From your point of view – knowing nothing about the secret commander – the order of proceedings seems to be:
Think ‘tap finger’.
Finger taps.
To us, it seems obvious that the thought caused the action, just as a ball hitting a vase is what causes it to topple off the mantelpiece. But the actual course of events in our little imagined scenario is quite different. A mysterious unconscious process (the secret commander) caused the thought ‘tap finger’ and set the finger tap in motion. But because we know nothing about the mental activity that took place before we had the great idea to tap our finger, we very reasonably infer that our finger tapped because we willed it so.19
You might concede that this crazy idea – that our conscious will is a misguided delusion – is logically possible. Yes, it could happen, in theory. But why on earth should we believe it? Is there any reason to think that conscious will isn’t actually what makes things happen?
To answer this question, we have to examine the simple process of moving one’s finger in more detail than you ever thought possible. In a momentous experiment by a researcher called Benjamin Libet, volunteers made spontaneous, willed finger movements.20 This was nothing very new or exciting for the volunteers: just the same old ‘think “move finger”, finger moves’ sequence. Libet, in the meantime, was busy taking very precise measurements. For starters, he detected finger movements the moment they happened by using a muscle movement sensor strapped to the volunteer’s finger. As a matching accessory, the volunteer’s head was encased in scalp electrodes that picked up brain activity. Libet found that about half a second before a person’s finger moved, there was a little flurry of brain activity, called the readiness potential. From previous research Libet knew that this flurry wasn’t anything to do with implementing the actual finger movement. It wasn’t the mundane but necessary instructions to get that finger up in the air. (That came later, right before the movement, in the motor control area of the brain.) What Libet was seeing when the readiness potential took place was the mighty command ‘Move finger’ itself.
The big question for Libet was where this command came from. Was the readiness potential a bunch of brain cells firing as the decision to raise a finger came to fruition – conscious will? Or did it correspond to the clandestine activities of the secret commander? The answer was in the timing. Libet asked his volunteers to report when exactly they became aware of having the conscious urge to perform each of their finger movements. They did this by using a specially designed clock with very small time intervals. The volunteers were carefully trained to observe where the clock hand was at the moment they had the conscious urge to move.
And here’s the remarkable thing. The volunteers didn’t consciously experience the will to move their finger until more than a third of a second after the readiness potential. In other words, the unconscious was already busy preparing for the finger movement well before the idea occurred to consciousness. You might think that this was just because the volunteers were a little slow at matching their awareness of their intention to move with the position of the clock hand. But to make sure that this wasn’t the case, in another series of trials Libet stimulated the volunteers’ hands and asked them to report, using the same clock, when they felt the sensation. Because Libet knew precisely when their hands had been touched, he could work out the delay involved in using the clock. Even allowing, generously, for this delay, the readiness potential in Libet’s main finger-tapping experiment still came well before the conscious intention.
This astonishing finding – that the brain can be busy preparing for intentions you haven’t yet had – leaves us with the mysterious question of who – or what – ordered the finger to move? It couldn’t have been conscious will. Was it our hypothetical secret commander?
The possibility that conscious will is an illusion challenges our sense of free will: the feeling that we are indeed masters of our destinies. It forces us to wonder if perhaps our lives are, as William James so graphically put it, nothing more than the ‘dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago’. And, if our so-called voluntary acts are actually the uncontrollable decisions of the secretive unconscious, how can we hold people responsible for their actions? It is irritating enough that I can’t justifiably hold my husband morally responsible for the richly sonorous breathing that accompanies his strangely dreamless sleep. Does he now have a watertight excuse for all of his misdemeanours? (‘It wasn’t me, darling. It was the secret commander. I refer you to Chapter 6 of your own book.’) But all is not lost. A consoling alternative, offered by Libet himself, is that conscious free will has a final veto over the unconsciously initiated intentions that come ‘bubbling up’ through our brains, as he puts it.21 According to this more comforting scenario, the mental script for our familiar finger-tapping scenario could potentially run along the following lines:
Secret Commander: [to waiting neurons] Tell Conscious Mind to think ‘tap finger’. And get that finger up.
A third of a second later …
Conscious Mind: I’ll tap my finger … oh, hang on. Actually, I won’t.
Finger: [remains still]
This is definitely an improvement on the conclusion that we are nothing more than automatons, deluded into thinking that we have some control over the course that our lives take. It also makes it OK once again to hold people morally responsible for their actions. According to this ‘conscious veto’ suggestion, there is nothing we can do to prevent the evil intentions that pop into our heads, but we do have the power to abort all plans to act on them. Phew. Restored back to the status of freely acting agents, we can relax … or can we? For consider this. What if the veto of the conscious mind over the orders of the secret commander came itself from the secret commander? According to this unflattering interpretation of what is going on behind the scenes – and it remains a disturbing possibility – the conscious mind is demoted right back to frilly accessory again:
Secret Commander: [to waiting neurons] Tell Conscious Mind to think ‘tap finger’. And get that finger up.
