by Guy Claxton
One way in which the relationship between consciousness and the undermind can be radically transformed is through hypnosis (a phenomenon the existence of which, unlike the paranormal, is now established beyond empirical doubt). The active ingredients in hypnosis are relaxation and trust: allowing yourself to be hypnotised involves giving up your normal sense of controlling your own actions, of planning and striving, and putting yourself in someone else’s hands. And in this state, for those who can attain it, the relationship between conscious and unconscious becomes unusually labile and permeable. The hypnotist is able to speak directly to the undermind, and is able to adjust, sometimes to an extraordinary extent, which aspects of the unconscious gain access to consciousness, and which do not. Under so-called ‘hypnotic age regression’, for example, you may gain conscious access to long-forgotten childhood memories. Or you may have compelling hallucinations that you take to be ‘reality’. While on the other hand you may be rendered functionally deaf or blind, either to particular kinds of events, or across the board. In one case the conscious threshold is lowered so that normally inaccessible memories surface into conscious awareness; in the other the threshold is raised so high that even mundane experience is blocked out.
Though consciousness may be drastically altered or reduced, we can show that the undermind continues to function. The fact that you no longer have any conscious experience of hearing, or of pain, for example, does not mean that you are really not registering the sensations. The threshold between conscious and unconscious has simply been raised to the point where consciousness just isn’t getting the usual reports of what is going on in the interior. Take the control of pain. Hypnotic analgesia is a reliably documented and effective method of pain control.11 Studies show it compares favourably with drugs such as aspirin, diazepam (Valium) and morphine in reducing the experience of pain. Hypnotic suggestion alone produces clinically significant pain relief in as much as 50 per cent of a sample of the general population, even when the people in the sample have not been preselected for their hypnotic susceptibility.
Yet, despite the dramatic alteration of the conscious experience, some responses to the painful stimuli remain. The registration of pain can be demonstrated through physiological measures, for example. One widely used indicator of general arousal is the ‘galvanic skin response’, GSR, a measure of the resistance of the skin to the passage of electrical current. People who, as a result of hypnotic analgesia, show no visible reaction to a painful electric shock nevertheless show GSR reactions that are typical of the more normal response.12 Also, it turns out that you can talk to a ‘hidden part’ of the person who can tell you about the pain, even though its conscious intensity is reduced or non-existent. If hypnotised subjects are asked to sit with their left hands in a bucket of iced water – which is normally quite painful – they will appear relaxed and will say that they genuinely feel little or no discomfort. However, if they are asked to respond with the other hand to a written list of questions about their general physical state, as it were inadvertently, they will report, in their answers, the pain that they do not ‘feel’.
One of the clearest demonstrations of this so-called ‘hidden observer’ effect was recorded by Ernest Hilgard, a long-time hypnosis researcher, in a student practical class. One of the students, a suitable subject, was rendered functionally deaf: he denied hearing anything and failed to flinch at loud noises. While he was in this state, Hilgard whispered softly in his ear:
As you know, there are parts of our nervous system that carry on activities that occur out of awareness, like circulating the blood . . . There may be intellectual processes also of which we are unaware, such as those that find expression in dreams. Although you are hypnotically deaf, perhaps there is some part of you that is hearing my voice and processing the information. If there is, I should like the index finger of your right hand to rise as a signal that this is the case.
The finger rose, and the hypnotised student spontaneously commented that he felt his index finger rise, but had no idea why it had done so. Hilgard then released the student from the hypnotic deafness, and asked him what he thought had happened. ‘I remember’, said the volunteer, ‘your telling me that I would be deaf at the count of three, and would have my hearing restored when you placed your hand on my shoulder. Then everything was quiet for a while. It was a little boring just sitting here, so I busied myself with a statistical problem I was working on. I was still doing that when suddenly I felt my finger lift.’
Our security is threatened by information that is painful, or predictive of pain, but it is discomfited by more than that. We possess a whole variety of beliefs, many of which are themselves unconscious or unarticulated, which specify, more or less rigidly, and in more or less detail, our character and our psychology. They define what kind of person we are, our personality or ‘self image’, and even how our minds are supposed to work. Could it be that our consciousness, what we are able to feel and know about ourselves, is regulated by these beliefs, as well as by the need to protect self-esteem? Is there any evidence that the threshold and the nature of conscious perception – the information in the undermind which is consciously available to us – is influenced by such assumptions?
