by Guy Claxton
One of the major contributions of experimental psychologists this century has been to keep providing us with new and telling demonstrations of what they call the ‘theory-ladenness’ of perception (just as it has been the function of the poets throughout history to keep showing us that the world is more ‘various’, more open to reinterpretation, and more inscrutable than we normally suppose). Much of the work on visual illusions shows this clearly. In the Kanizsa figures below, for example, we see – literally see – shapes that are not ‘really there’, because it seems plausible to the mind to suppose that they are.28 We are used to seeing as ‘whole’, objects parts of which are occluded by other objects in front of them. And this expectation can drive us, if it ‘makes sense’ to do so, to hallucinate an intervening shape, even creating visible edges for it, adding impressions of depth and contrasts in brightness, to make the interpretation more convincing. Such tinkering with reality goes on all the time, and at levels of mind that are way below conscious intention or control.
Figure 12. Illusory shapes and contours, after Kanizsa (1979)
A less stylised example is provided by the concept of ‘old age’. Being ‘old’ is not just a biological phenomenon; how one goes about ‘being old’ depends on one’s (largely unconscious) image of what it is like, what it means, to be old, and this in turn reflects a whole raft of both cultural assumptions and individual experiences. Ellen Langer and colleagues at Harvard University have examined the effect on elderly people of their own vicarious experiences, as children, of ways of being old. They reasoned that children may unconsciously pick up images of old age from their own grandparents – which they might then recapitulate as they themselves get older. Specifically, they surmised that the younger their grandparents were when children first got to know them, the more ‘youthful’ would be the image of old age that the children would unconsciously absorb, and the more positively they would therefore approach their own ageing.
In order to test this idea, they interviewed elderly residents of nursing homes in the vicinity of Boston to find out if they had lived with a grandparent as they were growing up and, if so, how old they were when the grandparent first moved in. When they were independently evaluated by nurses who knew nothing about the research, it was found that those elderly people who had lived with a grandparent when they themselves were toddlers were rated as more alert, more active and more independent than those whose first experience of living with a grandparent had not occurred till they were teenagers. While further research is needed to clarify the interpretation of these results, it does look as if the ways in which different people age depends quite directly on the assumptions and beliefs they have picked up in their own childhoods about what it is to be old.29
The unconscious assumptions that people stir into their experience are often rather hard to alter, but sometimes they can be changed just by a suggestion, especially if it comes from some kind of authority figure. The experience of pain, for instance, can be dramatically altered, in normal conscious subjects, simply by telling them to think of it differently. When a group of people who had volunteered to suffer some mild electric shocks were told to think of the shocks as ‘new physiological sensations’, they were less anxious, and had lower pulse rates, than those who were not so instructed.30 In another study, hospital patients who were about to undergo major surgery were encouraged to realise how much the experience of pain depends on the way people interpret it. They were reminded, for example, that a bruise sustained during a football match, or a finger cut while preparing dinner for a large group of friends, would not hurt as much as similar injuries in less intense situations. And they were shown analogous ways of reinterpreting the experience of being in hospital so that it was less threatening. Patients who were given this training took fewer pain relievers and sedatives after their operations, and tended to be discharged sooner, than an equivalent group who were untrained.
These experiments demonstrate how other people may be able to rescue us from what Langer refers to as ‘premature cognitive commitments’ – help us become aware of the assumptions that we had dissolved in perception, and contemplate alternative ways of construing the situation. Helping others to change not the circumstances of their lives but their interpretations of those circumstances is a widespread therapeutic technique called ‘reframing’. R. D. Laing, for example, in a classic case, helped a man who was desperate about his ‘insomnia’ to reconstrue his extra hours of wakefulness as a boon. ‘Just think of all those people out there who are suffering from “somnia”, forced to spend as much as eight or nine hours every day doing nothing,’ Laing observed. When the ‘problem’ that we are facing is created by our own unconscious additives, no amount of good thinking or earnest effort will bring a solution. Such contortions only compound the original mistake. The only way out of the trap is to see through the interpretation which one had been making; to see it as an interpretation. Only with such self-awareness, or ‘mindfulness’, is it possible to be released from the pernicious belief.
Mindfulness involves observing one’s own experience carefully enough to be able to spot any misconceptions that may inadvertently have crept in. There are a number of ways in which this quality of mindfulness towards the activity of our own minds can be cultivated, though all involve slowing down the onrush of mental activity, and trying to focus conscious awareness on the world of sensations, rather than jumping on the first interpretation that comes along and hurtling off in the direction of decision and action. Mindfulness can be taught directly, as a form of secular meditation, for example. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Director of the Stress Reduction Program at the University of Massachusetts Health Center, gives a clear idea of what is involved:
The essence of the state is to ‘be’ fully in the present moment, without judging or evaluating it, without reflecting backwards on past memories, without looking forward to anticipate the future, as in anxious worry, and without attempting to ‘problem-solve’ or otherwise avoid any unpleasant aspects of the immediate situation. In this state one is highly aware and focused on the reality of the present moment ‘as it is’, accepting and acknowledging it in its full ‘reality’ without immediately engaging in discursive thought about it, without trying to work out how to change it, and without drifting off into a state of diffuse thinking focused on somewhere else or some other time . . . The mindful state is associated with a lack of elaborative processing involving thoughts that are essentially about the currently experienced, its implications, further meanings, or the need for related action. Rather mindfulness involves direct and immediate experience of the present situation.31
There is now good evidence for the efficacy of such mindfulness training in helping people with all kinds of distresses and diseases. Kabat-Zinn’s programme has enabled hundreds of people with painful and upsetting conditions to release the secondary fears and anxieties that such conditions invariably create. Even the painfulness of pain itself, as we have just seen, can be reduced through mindfulness.
