A Mind of Its Own

by Cordelia Fine

  8 13 15 [correct]

  1 2031 2033 [correct]

  ‘The rule is that the first and second numbers are random, and the third is the second plus two.’

  4 5 7 [correct]

  9 5 7 [incorrect]

  263 364 366 [correct]

  ‘The rule is that the first and second numbers are random, but the first is smaller than the second, and the third is the second plus two.’

  41 43 42 [incorrect]

  41 43 67 [correct]

  67 43 45 [incorrect]

  ‘The rule is that the second number is random, and either the first number equals the second minus two, and the third is random but greater than the second; or the third number equals the second plus two, and the first is random but less than the second.’

  What did Professors Wason and Johnson-Laird make of this convoluted performance? ‘It is not difficult to detect strong obsessional features …’, they remark. ‘He offers merely three formulations … within a space of 50 minutes, and finally arrives at a complex disjunction which largely preserves the remnants of previous hypotheses. These are strong hints that his fertile imagination, and intense preoccupation with original hypotheses, has narrowed his field of appreciation to the point where he has become blind to the obvious.’

  Well! Blind to the obvious, eh? Doesn’t that just describe delusional patients to a T. They get it stuck into their heads that their wife is a cloned replacement, and nothing will persuade them otherwise. Have Wason and Johnson-Laird found the holy grail of a reasoning abnormality in patients with delusions? It certainly looks like it, but for one small problem. Not one of their participants was mentally ill. They were university students in tip-top psychological condition. In the particular example I described, the volunteer was a male undergraduate from Stanford University.

  In fact, on the whole, delusional patients tend to do just as well (or rather, just as badly) as we do on reasoning tests.18 This has resulted in a rather cantankerous academic debate. Everyone agrees that delusional patients often have a very strange experience of which they must try to make sense: the Capgras patient has to explain why his wife no longer feels familiar; the Cotard patient has to account for her overwhelming detachment from her sense of self. But on one side of the debate there are the researchers who think it obvious that there must also be something odd about the reasoning abilities of somebody who can believe, for example, that they don’t exist. How else could they entertain such a fantastical belief?19 Others, though, in response, merely wave an expansive hand towards the bulky testimony to the sorry irrationality of the healthy brain and ask, what more is needed?20

  The idea that we are no more rational than the pathologically deluded may not appeal greatly to our vanity, yet it remains an intriguing possibility. ‘The seeds of madness can be planted in anyone’s backyard’, is the claim of psychologist Philip Zimbardo who, metaphorical trowel in hand, has dug hard for evidence to prove it.21 The backyards he chose were those of 50 happy, healthy and highly hypnotisable Stanford students. The seed of madness sown was the peculiar sensation of feeling strangely and unaccountably aroused. Zimbardo did this by hypnotising his volunteers. Once they were in a hypnotic state, the students were told that when they heard a buzzer go off they would act as if they were aroused. Their hearts would begin to race, and they would breathe more heavily. Some of the students were told that they would of course remember that they were feeling this way because of the hypnotic suggestion that they had just received. But other students, in the ‘amnesic’ condition, were told by the mesmerising experimenter that they would have no memory for why they were feeling agitated, but that they should try to think of possible explanations for their bodily tizz. They were then given a gentle hint as to where the cause might lie; they were offered one of the sorts of explanations we frequently use to make sense of our sensations and emotions. Some were told that it might have something to do with the physical environment. Others were asked to consider their bodies as a possible source of their internal perturbation. To yet another group of students, the experimenter intimated that the explanation might lie with other people.

  As we saw in ‘The Emotional Brain’, we have no particularly privileged information as to why we are feeling emotionally stirred. Our agitation does not come pre-labelled – we have to match it up with a likely trigger. And if the true cause of your jittery feeling is unknown to you (the waiter forgot that you ordered a decaf), or is one that you would prefer to ignore (no longer in the first bloom of youth, even the gentle slope up your street puts you in a puff), you will plump for any other plausible-sounding explanation. Potentially, this way madness lies, according to Zimbardo. The hypnotised students became aroused right on cue with the sound of the buzzer. Next, they worked their way through several well-known psychological tests, designed to roughly locate the volunteer’s mental state on the line between sanity and madness. Finally, and still under hypnotic suggestion, the volunteers talked with the experimenter for a quarter of an hour about how they were feeling, and why they might be feeling that way. This interview was videotaped, and afterwards ten clinical psychologists (who knew nothing about the experiment) watched the tapes and scrutinised the students’ behaviour and conversation for telltale signs of derangement.