An intriguing study by Ellen Langer at Harvard suggests that even such a basic psychological attribute as our visual acuity is determined by who we happen to believe ourselves to be. Her subjects were invited to ‘become’ air force pilots for an afternoon. They were dressed in the appropriate uniform and given the chance to ‘pilot’ a jet airplane on a flight simulator. The context was made as ‘real’ as possible, and the subjects were asked to try to become a pilot, not merely to act the part. At the beginning of the study, before the simulation had been introduced and explained, each subject was given a short physical examination, which included a routine eye test. During the flight simulation, while they were being pilots, they were asked to read the markings on the wings of another plane that could be seen out of the cockpit window. These markings were actually letters from an equivalent eye chart to the one used in the physical. It was found that the vision of nearly half of the ‘pilots’ had improved significantly. Other groups of subjects, who were equally aroused and motivated, but who were not immersed in the role, showed no such improvement. By changing the sense of self, more precise sensory information can become available to consciousness.13
The self also contains core assumptions about psychological aspects of our make-up that are generic and cultural as well as those that identify us as individuals. Some of these core beliefs concern consciousness itself: when conscious awareness occurs, what it is for, how well it can be trusted and so on. And one of these tacit assumptions is that ‘What we see – consciously – is what is “there”, and it is all that is there’. If we subscribe to this model of perception, we will unquestioningly assume that ‘When I have no conscious visual experience, I cannot have registered anything about what is happening out there in the visual world’. So if by some tragic accident I were to be deprived of conscious visual experience, but not of unconscious visual information, it is possible that I would be prevented by this belief from reacting appropriately to visual events. Someone who is involuntarily deprived of conscious sight may thus, as a result of their fundamental belief that consciousness and perception are the same thing, handicap themselves further by cutting themselves off from their residual unconscious visual capacity.
It has recently been suggested that this is exactly what may be happening in cases of so-called ‘blindsight’. These cases have now become quite celebrated – they have taken over from ‘split brain’ patients as the most fashionable and intriguing neurological curios. The blindsight condition results from damage to the visual area of the cerebral cortex which leaves the patient with a blind ‘hole’ in some part of their visual field. Despite the lack of conscious visual awareness, it has been convincingly demonstrated that these patients can react appropriately to stimuli that impinge within the hole – but only if t
hey are allowed to feel that they are playing a rather bizarre kind of ‘guessing game’, and are not actually being asked to ‘see’ anything. In the original studies by Lawrence Weiskrantz at Oxford, patients were asked to indicate when they saw one of a constellation of small lights that were flashed at different locations in the visual field. Those lights that fell within the blind area were, as you would expect, not reported. However, when asked to do something absurd – to take part in the nonsensical game of pointing at the hypothetical location of the (to the patient) non-existent light – they were able to do so with remarkable accuracy and consistency. Exactly what these patients can respond to is still under investigation. They can certainly point accurately at flashes of light, distinguish between simple shapes such as circles and crosses, and it has been claimed that two such patients have been observed to adjust the movement of their hand appropriately as they reach out for different objects which they cannot ‘see’.14
Though we can demonstrate that blindsight patients do possess this residual visual capacity, they seem (like Tony Marcel’s experimental subjects) unable to use it to respond verbally to the flashes of light, and they do not seem to make spontaneous use of this information to further their own everyday purposes. In the 1993 CIBA symposium on ‘Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Consciousness’, psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, commenting on one of the presentations, had some perceptive comments to make on exactly this issue.
John Kihlstrom’s interesting remarks about the self and its relation to unconscious processes . . . are quite well supported by some of the data from patients with blindsight . . . I worked many years ago with monkeys who had had the striate cortex [the primary visual part of the brain] removed: they retained extraordinarily sophisticated visual capacity, much better than anything which has yet been discovered in human beings with lesions of the striate cortex. One way of thinking about this is that the monkey has an advantage in that it doesn’t have a particularly highly developed concept of self. Hence the monkey’s non-sensory [i.e. unconscious] visual percepts are nothing like so surprising to the monkey as to the human. For a human to have a percept which isn’t his own percept (related to himself) is very odd indeed. So human patients retreat into saying: ‘I don’t know what’s going on’ and denying their ability to see at all. For the monkey, I suspect [unconscious] perceptual information doesn’t create the same sort of existential paradox, therefore the monkey is much more ready to use it . . . Interestingly, for one particular monkey I worked with for a long time, there were conditions under which she became unable to see again – if she was frightened or she was in pain. It was as though anything which drew attention to her self undermined her ability to use unconscious percepts.15 (Emphasis added)
The more self-conscious we are – the more fragile our identity – the more we shut down the undermind. As people feel increasingly vulnerable, so their access to, and reliance on, information that is faint or fleeting declines. They become not just physically but also mentally clumsy, losing access to the subtler ways of knowing. Conversely, the less self-conscious we are, the more ‘at home in our skins and our minds’, the more it seems we are able to open ourselves to the undermind, and to the mental modes through which it speaks. Self-consciousness is a graded phenomenon; there are milder, more chronic and more widespread degrees of self-consciousness, in which the kinds of deleterious effects we have been discussing still occur, albeit in less intense forms. Extrapolating from the experimental studies, we might hazard the suggestion that many people (at least in busy, d-mode cultures), much of the time, are in a state of low-grade, somewhat pressurised self-consciousness, and that in this state, consciousness is edited and manipulated so that its contents are as congenial and unthreatening to the operative model of self and mind as possible. We attenuate our contact with the iridescent world of the undermind, and may thus deprive ourselves of valuable data. Though we are in fact sensitive to the shimmering reality that underlies consciousness, we act as if we were not – because we do not ‘believe’ in it, do not trust it, or do not like what it has to say.
