that our past was happier that it truly was.

  At this point you might be wondering whether the humble cow, unperturbably munching grass, might not have a more accurate view of her world than we do of ours. Our decisions, opinions, perception and memory can all be set adrift by our emotional undercurrents – often without our even noticing that our anchor has slipped. Perhaps more surprising still, though, is the role that these squeakings and creakings of the emotional brain in action play in generating our sense of self. For as we will learn, they seem to be what generate our very sense of existence, or being.

  Think back to the most nerve-wracking experience of your life. Did you feel as if you weren’t actually there? It’s very likely that you felt an eerie detachment from yourself, as if some sort of ‘out-of-body you’ were dispassionately observing you. Perhaps most curious of all is that, rather than experiencing the shakes and quakes merited by the situation, you felt peculiarly emotionless.

  My own traumatic experience of this sort occurred in the unlikely venue of a science museum. I was newly employed as an ‘Explainer’, a lone psychologist amid a cluster of biochemists. While the biochemists admired the genetic material they had cleverly unleashed from onion cells – an activity deemed suitable for children aged five and up – I gazed bewildered at my soupe d’oignon, and not a chromosome in sight. These über-Explainers pipetted, centrifuged and chromatographed their way through the training with ease, while I knocked over the test tubes of myself and others, and wished that I had been born with hands rather than paws.

  By the day of my first workshop my well-founded anxieties about my competence were alleviated only by the knowledge that I would be joined by one of the superbly competent Explainers. I anticipated expertly assisting in the distribution of lab-coats and then allowing the biochemist to pull her weight by running the workshop. However, I turned out to be a superior Explainer to her in one important respect. I remembered to attend the workshop.

  I was terrified. My mission was to guide twelve prepubescents through the Frankensteinian mutation of E. coli bacteria. The children were beginning to fidget: some choosing to play with the alarmingly expensive scientific equipment; others preferring to jiggle the flimsy petri dishes containing potentially lethal bacteria. It was at that moment that my brain did a runner. My ‘me’, so to speak, slipped out of my body and watched impassively as Cordelia Fine ran a science workshop. Thanks to my brain, I was able to do a much better job than if I had remained in there, gripped in the clutch of terror. The E. coli may have remained unmutated – and the children possibly wondered what all that scientific equipment was actually for – but there were no fatalities or lawsuits. (Despite this, shortly after this incident it was suggested to me that I might prefer to never Explain anything in the museum ever again.)

  What I was experiencing in those few hours of intense anxiety was what psychologists call depersonalisation. It’s an ace your brain keeps up its sleeve for when the chips are down. You feel detached from your thoughts, feelings and body, and the world may seem dreamy and unreal. Once the coast is clear your brain brings you back again, and the world is real once more.

  What is your brain up to during depersonalisation episodes? Thanks to those pesky research ethics that prioritise bothersome issues such as people’s welfare and rights over furtherance of scientific knowledge, psychologists can’t simply recruit a handful of generous volunteers, throw them into a terrifying situation and then take a few measurements. Instead, they have been studying people with a psychiatric condition called depersonalisation disorder that leaves them in an almost constant state of out-of-bodyness.19 Like the depersonalisation you may have experienced yourself, it is often set off by intensely anxious episodes. This is almost certainly no coincidence. Depersonalisation seems to be the emotional brain’s emergency response to stress and anxiety. In the face of severe threat, your brain throws up its hands in defeat and switches off the emotions at the mains. This prevents you from becoming overwhelmed with anxiety, which could be literally fatal in a dangerous situation.

  But if the emotions are off, they’re off. There aren’t separate stopcocks for ‘crazy psychologist telling me I’m about to be electrocuted to death’ emotions and ‘damn, I’ve got a parking ticket’ emotions. So if the theory about depersonalisation is right, patients should be unemotional about everything. Sure enough, when psychologists showed depersonalisation disorder patients nasty pictures, they didn’t show the normal leap in skin conductance response.20 The patients just weren’t emotionally aroused by the unpleasant pictures in the way people usually are.

  The same researchers then looked directly into the brains of the depersonalisation patients using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the whizz-bang imaging technology that measures brain activity.21 They wanted to see how the patients’ brains responded to disgusting things. Going round to the patients’ houses and performing an enema on the kitchen table wasn’t on the cards (those research ethics committees again), so it was back to the pictures. Normally, a part of the brain called the insula goes wild when you see disgusting things. It’s the part of your brain that stays forever eight years old. But the insulas of the depersonalisation patients actually responded less to disgusting pictures than they did to boring pictures. What was getting overly excited, however, was our old friend, the prefrontal cortex.

  Because the prefrontal cortex is in charge of keeping our emotions in check, there is a huge amount of communication between the prefrontal cortex and areas of the brain like the insula that respond to emotional stimuli. This is why it was so interesting that the sergeant major of the brain was over-active in the patients with depersonalisation disorder when they looked at disgusting pictures in the brain imaging study. Unlike my charming patient with the damaged prefrontal cortex, whose emotions were allowed to run wild and free, the prefrontal cortices of the depersonalisation disorder patients seemed to be holding the emotions on too tight a rein. It looked as if, at the merest glimpse of something a little juicy, the prefrontal cortex started shooting commands down to the insula, warning it to keep its mouth shut. This excessive nannying by your prefrontal cortex may be how your emotional brain is able to shut itself off during depersonalisation episodes.

  It might seem rather appealing, the idea of remaining so untouched by the emotional flotsam of life. One imagines dep
erson alisation patients greeting an astronomical phone bill with a lackadaisical shrug, a leaking roof with a careless laugh. But in fact depersonalisation is an extremely unpleasant state to be in for any length of time. Self-injury and self-mutilation aren’t uncommon in depersonalisation patients, perhaps as an attempt to just feel something. Life is flat and disturbingly unreal:22

  Music usually moves me, but now it might as well be someone mincing potatoes … I seem to be walking about in a world I recognise but don’t feel … It’s the terrible isolation from the rest of the world that frightens me. It’s having no contact with people or my husband. I talk to them and see them, but I don’t feel they are really here.

  As one patient put it, ‘I would rather be dead than continue living like this. It is like the living dead.’ That’s the problem with depersonalisation. You no longer feel as if you’re experiencing life:

  It is as if the real me is taken out and put on a shelf or stored somewhere inside of me. Whatever makes me me is not there.

  I feel as though I’m not alive – as though my body is an empty, lifeless shell.

  This is what suggests that it is our emotional brain that gifts us with our sense of self. It is our feelings, no matter how trivial, that let us know we are alive.23 We see the toilet seat left up again, and, while we writhe in fury, the brain chuckles, ‘Yep, still here.’ According to this line of argument, if the emotions were shut off tight enough a person might actually begin to believe that they no longer exist …