  Unsurprisingly, the volunteers allowed to remember why they were feeling aroused dealt with the experiment with sane equanimity. The amnesic volunteers, however, who had no obvious hook on which to hang their feelings, struggled to cope with the situation. The Stanford students whose hypnotic suggestion included the pointer that their environment might hold the key, scanned and searched their surroundings like terrified lab-rats. ‘I really think that the fumes of the projector kind of made me sick … the ink fumes … not the ink fumes … maybe it was just the warm air’, was a typical sort of speculation for people in this group. The unexplained arousal, together with the pointer to the environment, made them feel that the surroundings were charged with danger: their scores on a scale of phobic thoughts were the same as those of patients suffering from full-blown clinical phobias. Students encouraged to look to their bodies for an explanation actually outscored clinical hypochondriacs (whose corporeal preoccupations earn them a psychiatric diagnosis) on a questionnaire measure of bodily concerns. ‘My muscles are a bit tense and I have a headache … I think it is because of today’s early swimming practice … or maybe from horseback riding’, were the thoughts of one student catapulted into bodily fixation by the experimental manipulation.

  But it was the suggestion to focus on people that seemed to spark the most extreme responses. These students became paranoid, hostile and vindictive, according to the clinical psychologists watching the taped interviews. Despite being alone in the laboratory when they became aroused, the students attributed their excitation to recent confrontations, to jealousy, to anger with others. Indeed, so unusual was their behaviour that the professional clinicians confidently diagnosed fully 80 per cent of these students as pathologically disturbed, labelling them officially insane. Disoriented and distraught, the volunteers in this experiment (and others similar to it) ‘became inarticulate, confused, hyperactive, angrily banging on the desk, in near tears, frightened, picking away at a scab, anxious, or developing an uncontrollable muscle tic’. Yet seconds later, when their memory of the hypnotic suggestion was restored, their ‘madness’ lifted. Briefly confused, the debriefed volunteers smiled and laughed in astonishment at the strangeness of the ideas they had just had. No harm done. But of course when there is no cunning researcher available to magic away with a flourish the source of your disorientation, the seedlings of insanity can take root and flourish.

  This is not an experiment that reassures us, exposing as it does the disturbing ease and speed with which brains (even smart, educated Stanford brains) can fall in with theories that have no basis in fact. (We may also raise an eyebrow or two at the alacrity with which the clinical psychologists diagnosed clinical syndromes in a substantial proportion of these mo
mentarily bewildered young people.) Disquieting too is the powerful mental disruption stirred up by something that seems likely enough to befall any of us at some point in our lives – an inexplicable feeling of heightened arousal. If this should happen, what – we must worry – would save our own sane selves from developing the irrational dread of the phobic patient, the pathological fixation on an illusory medical condition, or the frenzied suspicions of the paranoiac?22 Suddenly these pathological beliefs seem only a small step away from the wide berth so many of us take care to give harmless spiders, unfounded worries about mystifying aches and twinges, or the intriguing theories we entertain regarding the motives of our friends, family and colleagues.

  But we mustn’t relinquish our sense of rational superiority too quickly. After all, psychiatrists recognise that some delusions (the non-bizarre variety) are beliefs about real-life situations that could be true (some people do become terminally ill, for instance, and some people are conspired against), but just happen to be groundless, or greatly exaggerated. But what of the bizarre delusions that have no footing at all in reality? Your wife has been replaced by a robot. You are dead. Aliens are controlling your thoughts. True, some of the wiring within the brain may have gone wrong, leaving such patients with experiences that are very much out of the ordinary. But surely that cannot be the only problem? Take, for example, the delusion of control often suffered by patients with schizophrenia. They believe that their thoughts, actions and impulses are being controlled by an external force, such as an alien, or radar. Some researchers think that the problem lies in the patient’s inability to keep tabs on his intentions: to brush his hair, stir his tea, pick up a pen.23 This means that he is no longer able to tell the difference between actions he has willed, and actions that are done to him. Because he can no longer match an action with his intention to perform it, it feels as if it is externally caused. Struggling to explain this strange experience, the patient decides that some external agent is now in command of him. Aliens are puppeteering his mind.

  This does not seem like the sort of hypothesis that someone with all their reasoning faculties intact would entertain for a moment. The idea that an alien is controlling your brain goes straight into the box marked ‘Mad People Only’. Right? But consider what I will call the ‘alien hand’ experiment.24 The volunteers (normal, mentally healthy Danes) did a task in which they had to track a target with a joystick, and they could see on a screen how they were doing. But on certain trials, unbeknown to them and by means of ingenious guile, the volunteers saw a false hand instead of their own. The hand moved in time with the volunteer’s actual hand, but it was deliberately designed to miss the target. It didn’t do quite what the volunteers were telling their own hand to do. After the experiment, the volunteers were asked to explain their poor performance on the false hand trials. Here are some examples of the explanations suggested by the sane Danes:

  ‘It was done by magic.’

  ‘My hand took over and my mind was not able to control it.’

  ‘I was hypnotised.’

  ‘I tried hard to make my hand go to the left, but my hand tried harder and was able to overcome me and went off to the right.’

