The Illusion of Conscious Will (15 page)

In a second experiment, participants had their own right hand connected to skin conductance sensors so that their level of arousal could be measured. They then watched while, before the tape recording or action began, one hand snapped a rubber band on the wrist of the other. This gave participants a surge of arousal, as their skin conductance responses were significant. Following this, the experiment continued with the hand action sequence, again with some participants hearing the instructions while others did not. Finally, one hand again snapped the rubber band on the other wrist.

It turned out that foreknowledge of the action increased the perception of control in this study as it had in the prior experiment. It also seemed to produce an emotional attachment to the hands. Consistent foreknowledge of the action led participants to experience another strong skin conductance response to the snap, whereas those participants who didn’t hear the instructions had by this time settled down and showed no significant arousal to the snap. Apparently, the experience of controlling the hands that was induced through consistent previews of action also yielded a kind of empathic ownership of the hands. When the hands hurt each other, people who felt they were controlling them because of their consistent thoughts experienced an emotional reaction.

Creative Insight

The happiest inconsistency between intention and action occurs when a great idea pops into mind. The “action” in this case is the occurrence of the idea, and our tendency to say “Eureka!” or “Aha!” is our usual acknowledgment that this particular insight was not something we were planning in advance. Although most of us are quite willing to take credit for our good ideas, it is still true that we do not experience them as voluntary. Rather, they happen to us, jumping into mind. The writer finds ideas hopping onto the page, the violinist finds musical ideas sneaking into the bow, the tennis player finds inspirations enlivening the racket. In each of these cases, the sense of willfulness of the action is curiously absent from an act that seemed eminently willed. Although one may have desperately desired to have an insight or a cool move, a fully developed thought of what it would be did not appear in mind in advance, and so there is little sense of authorship when it finally arrives.

There are repeated affidavits of the sense of effortlessness and even mindlessness that accompany creative breakthroughs and skilled productions of thought. In his essay on
Mechanism in Thought and Morals,
for in-stance, Oliver Wendell Holmes described this sense of everyday discovery:

The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping stones; how we get from one to the other, we do not know: something carries us; we do not take the step. A creating and informing spirit which is with us, and not of us, is recognized everywhere in real and in storied life. It is the Zeus that kindled the rage of Achilles; it is the Muse of Homer; it is the Daimon of Socrates; it is the inspiration of the seer; . . . it comes to the least of us as a voice that will be heard; it tells us what we must believe; it frames our sentences; it lends a sudden gleam of sense or eloquence to the dullest of us all, so that . . . we wonder at ourselves, or rather not at ourselves, but at this divine visitor, who chooses our brain as his dwelling-place, and invests our naked thought with the purple of the kings of speech or song. (1877, 48-50)

The apparent involuntariness and unexpectedness of creative insights are documented nicely in a lecture of the mathematician Henri Poincaré to the
Société de Psychologie
in Paris. On his discovery of the Fuchsian functions, Poincaré remarks,

I left Caen, where I was then living, to go on a geologic excursion under the aus-pices of the school of mines. The changes of travel made me forget my mathe-matical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it. . . [Later, the same thing happened again.] Then I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions apparently without much success and without a suspicion of any connection with my preceding searches. Disgusted with my fail-ure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with just the same character-istics of brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty. (Quoted in Koestler 1964, 115-116)

The transition from not knowing to knowing impresses us with its abruptness. Albert Einstein describes the seeming precipitousness of one of his ideas this way: “I was sitting in a chair in the Patent Office at Berne when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: ‘If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight.’ I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation” (quoted in Highfield and Carter 1993). Creative insights differ from other problem solutions primarily in these qualities of suddenness and unexpectedness. Without a preview in thought, then, the creative leap feels more like a gift than something we have consciously willed.

When we solve a problem using a standard “grind-it-out” algorithm, such as the technique for subtraction or multiplication of lengthy numbers, we experience little in the way of an “Aha!” when we reach the solution. We know when it is coming and that it is coming, so even though the solution itself may be unknown until it pops out of the grinder, it is not particularly surprising to discover. For problems that have no such algorithm, but that have been on our minds in some way, the solution seems to arise out of nowhere and jump into mind with many of its implications already in place. Schooler and Melcher (1995) remark on the importance we all attach to such insights and the sense we typically have that we are somehow not responsible for them. Instead, we usually attribute them to our unconscious minds.

Indeed, the sense that we are somehow “not driving” our own minds is a common experience people report when they reflect on their own expert performances. As we become highly skilled at a task, it is possible for our minds to drift away from what we are doing, so that when we subsequently notice we have done something interesting, we feel almost divorced from the action. A musician might be attempting to improvise and be fully surprised at the result. The blues guitarist B. B. King de-scribed this sensation in an interview (Gelfano 1998), noting the many cases when he found his music occurring to him without conscious plans. Similarly, we may wonder at what we say when we are particularly clever, and feel that we are not really deserving of authorship for some of our best quips. We are not ready to own up to causing the action at this time because we have not experienced the prior occurrence of thoughts fully consistent with the action. We may have some vague sense of what we are up to (“I think I’ll try to be clever now”), but we marvel at our good fortune when such plans do succeed.

The loss of a sense of authorship is even sought-after as a badge of skilled performance. Going “unconscious” is a good thing when you’re playing basketball, and more than one postgame interview has featured a player saying, “I just waited for the game to come to me” or “the game played me.” Losing oneself and one’s will is a goal as well in art. Indeed, there is a contemporary art movement devoted to “automatism,” the production of artistic products without the intrusion of conscious will. Dennett (2000) quotes the painter Philip Guston as saying, “When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my con-temporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too.”