One particularly compelling demonstration of the practical value of mindfulness comes from clinical psychologist John Teasdale in Cambridge, who has been working on ways to prevent relapse in people who suffer from chronic depression.32 To simplify a complex story: in many types of depression people suffer some upsetting experience or feeling, but instead of just dealing with it as best they can, and moving on, a set of negative assumptions is activated which then triggers a downward spiral of pessimistic thoughts, memories, feelings and interpretations. Once this process has taken hold, people come to see the world and themselves through increasingly critical glasses, and this makes it all the more likely that they will attend to just those features of their experience that validate and exacerbate their feelings of inadequacy or hopelessness. It becomes impossible to remember, or even to notice, anything positive or encouraging. The conscious mind may become obsessed with ‘personal goals that can neither be attained nor relinquished’.
Teasdale argues that the way
to stop this vicious spiral from getting going is not to try to prevent experiences of disappointment or uncertainty: that is not a practical option. There will always be upsets. Rather the solution is to get people to practise new habits of thinking and attending which will stop the self-destructive patterns from gaining control of the mind. And mindfulness can do this by preventing you from leaping to conclusions, and then carrying on as if those conclusions were solid and true: first of all by keeping you closer to the ‘bare facts’ and enabling you to see molehills as molehills, rather than automatically inflating them into mountains; and secondly, as you become more attentive to the movements of the mind, you relearn your attitude towards them. The conclusions that present themselves to consciousness are not seen any more as ‘valid descriptions of who I really am’ – ‘worthless’, for example – but as ‘thoughts produced by the mind’. You reinterpret them as ‘mental states’, or ‘events in the field of awareness’, not as ‘reflections of reality’. So even when negative interpretations and conclusions do bubble up, mindfulness enables you to refuse the lure and question their validity. It is no longer ‘me’ who is forced to defend myself; it is the content of consciousness that now appears dubious. The tables are turned.
John Teasdale’s conclusions from his research with depressive people may ‘ring bells’, perhaps, with a wider population.
Depressive relapse often seems to occur when patients fail to take appropriate remedial or coping activity at an early stage of incipient relapse, when control over depression is likely to be relatively easy to obtain. Patients may defer recognition or acknowledgement of problems to a later stage in the relapse process, where a more full-blown depressive syndrome may be much more difficult to deal with . . . Mindfulness training . . . in ‘turning towards’ potential difficulties, rather than ‘looking away’ from them, is likely to facilitate early detection of signs . . . and so to increase the chances that remedial actions will be implemented at a time when they are likely to prove most effective.
Though pharmacological approaches to depression continue to play a vital role in its amelioration, the research shows that Teasdale’s and Kabat-Zinn’s approach is at least as effective as administering conventional anti-depressant drugs (and there are, of course, fewer negative side effects).
Daniel Goleman, in Emotional Intelligence, has documented the role that mindfulness can play in preventing ‘emotional hi-jacking’.33 When couples begin to get into a marital ‘fight’, for example, things can easily go from bad to worse if either or both of the partners falls into a self-reinforcing pattern of negative thinking. Mindfulness increases the likelihood that such a pattern can be spotted and neutralised before it has done too much damage. Goleman gives the example of a wife who feels in the heat of the moment that ‘he doesn’t care about me or what I want; he’s always so selfish’, but who, on catching herself in the act of ‘demonising’ her husband, is able to remind herself that ‘There are plenty of times when he has been caring – even though what he did just now was thoughtless and upsetting.’ Through the moment of mindfulness she is able to neutralise the exaggerated thought that, if accepted, would have justified a negative reaction that would only have inflamed the situation further.
The value of slowing down the mind is evident in dozens of everyday situations. Take the example of a divorcing couple arguing over custody of their child. In such an emotionally intense situation, it is very easy for an impoverished perception to lead to a rigid response: one in which it looks as if only one partner can ‘win’, and the other therefore must ‘lose’. Any more subtle analysis of the actual predicament, and especially of what it is that each party is actually trying to achieve, is sacrificed in favour of a knee-jerk adherence to a one-dimensional view. Underneath the dogmatism, however, there may be a whole host of other factors and values, consideration of which might make it possible for everybody – including the child – to win. Is each parent really seeking the full-time physical presence of the child, or is it a quality of relationship they want to preserve? Are they trying to use the custody issue as a way of punishing their partner, or of asserting a need for control that they feel they lost in the marriage? Could there not be advantages to being a part-time parent that have been overlooked? And what might be best for the child itself? Increasingly it is the role of counsellors and mediators to try to ease people out of their entrenched, antagonistic positions, and to see the situation more fully. To cultivate mindfulness is to be able to adopt that role for oneself.