Conscious Mind: I’ll tap my finger …
Secret Commander: Change of plan. Somebody put the brakes on that finger. And don’t forget to tell Conscious Mind to change its mind.
Conscious Mind: Oh, hang on. Actually, I won’t tap my finger.
Finger: [remains still]
Creepy, or what? Fortunately, freedom of will – if indeed a conceit – is such a compelling one that it’s easy enough to slip back into falling for the trick. Even philosophers, who have a tendency to dwell on these sorts of things, generally go happily about their everyday, if not their professional, lives without thinking twice about secret commanders and the rattling chains of foregone conclusions. There may well be a secret commander masterminding our every thought and deed, but at least he’s discreet about it.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed this tour into the unconscious mind. Forget Freud, forget dreams, forget stretching out on a comfy leather sofa: cognitive psychology is the new spyhole into the psyche. (You may also wish to note that the cost of this entire book would barely buy you ten minutes of psychoanalysis.) Yet despite all of the astonishing discoveries that have been made about the unconscious in the last few decades, we should not lose our humility. Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets.
Notes
1 J.A. Bargh and T.L. Chartrand (1999), ‘The unbearable automaticity of being’, American Psychologist, 54: 462–79.
2 See J.A. Bargh and K. Barndollar (1996), ‘Automaticity in action: the unconscious as repository of chronic goals and motives’, in P.M. Gollwitzer and J.A. Bargh (eds), The psychology of action: linking cognition and motivation to behavior, New York: The Guilford Press.
3 G.M. Fitzsimons and J.A. Bargh (2003), ‘Thinking of you: nonconscious pursuit of interpersonal goals associated with relationship partner
s’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84: 148–64.
4 D.T. Gilbert and J.G. Hixon (1991), ‘The trouble of thinking: activation and application of stereotypes’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68: 509–17.
5 J. Shah (2003), ‘Automatic for the people: how representations of significant others implicitly affect goal pursuit’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84: 661–81.
6 G.M. Fitzsimons and J.A. Bargh (2003), ‘Thinking of you: nonconscious pursuit of interpersonal goals associated with relationship partners’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84: 148–64.
7 J.A. Bargh, M. Chen and L. Burrows (1996), ‘Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71: 230–44.
8 A. Dijksterhuis and A. van Knippenberg (1998), ‘The relation between perception and behavior, or how to win a game of Trivial Pursuit’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74: 865–77.
9 J.A. Bargh, M. Chen and L. Burrows (1996), ‘Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71: 230–44.
10 T. E. Moore (1982), ‘Subliminal advertising: what you see is what you get’, Journal of Marketing, 46: 38–47.
11 For discussion of the role of priming in consumer research, see J.A. Bargh (2002), ‘Losing consciousness: automatic influences on consumer judgment, behavior, and motivation’, Journal of Consumer Research, 29: 280–5.
12 K.C. Berridge and P. Winkielman (2003), ‘What is an unconscious emotion? (The case for unconscious “liking”)’, Cognition and Emotion, 17: 181–211.
13 E.J. Strahan, S.J. Spencer and M.P. Zanna (2002), ‘Subliminal priming and persuasion: striking while the iron is hot’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38: 556–68.
14 J. Cooper and G. Cooper (2002), ‘Subliminal motivation: a story revisited’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32: 2213–27.
15 I. S. Johnsrude, A.M. Owen, N.M. White, W.V. Zhao and V. Bohbot (2000), ‘Impaired preference conditioning after anterior temporal lobe resection in humans’, Journal of Neuroscience, 20: 2649–56. For the classic paper on this subject, see also R. E. Nisbett and T.D. Wilson (1977), ‘Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes’, Psychological Review, 84: 231–59.
16 P.G. Zimbardo (1999), ‘Discontinuity theory: cognitive and social searches for rationality and normality – may lead to madness’, in M.P. Zanna (ed), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 31: 345–486.
17 D. J. Bem (1972), ‘Self-perception theory’, in L. Berkowitz (ed), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 6: 1–62.
18 M.R. Lepper, D. Greene and R.E. Nisbett (1973), ‘Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: a test of the overjustification hypothesis’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28: 129–37.
19 D.M. Wegner (2002), The illusion of conscious will, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. See also D.M. Wegner (2003), ‘The mind’s best trick: how we experience conscious will’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7: 65–9.
20 B. Libet, C.A. Gleason, E.W. Wright and D.K. Pearl (1983), ‘Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activities (readiness-potential): the unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act’, Brain, 106: 623–42. For further discussion of this study, see B. Libet (1985), ‘Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8: 529–66.
