The Illusion of Conscious Will (11 page)

Acting Quickly

The odd sluggishness of consciousness becomes apparent in another way when people do fast things. When we react to a phone ringing, or take a swat at a fly, for example, we move so rapidly that we seem to leave consciousness behind. In fact, the consciousness of a stimulus that causes a re-active or triggered action of this kind typically
follows
much of the action, coming to mind several hundred milliseconds after the person has begun to respond to incoming signals (Rossetti 1998; Velmans 1991). Imagine, for example, being asked to press a button as soon as you feel a tap. It typically takes only about 100 milliseconds to react to such a stimulus, and sometimes much less, but it may take as much as 500 milliseconds to become conscious of having responded (Libet 1981). For example, in a study in which participants were tracking by hand an unexpectedly moving target, the change in their hand trajectory toward the target’s movement happened as early as 100 milliseconds following the target jump. However, the vocal signal by which they reported their awareness of the jump (saying “Pah,” which is apparently what you say in an experiment in France to signal something unexpected) did not occur on average until more than 300 milliseconds later (Castiello, Paulignan, and Jeannerod 1991).

Another illustration of the conscious delay is the finding that people can’t gradually slow down their reaction times. Jensen (1979) asked people to try deliberately to lengthen their reaction time little by little and found that they could not do so. Rather, their reaction times jumped from the usual minimum values (in his study, about 250 milliseconds) to much higher values, which at a minimum were 500 to 1000 milliseconds. One cannot slow down one’s reaction until one becomes conscious of the stimulus
and of having reacted,
and this takes lots of extra time. This discontinuity suggests that a response and a
conscious
response are two very different things, the first one typically far speedier than the second.

The slowness of consciousness prompted Posner and Snyder (1975) to draw a distinction between automatic processes and controlled (conscious) processes.
⁸
They proposed that fast responses, such as hitting the accelerator when the light turns green, or pulling a finger away from the touch of a hot pan, could be understood as automatic. These automatic reactions take place in 200-300 milliseconds or even less and occur prior to reportable consciousness of the stimulus. They can include choices, such as picking which word to say in a given sentence or which soft drink to grab from the fridge, and they underlie the various fast and fluid skills of which people are capable. Playing tennis or reading or typing or walking are all skills that involve exceedingly fast reactions, many of which can be understood as automatic in this sense (Baars 1988; Bargh 1984; 1994; 1997; Bargh and Chartrand 2000; Wegner and Bargh 1998).

8
. Actually, the distinction is a far older one. The
Oxford English Dictionary
ascribes the first use of
automatic
to David Hartley, who remarked in
Observations on Man
(1749) that “the
Motions
of the body are of two kinds,
automatic
and
voluntary
.” These terms were meant to describe bodily functions such as breathing or lifting a finger, and so were not understood as cognitive processes. Later psychological writers, such as Carpenter (1888) and Jastrow (1906), developed the psychological distinction the way we use it today.

These automatic processes also are often uncontrollable in that once they have been launched, they continue until they are complete (Logan and Cowan 1984). Conscious processes are more flexible and strategic, but they also take more time—in the range of 500 milliseconds or be-yond. Half a second doesn’t seem like much, of course, but it can be an eternity when you’re trying to do something fast. Consider that a skilled keyboarder might be able to type at the rate of 120 words per minute. That means
two words every second,
a phrase that itself would have taken me only 2 seconds to type if I were such a skilled keyboarder. So, a 500-millisecond interval would allow for the typing of an entire word. All the automatic keystrokes that go into typing that word are so fast that they are telescoped together into a sequence that takes only as long as it takes for something
once
to enter into a conscious response.

The slowness of consciousness suggests that much of what we see and do involves the operation of
preconscious
mental processes. That is, we may begin to react to a stimulus before we are aware of it. In fact, if our exposure to a target stimulus is cut short (by a masking stimulus that immediately follows the target and wipes out our visual image of it), we may have a cognitive response to the target without ever becoming aware of the target. People who are judging whether each of a series of letter strings is a word or not, for instance, are likely to judge a string correctly as a word more quickly if they have just been exposed to a related word at a very brief duration, followed by a masking stimulus (Marcel 1983).

One might more quickly judge
wedding
to be a word, for instance, after seeing a brief flash of
bride
before it than after seeing a similar flash of
succotash
. (This might depend, of course, on one’s personal opinion of marriage.) In such studies, the initial word prime never reaches consciousness, and yet it has a measurable influence on behavior.
⁹

Our preconscious responses can take the form of early emotional reactions and attitudes. We may develop a quick emotional reaction to just about everything we see, even before we consciously see it (Bargh et al. 1996; Zajonc 1980). We will shrink from the enemy we see coming to-ward us from a distance, for instance, or get a little shiver when we see our favorite love object, and this can happen before we even know what we have seen. These fast attitudinal responses may determine our behavior when a subsequent conscious reaction to the stimulus is somehow prevented, because we are too busy or distracted, or because we must react without having the chance to spend some time thinking. As Wilson, Lindsay, and Schooler (2000) have proposed, we may have dual attitudes toward many things in our lives, one a rapid response and the other a more studied reaction that takes into account the context and our personal theory of what we ought to be feeling. The conscious attitude will only govern our responses when we have had time to consider the situation and get past the automatic reaction.