  ‘My hand was controlled by an outside physical force – I don’t know what it was, but I could feel it.’

  Remember, these were normal, psychiatrically healthy people experiencing a slight and brief discrepancy between their motor commands and their perceptual experience. This is nothing in comparison with the continually discombobulating experiences of the patient with schizophrenia. Yet it was enough for at least some of the mentally healthy Danish participants to invoke the powers of hypnosis, magic and external forces, in order to explain the modest waywardness of a single appendage.

  The fanciful explanations conjured up by the volunteers in the alien hand experiment may seem surprising. Yet around half of the general, psychiatrically healthy population have faith in the powers of paranormal phenomena, such as witchcraft, voodoo, the occult or telepathy.25 And why not alien forces? Half of the American public claims to believe that aliens have abducted humans. Presumably these 150 million people would have no reason to think that body-snatching extraterrestrials would draw the line at interfering with a Danish psychology experiment.26

  The frequency of odd experiences in our everyday lives may go some way towards explaining the popularity of peculiar beliefs. As it turns out, strange experiences of the type suffered by clinically deluded patients are quite common in the general population. In one recent survey, mentally healthy participants were asked about odd experiences they might have had, and the 40 experiences that they were offered to pick from were based on actual clinical delusions.27 For example, they were asked, ‘Do your thoughts ever feel alien to you in some way?’ and ‘Have your thoughts ever been so vivid that you were worried other people would hear them?’. The average participant admitted to having had over 60 per cent of these ‘delusional’ experiences. What’s more, one in ten participants reported more such experiences than did a group of psychotic patients who were actually suffering from pathological delusions. Combine these common strange experiences in the general population with the unfortunate irrationality of the healthy brain – its biased and unscientific approach to evaluating hypotheses – and you begin to understand the blurring of the line between pathological delusions and the normal deluded brain.

  At no point, perhaps, does that line become more blurred than when beliefs are based on religious experiences. It is a tricky task to differentiate between faith and insanity without being somewhat subjective about it.28 Mental health professionals are not much concerned by the devout Christian who has been fortunate enough to experience the presence of Jesus. But if the identity of that presence happens to be Elvis, rather than the son of God, then eyebrows begin to be raised. And while Catholics can safely divulge to psychiatrists their belief that God lends them the strength to pursue the Catholic way of life, Mormons should think twice before revealing their conviction that they will be transformed into a god after they die. It is fine to be assisted by a supernatural entity, but not to aspire to be one.

  Despite our irrationality, despite the oddities of our experiences, most of us nonetheless manage to remain compos mentis. Yet, as this chapter has shown, it is still not clear what it is that prevents the seeds of madness from germinating in our minds. Certainly it does not seem that we have a razor-sharp rationality to thank for quickly felling any tentatively sprouting seedlings of insanity. Perhaps in some cases our strange experiences are less intense, less compelling, than those suffered by people who go on to develop full-blown clinical delusions.29 At other times, perhaps, it’s our personality, our emotional state or our social situation that gives us greater strength to cope with odd experiences and that keeps us from seeking psychiatric help.30 And sometimes, perhaps, the grace that saves us from a psychiatric diagnosis is nothing more than the sheer good fortune that millions of others happen to share our delusion.

  Notes

  1 The current diagnostic definition of delusion, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV, is: ‘a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary’ (American Psychiatric Association, 1994: p. 765). For discussion of difficulties in adequately defining delusions, see B.V. Halligan and H. Ellis (2003), ‘Beliefs about delusions’, The Psychologist, 16: 418–23.

  2 See B.A. Maher (1999), ‘Anomalous experience in everyday life: its significance for psychopathology’, The Monist, 82: 547–70. Also E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn and S. Krippner (eds), Varieties of anomalous experience: examining the scientific evidence, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

  3 Z. Kunda, G.T. Fong, R. Sanitioso and E. Reber (1993), ‘Directional questions direct self-conceptions’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 29: 63–86.

  4E. Shafir (198
3), ‘Choosing versus rejecting: why some options are both better and worse than others’, Memory and Cognition, 21: 546–56.

  5 L. J. Chapman and J.P. Chapman (1969), ‘Illusory correlation as an obstacle to the use of valid diagnostic signs’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 74: 271–80.

  6 M. Conway and M. Ross (1984), ‘Getting what you want by revising what you had’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47: 738–48.

  7 For a readable and comprehensive account of normal irrationality, see S. Sutherland (1994), Irrationality: The enemy within, London: Penguin.

  8 For illuminating discussion on the power of expectations with regard to the ‘Premenstrual Syndrome’, see C. Tavris (1992), The mismeasure of women: why women are not the better sex, the inferior sex, or the opposite sex, New York: Touchstone.

  9 See H.D. Ellis and M.B. Lewis (2001), ‘Capgras delusion: a window on face recognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5: 149–56.