Blindsight research suggests that one area in which we might expect to see the effects of ‘self’ on consciousness is where people are acting deliberately or intentionally, as opposed to accidentally, playfully or impulsively. The sense of self is associated most crucially, after all, with plans and actions which are designed to serve our own conscious purposes. Intentions are the conscious expressions of our valued goals – of our selves, in other words. One of the features of the blindsight syndrome seems to be the decoupling of patients’ unconscious seeing from their own intentions. We can show that they have residual sight, and we can do so best under precisely those conditions when they are not acting on the basis of any internally generated intention: when they are not trying to achieve anything, or prove themselves in any way.16
This inhibiting effect of intention certainly has its parallels in everyday life. The phenomena of ‘not being able to see for looking’, or of ‘trying too hard’, are commonplace. Perhaps the presence of a strong intention locks consciousness too firmly into a predetermined framework of plans and expectations, so that other information, which could potentially be useful or even necessary, is relegated to unconscious processes of perception, where it is, in these cases, ignored. Intention drives conscious attention, to the detriment, sometimes, of intelligence. In d-mode, we are not just ‘looking’, we are looking for, and what we are looking for has to be, to an extent, pre-specified. Attention is focused and channelled by the unconscious decisions we have made about what may be ‘relevant’ to the solution of the problem, or the achieving of the intention. And these presumptions may be accurate, or they may not.
Sigmund Freud made exactly this point in his ‘Recommendations to physicians practising psychoanalysis’, published in 1912. The technique of psychoanalysis, he said,
consists simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in particular, and in maintaining the same ‘evenly-suspended attention’ . . . in the face of all that one hears. In this way . . . we avoid a danger. For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point will be fixed in his mind with particular clearness and some other will be correspondingly disregarded, and in making this selection he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This however is precisely what must not be done.17
This line of thought suggests that threat or desire may make consciousness narrower as well as coarser, and may explain the experiments described in Chapter 5 which showed that the creativity of intuition and problem-solving is reduced by a feeling of threat or pressure. One of the major reasons why too much effort, too purposive an attitude, or a general increase in stress or anxiety is counterproductive is because it creates ‘tunnel vision’. We might imagine that, at any given moment, people are shining a ‘beam’ of attention outward on to their environment, through the five senses, and inward, too, on to their own physiological, emotional and cognitive state. At the extremes, this beam may be tightly focused, like a spotlight, or wide and broad, like a floodlight, or the dim glow of a candle.
In principle, both forms of attention, concentrated and diffused (and all the degrees of focus in between), are useful. In a pitch-black cave, a hurricane lamp shedding a broad, dim light, which enables you to see the overall size and shape of your surroundings, is what you need first. If all you have is a torch with a fine beam, you will not be able to get your bearings so well. But once you have orientated yourself, it is useful to be able to home in on details, and now the spotlight comes into its own. The diffuse illumination gives you a holistic impression; the focused beam enables you to dissect and analyse. Both are needed, and in an optimal mental state one can flow between the two extremes, adopting a degree of concentration that is appropriate for that particular moment. This balance between perception and attention has a parallel in the equilibrium of deliberation and intuition required for o
ptimising our creative thought processes.
It appears that being stressed, threatened or over-eager tends to narrow the beam of attention too much, whether it be to one’s own internal database or to the outside world. People who are chronically anxious have been shown to have more tightly focused attention than people who are more relaxed. Several investigators have reported impaired night vision, for example, in people who are stressed or anxious.18 When people are required simultaneously to carry out a focal task, such as trying to track a randomly moving point in the central part of a screen with a cursor, and a task that requires the use of peripheral vision, like detecting small flashes of light at the edges of the screen, then increasing the size of the reward for successful performance leads to a tighter concentration on the tracking task, and a serious fall-off in performance on the peripheral task. And if subjects had not been forewarned about the peripheral lights, 34 per cent of subjects who were working for large rewards failed to notice them at all, whereas only 8 per cent of those receiving small incentives failed to notice them.19 The same kind of tunnel vision is produced if the general level of stress is increased by making people work in hot or noisy conditions.20
People working under pressure, whether environmental or psychological, tend to select out and focus on those aspects of the situation as a whole which they judge to be the crucial ones. And this judgement must to a certain extent, as Freud realised, be a prejudgement. You make an intuitive decision about what is going to be worth paying attention to. If this ‘attentional gamble’ is correct, people may learn the task, or figure out a solution, quicker, but at the expense of a broader overview. They see in terms of what they expect to see, and if this self-imposed blinkering reflects an adequate conceptualisation of the problem, time may be saved. But if it is not, or if (as in the Luchins’ jars experiments) the situation changes but because of the tight focus the change is not noticed, then a commitment to the spotlight processing strategy is going to let them down. As Jerome Bruner says, reflecting on the adverse effect of motivation: ‘Increase in incentive leads to a higher degree of selective attention for those parts of a complex task that subjects interpret as more important, with a concomitant tendency to pay less attention to other features of the situation.’21 Broad, diffuse attention is precisely what is needed in non-routine, ill-defined or impoverished situations, where data is patchy, conventional solutions don’t work, and incidental details may make all the difference. And that is why too much effort inhibits creativity.