What all this means is that consciousness is kind of a slug. This slowness suggests that consciousness might not be up to some of the kind of guidance activity that seems to be needed for the production of willed action. Now, of course, many of the speeded responses we’ve considered here are not ones usually classified as willed. The quick push of a response key in a reaction time task is certainly not the prototypical voluntary action because it is not spontaneous and is governed by the occurrence of an outside signal. However, it is instructive indeed that consciousness seems to follow these actions rather than lead them. At the extreme, it is possible to concur with Marc Jeannerod that “in conditions of normal execution [of action], there is usually no awareness of the con-tent of the representation at any level and no image is experienced. This is explained by the fact that motor imagery and execution have different time constants. Because imagery, unlike execution, implies subjective awareness, it takes longer to appear. If imagery actually occurred in conditions of normal execution, it would be delayed with respect to the corresponding action” (1995, 1429). We may think consciously about what we are doing, turning it over and over in our minds in advance of our action, but it may be that this conscious image we develop is in fact too slow to run concurrently with many of our fast, reactive actions as they happen.

9
. There has been controversy about just how to establish that something is not conscious, as it could just be that the prime word is gaining access to a tiny bit of consciousness (once every few trials, for instance), and so achieving its effect on just a small (but significant) proportion of responses. The battle right now is leaning toward those who believe the evidence does favor preconscious processing, but stay tuned (Greenwald and Draine 1997; Holender 1986; Merikle and Joordens 1997).

Consciousness and action seem to play a cat-and-mouse game over time. Although we may be conscious of whole vistas of action before the doings get underway, it is as though the conscious mind then slips out of touch. A microanalysis of the time interval before and after action indicates that consciousness pops in and out of the picture and doesn’t really seem to do anything. The Libet research, for one, suggests that when it comes down to the actual instant of a spontaneous action, the experience of consciously willing the action occurs only after the RP signals that brain events have already begun creating the action (and probably the intention and the experience of conscious will as well). And the studies of the automaticity of fast reactions, in turn, suggest that conscious mental processes regularly follow rather than lead actions that are quick responses to environmental cues. In the case of reactive responses, knowing what we have done and what stimulated our doing is only a luxury we achieve some milliseconds after action.

The Missing Lightbulb

The search for where and when the will appears in the course of action has led us in a number of different directions. Unfortunately, none of these sorties has resulted in the discovery of the lightbulb we were looking for at the beginning of the chapter. It has taken a whole lot of scientists to try to screw in this particular lightbulb, and so far we are all still in the dark.

We do know where the lightbulb isn’t. Apparently, we cannot yet trace the experience of will to any particular signal in the nervous system— from brain to body, or from body to brain. The research on the experience of muscle effort indicates that a variety of different systems can participate in the creation of the sense of effort, and the phantom limb research points to the further idea that one system may stand in for another (vision can substitute for muscle sense, for example) in creating the experience of voluntary movement. The experience of will seems to accrue from a flexible cognitive system that has not yet been isolated to one anatomical structure. The finding that people don’t lose the sense of voluntary action even when their movement is being caused by transcranial magnetic stimulation lends credence to this hypothesis as well.

The brain stimulation studies offered the tempting possibility that we might finally find the will in some cranny of the brain. And indeed, some brain events yield action that occurs with an experience of will whereas others do not. However, the research supporting this idea takes the form of a few early clinical observations from different researchers, not a con-trolled comparison of any kind, and so leaves us with no satisfying indication that the experience of will has been localized in the brain or that it can be found if the right search is mounted. And ultimately, of course, even these studies fail to find the will per se. They indicate instead that the
experience
of willing is a variable attachment to action, and so refocus our attention on the circumstances and timing of the experience.

The timing of will, finally, seems to seal the fate of that elusive light-bulb. The detailed analytical studies of the timing of action indicate that conscious will does not precede brain events leading to spontaneous voluntary action but rather follows them. And the studies focusing on the timing of motor responses, as compared to the timing of conscious responses, indicate further that consciousness of action occurs on a different time schedule than action itself. When actions are forced to be fast, consciousness is perpetually late—the Dagwood Bumstead of the mind, running out the door in the morning and knocking down the mailman. Consciousness of responses occurs following the responses themselves whenever the person is attempting to react quickly.

The circuitous timing of consciousness combines with the difficult anatomy of the will to indicate that what we have here is no lightbulb. Rather, it appears that the experience of will occurs through a system that presents the idea of a voluntary action to consciousness and also produces the action. The idea can occur just in advance of the action, as when people are allowed to act ad lib (as in Libet’s research), or the idea may come to mind only just after the action, as when people are prompted to act rapidly (as in reaction time studies). People get the experience of will primarily when the idea of acting occurs to them before they act. In fact, this tendency to experience will when the appropriate idea precedes the act is the theme of the next chapter.

3

The Experience of Will

The experience of conscious will arises when we infer that our conscious intention has caused our voluntary action, although both intention and action are themselves caused by mental processes that do not feel willed
.

While belief in the causality of the self is only an illusion, . . . there are nonetheless two phenomena which explain such a belief; the first is our ability to foresee the result before it actually takes place, the second the presence of a feeling of “activity.”

Albert Michotte,
The Perception of Causality
(1954)

Imagine for a moment that by some magical process you could always know when a particular tree branch would move in the wind. Just before it moved, you would know it was going to move, in which direction, and just how it would do it. Not only would you know this, but let’s assume that the same magic would guarantee that you would happen to be thinking about the branch just before each move. You’d look over, and then just as you realized it was going to move, it would do it. In this imaginary situation, you could eventually come to think that you were somehow causing the movement. You would seem to be the source of the distant branch’s action, the agent that wills it to move.