These observations suggest that people are likely to experience little willfulness for some of their most inspired actions—the peaks of their creativity and skill. These actions spring into existence with seemingly minimal conscious thought, inspired as they are by the operation of extensively developed unconscious mental expertise, and so can present to us a sense of being unwilled. It is ironic that many of the most skilled acts we can do, the actions that others enjoy or find simply marvelous because of their high level of skill, and that others may therefore ascribe uniquely to us, may not be things we experience willing. Instead, we experience will when we must plod along, thinking methodically of all the parts of an action that we are putting together. The thoughts and acts we toil over as we grind the wheels to solve problems bit by bit may seem more willful, imbued with a sense of voluntariness, because we have encountered so many thoughts about them before the desired actions have finally emerged.

Hearing Voices

The consistency principle also offers a way of understanding the experiences of involuntariness reported by people with schizophrenia. In some 65 percent of people with this disorder, the symptoms include unusual experiences that seem to emerge from inconsistency of thought and action (Frith and Fletcher 1995; Sartorius, Shapiro, and Jablensky 1974). Certain of the person’s thoughts or actions do not seem to issue voluntarily from the self, perhaps because they do not arise in the context of consistent prior thoughts.

The experience of hearing voices, for example, involves the apparent perception of voices from people who are not there. A collection of historical descriptions of such symptoms (Peterson 1982) includes this 1840 quote from one John Percival, Esq., of London: “Only a short time before I was confined to my bed I began to hear voices, at first only close to my ear, afterwards in my head, or as if one was whispering in my ear, or in various parts of the room. . . . These voices commanded me to do, and made me believe a number of false and terrible things.” Now, many normal people report hearing voices from time to time—in fact, as many as 30 percent of college students in one study indicated at least one such experience (Posey and Losch 1983).
⁶
In the case of schizophrenia, how-ever, the experience is often profound and disturbingly recurrent, and often leads to a preoccupation with attempts to explain the voices (Frith 1992). And in schizophrenia there may also be experiences of thought insertion (having another person’s thoughts appear in one’s own mind), thought echo (experiencing one’s thoughts over again, sometimes in an-other’s voice), thought broadcasting (hearing one’s own thoughts spoken aloud), or alien control (experiencing one’s actions as performed by someone else). Such experiences are often called Schneiderian symptoms, after the psychiatrist Kurt Schneider (1959), who described them as indicative of schizophrenia.

These symptoms usually are interpreted as originating outside the self. The voices are not, however, “like living in a cheaply built apartment where our neighbors’ voices come through the walls. The voice the patient hears is directed at the patient and what the voice says has implications for the patient. This is the voice of an agent with the intention of altering the thought and behavior of the patient. For most patients the agent is omniscient and omnipotent” (Frith and Fletcher 1995, 74-75). The majority of a sample of patients with auditory hallucinations interviewed by Chadwick and Birchwood (1994) reported being unable to exert any influence on their voices. The voices are often interpreted as representing the patient’s own conscience, although some patients understand them as coming from other people (Chapman and Chapman 1988). The standard feeling is that the voice seems alien—the voice of another—even though the patient may realize the voice is in his or her own mind.

6.
It is also possible to extract what seem to be intelligible voices from random sounds, such as the white noise generated by the radio when it is tuned between stations. Such “electronic voice phenomena” are the result of the overeager sense-making apparatus of our language interpretation processes, and they can often produce entertaining interpretations of random sounds. A number of Web sites have audioclip examples of what seem to be particularly sensible phrases. The tendency to try to make sense of voicelike sounds is also the process that allows people to attribute satanic or other messages to rock lyrics played in reverse.

Much of the research on auditory hallucinations has focused on the idea that they are indeed self-generated. Gould (1948) used a throat microphone to record speech from schizophrenic patients and found in some cases that whispering or other vocalizations occurred during periods for which the patients later reported having heard voices. Psy-chophysiological measures of muscle movement in the voice box suggest that the voices are generally self-generated (Inouye and Shimizu 1970), and brain scans in hallucinating patients have indicated activity in Broca’s area, an area linked with language production (McGuire, Shah, and Murray 1993). So voices seem to arise when the patient’s own inner speech is perceived to be coming from outside the self. Indeed, when patients hum or keep their mouths open, they experience the voices less frequently (Green and Kinsbourne 1989).

The intriguing aspect of schizophrenic voices is their origin in thought/ action inconsistency. Graham and Stephens (1994) have described the problem as one of “introspective alienation.” The patient develops the sense that an episode occurring in the mind is attributable to someone else rather than to the self. This seems to occur primarily because the episode is in-consistent with prior thought. Thoughts that come to mind in a willful way typically do so in a format that makes sense. They follow. A person thinking this way can say, “I have a sense of deliberately directing my thinking toward a certain project or theme, such as crafting an apology, finding a solution to a problem, recollecting my trip to Berlin or Tenerife, without having some specific sequence of thoughts in mind at the outset” (Graham and Stephens 1994, 98-99). It is not that we need to know every-thing in advance of thinking it, but that we need to know something about where our thought may be going that then is consistent with what we think when we get there. Usually, we have a general idea of what we will think or do next. When inconsistent thought or action appears, we lose our sense that we are the ones in charge. The voices seem to belong to someone else.