The cultivation of mindfulness does not require instruction in any kind of formal meditation, though it may help. Our own culture possesses many venerable and effective activities – or inactivities – that encourage the mind to shift out of doing-and-thinking mode into a mode that is relaxed and spacious, yet alert to its own meanderings. Coarse fishing, for example, as Ted Hughes noted, is a meditation in everything but name; a perfect excuse to gaze at the float while the mind wanders free, enjoying the shimmer of the light on the water or the soft touch of the rain. It is not unknown for fishermen to experience mild resentment when their reverie is disturbed by the inconvenient attentions of fish to hook. Rhythmic activities such as knitting, weeding and swimming may all encourage mindfulness of simple body sensations, sounds or smells, drawing attention away from problem-solving and back into the perceptual world. Watching a relatively unimportant county cricket game live is good practice. On TV you can drift off too much, knowing that the action replays will show you the highlights. At the ground, if you don’t maintain awareness you miss the action when it occasionally happens. Yet you cannot spend all day focused and concentrated. You have, gradually, to develop the quality of attention of a cat: relaxed and watchful at the same time. You feel the spontaneous ‘pulsing’ of awareness that we spoke of in Chapter 10.
If perception samples experience only in order to categorise it, and to decide whether it is potentially useful or harmful, the conscious image it creates is likely to be rather flat and dull. Having lost perceptual vividness, we seek to put ourselves in extreme situations where the outside world startles us strongly enough for perceptual intensity to return. Thus the entertainment ‘industry’, whether in the form of violent or pornographic films, terrifying theme-park rides, raves or cocaine, becomes geared to providing transient experiences of aliveness that our habitual mode of mind prevents us from having for, and by, ourselves. Greater mindfulness makes conscious experience of life richer and more vivid. Rediscovering the ability to dwell in perception gives it back its charm and its vitality.
CHAPTER 12
The Rudiments of Wisdom
The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that hath little business shall become wise.
Ecclesiasticus 38:34
Summerhill, the progressive English school founded by A. S. Neill, is run by a council, the ‘moot’, which meets once a week. Every member of the school, from the newest five-year-old to the oldest teacher, has a single, equal vote. The moot decides everything; school rules, bedtimes, sanctions to be applied in particular cases. It is the mid-1970s. The founder and his wife sit quietly in the meeting listening to a complaint being brought by two girls against one of the boys who has, allegedly, been irritating them by, among other things, flicking them with towels. The mood of the meeting is against the defendant. Student after student denounces him. A harsh penalty looks likely. Both Neill and his wife sit with their hands raised, waiting to be invited to speak by the thirteen-year-old girl who is chairing the moot. Eventually Mrs Neill has her turn. ‘Just think how dull your lives would be if you didn’t have these boys to annoy you,’ she says, with a twinkle. The meeting laughs. Then Neill speaks in a gruff, laconic voice, as if he is raising a point of procedure. ‘I don’t think the meeting has any right to interfere in a love affair,’ he says. Again the meeting laughs. The boy and one of the girls grin sheepishly at each other. The meeting moves on.1
The exploration of ‘knowing better by thinking slower�
�� eventually brings us to a consideration of wisdom. The dictionary tells us that wisdom is ‘the capacity to judge rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; sound judgement especially in practical affairs; making good use of knowledge’. But that does not get us very far. What does it mean to ‘judge rightly’, or to have ‘sound judgement’? Who is to decide what is right or sound? What sort of knowledge does one need, and how does one learn to make good use of it? All the interesting questions are begged. Our study of the complex and sometimes troubled relationship between the hare brain and the tortoise mind can help us to get a better handle on this most elusive, but most important, of concepts.
The Neills’ reactions demonstrate some of the qualities of wisdom. Above all, wisdom is practical, dealing directly with ‘matters relating to life and conduct’; with ‘practical affairs’. It is also creative and integrative. The Neills ‘reframe’ a polarised situation in a way that skilfully avoids taking sides. Where the protagonists are stuck in a world-view in which one must ‘lose’ if the other ‘wins’, the wise counsellor finds a perspective that integrates and transcends the opposing positions. Apparently stark choices are magically transformed into common purposes. A classic example of this creative reframing occurred during one of the many riots in nineteenth-century Paris, when the commander of an army detachment was ordered to clear a city square by firing at the canaille – the rabble. He commanded his soldiers to take up their firing positions, their rifles levelled at the crowd, and, as a ghastly silence descended, he drew his sword and shouted at the top of his lungs: ‘Mesdames et messieurs, I have orders to fire at the canaille. But as all I can see from here are a great number of honest, respectable citizens peacefully going about their lawful business, may I request that they clear the square quietly so that I can safely pick out and shoot the wretched canaille.’ The square was emptied in a few minutes, with no loss either of life or face.2