21 B. Libet (1999), ‘Do we have free will?’ Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6: 47–57.
CHAPTER 7
The Weak-willed Brain
The prima donna within
My husband and I are finally in bed. Our toddler, who has been newly promoted from cot to bed, has been enjoying the ease with which he can now tumble out from under the covers, leave his bed room and join us. It is an as yet unexplained mystery of the two-year-old brain why running down the hallway towards stony-faced parents is every bit as hilarious the thirtieth time as it is the first. The baby has been sleeping peaceably throughout this episode of bedtime rebellion – time that we should have been asleep ourselves. He was born fourteen weeks ago, and this is how long it has been since we last had an uninterrupted night’s sleep. I am desperately, dangerously tired. My preoccupation with night-time awakenings consumes me to the point of obsession. Although I struggle to remember my own phone number, I can report with tedious precision the timing of each wail of the baby during the hours of darkness. I can calculate instantly the time lapsed between feedings – but forget words like ‘spoon’ and ‘car’. I am exhausted. More than anything in the world, I crave sleep.
I cannot sleep.
I listen to the gentle, snuffling breathing of the baby. Extrapolating from the last few hellish nights, I estimate that I have perhaps 200 minutes in which to sleep before he wakes again. He stirs. I tense, waiting to see if he is waking up. He stays asleep. I now have approximately 199 minutes in which to sleep. Except, as I suddenly realise, it will take at least five minutes actually to drift off. One hundred and ninety-four minutes. So frustrating is it to be awake when I could be asleep that, perversely, I almost wish the baby would wake up.
One hundred and ninety-three minutes.
‘Why don’t you go to sleep?’ mumbles my husband, roused by my fidgeting.
‘I’m trying’, I retort with all the patience I can muster, which is to say none. ‘But I keep thinking about how little sleep I’m going to get before the baby needs feeding again.’
‘That won’t help’, my husband advises. ‘Think about something else.’
‘I can’t’, I say. (I do not remember whether the ‘you idiot’ was spoken aloud or merely thought.)
My husband helpfully suggests a tip from an eight-week meditation course for which – in an uncharacteristic moment of spirituality I can only attribute to extreme sleep deprivation – he recently signed up.
‘Clear your mind’, he commands in the tongue-in-cheek New Age drawl he invariably assumes when conversation turns to the psychical realm. ‘Don’t think – sense. Focus on the feeling of the pillow against your cheek.’ He sniggers, then goes back to sleep.
Obediently, I turn my attention to the feeling of the pillow against my cheek. But within a few seconds my mind decides that it has garnered all the interest there is to be had from this particular sensation. It is in too lively a mood, and quickly becomes bored. Instead, it focuses my unwilling, bleary eyes on the glowing clock-face. One hundred and ninety minutes and counting. Determined to get to sleep, I order my mind to return to soporific contemplation of the soft touch of the cotton-covered duck-feathers beneath my buzzing head. It ignores me. It has other matters to pursue: one hundred and eighty-nine minutes … one hundred and eighty-eight …
My mind has a mind of its own: I cannot even control my own thoughts. With all my might I exhort my will to rechannel the stream of consciousness but – although I am quite irredeemably wide awake – my will appears to be fast asleep.
It’s hard work being in charge of a brain. Despite all the help it receives from the mental butler, the conscious self still finds its workload rather heavy. And, ironically, one of its more arduous duties involves keeping itself under control. Having decided to become a paragon of perfect living – to forgo desserts, stay late at work and stop thinking about that rather attractive next-door neighbour – it must then follow through. But, as Aristotle remarked (perhaps while reaching for his second slice of baklava), ‘The hardest victory is the victory over self.’ Willpower is set into battle against the impulse to indulge and – alas – it is all too often resolve that is the loser. You sharply order your mind to stop grinding on about that parking fine you got this morning, or your lack of sleep – but only sporadically does it deign to obey you. Self-control – as we all know to our chagrin – is a temperamental performer. Some
mornings we are up with the birds and touching our toes a hundred times before leaping into a cold shower. At other times, the birds are taking their elevenses when we finally stop hitting the snooze button.
Some researchers have likened self-control, which strives, so often unsuccessfully, to keep us pure in thought and deed, to a ‘moral muscle’.1 This is because, like any muscle made of mere flesh and blood, it becomes fatigued with use. In fact, even quite modest feats of self-control leave you in a surprisingly weakened state so far as subsequent acts of self-restraint are concerned. Take, for example, a group of hungry volunteers who were left alone in a room containing both a tempting platter of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, and a plate piled high with radishes.2 Some of the volunteers were asked to sample only the radishes. These peckish volunteers manfully resisted the temptation of the cookies and ate the prescribed number of radishes. (The effort of will this required was splendidly demonstrated by several participants who were spotted, through a secret two-way mirror, picking up cookies and holding them up to their noses in order to inhale their aroma longingly.) Other, more fortunate, volunteers were asked to sample the cookies. In the next, supposedly unrelated, part of the experiment, the volunteers were asked to try to solve a difficult puzzle. The researchers weren’t interested in whether the volunteers solved it. (In fact, it was unsolvable.) Rather, they wanted to know how long the volunteers would persist with it. Their self-control already depleted, volunteers forced to snack on radishes persisted for less than half as long as people who had eaten the cookies, or (in case you should think that chocolate cookies offer inner strength) other volunteers who had skipped the eating part of the experiment altogether.
A Mind of Its Own Page 15