Hack80.Act Without Knowing It

Hack 80. Act Without Knowing It

How do we experience our actions as self-caused? It's not automatic; in fact, the feeling of consciousness may indeed have been added to our perception of our actions after our brains had already made the decision to act.

Place your hand on the table. Look at it as an object, not unlike just about anything else on the table. Now, raise one of your fingers. Why did you raise that one? Can you say? Was it a free choice? Or was the decision made somewhere else, somewhere in your brain you don't have access to? You experienced your finger being raised by you, but what was it in you that caused it?

If you record EEG readings [Hack #2] from the scalps of people just about to decide to raise their fingers and at the same time make them watch a timer and remember at what time they experienced deciding to raise their finger, they're found to report that the experience of deciding to raise their finger comes around 400 ms after the EEG shows that their brain began to prepare to raise their finger.1 Stimulating particular parts of the brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation [Hack #5], you can influence which finger people choose to move,² yet they still experience their choice as somehow willed by them, somehow "theirs."

This is an example of how an action we feel we own may be influenced by things outside of our conscious deliberation. The feeling of conscious will isn't always a good indication that we consciously willed something. And the reverse can also be true. We can disown actions we are responsible for, doing things we don't feel are caused by our own will.

8.7.1. In Action

Draw a cross on a piece of paper. Next, make a pendulum out of something light: a button and a length of string is ideal. Now hold the pendulum over the cross and ask a question ("Is the button on this pendulum blue?" or "Is it lunchtime yet?" perhaps). Know that to indicate "yes" the pendulum will swing clockwise, and to answer "no" the pendulum will swing counterclockwise. Don't rest your arm or elbow on anything as it holds the pendulum. Just watch the pendulum as it begins to swing to answer to your question.

Odds are, the pendulum swung in the way that answered the question correctly.

8.7.2. How It Works

What you've just experienced is called the ideomotor effect.³ It is the ideomotor effect that lies behind Ouija boards, dowsing wands, and facilitated communication (when helpers supposedly channel messages from the severely physically handicapped). There are no demons involved, except for the ordinary everyday human ones.

The movements produced in these cases are entirely self-caused (and, in the case of the Ouija board, self-caused and shared by a group of people)but because we don't feel we've consciously caused the movement, we're able to disown the action and it appears to have an external cause, as if it has nothing to do with us. Spooky! We do (in case you were still worried) have everything to do with it. Muscle readings from people playing with Ouija boards show that self-generated signals move the marker; the marker does not move the people's hands attached to it. Ouija boards only provide answers that the participants already knoweven if that knowledge is false. Some people have had conversations with "dead" people who have turned out to still be alive. Blindfolded participants for whom the board is rotated without their knowledge move the marker to the old, unrotated positions.

So when do we experience an action as self-caused? When don't we? Daniel Wegner of Harvard University4 has suggested that "we experience conscious will when we interpret our own thought as the cause of the action." In other words, we infer our feeling of conscious will when we notice that our intention to act went hand in hand with whatever happened. That means that if we had no such intention, the feeling of conscious will doesn't occur and, conversely, that we can feel an event was self-caused even if it had nothing to do with us. It's similar to the feeling of causation [Hack #79], which we deduce from our perception of eventswe have to, because it's impossible to perceive cause and effect directly. Our senses are all we have to work with.

Wegner suggests that the brain uses three basic principles in deciding whether to deliver an experience of conscious will: priority, consistency, and exclusivity. These are, respectively: that the thought precedes the action at an appropriate interval, that the thought is consistent with the action, and that the thought is the only candidate cause.

Now, in most situations, these conditions are met and we feel as if we properly own our actions. But in some situations, this isn't the case and we disown the action, like those of the pendulum. We make small muscle movements with the hand holding the pendulum, when thinking of the "yes" or "no" answer we expect to receivemuscle movements so small that we're barely aware that we're making them. Perhaps we would be aware of our muscles moving, except that the ultimate effect is so disproportionate: our hands move invisibly, but the pendulum swings obviously. The microthought versus the large swinging response violates the principle of consistency, and we can hardly believe that our own actions are a salient cause. That's why we don't experience self-cause and are willing to speculate about other, more proportionate, candidate causes: spirits from the afterlife and the like.

Given this, it's easy to see how behaviors that happen without much conscious will or any effort manage to escape being labeled as self-caused, such as our "monkey see, monkey do" [Hack #98] response to other people's habits.

The fact that Wegner's principles are used to understand events external to the brain isn't too surprising. After all, we have no direct way of perceiving causation in external events other than by principles like priority, consistency, and exclusivity. What is even more interesting is that the brain uses the same principles for understanding internal events like conscious action. This suggests that there are serious limits to our conscious insight into the workings of our own brains. There are good computational reasons why this should be so. You'd be distracted if you were constantly being informed of just how all your decisions were being made by your brain. Most of the processing has to be below the surface for you to operate efficiently. The ideomotor effect and related phenomenon are evidence that when it came to conscious understanding of our own actions, our brain found it more convenient to evolve a secondary set of mechanisms to infer mental causation than open up our mental modules to give us direct, but time-consuming, insight.

8.7.3. End Notes

1. Kornhuber, H. H., & Deeke, L. (1965). Hirnpotentialänderungen bei Willkürbewegungen und passiven Bewegungen des Menschen: Bereitschaftspotential und reafferente Potentiale. Pflügers Archiv, 284, 1-17. Discussed in Wegner, D. M., & Wheatley, T. P. (1999). Apparent mental causation: Sources of the experience of will. American Psychologist, 54, 480-492.

2. Brasil-Neto, J. P., Pascual-Leone, A., Valls-Solé, J., Cohen, L. G., & Hallett, M. (1992). Focal transcranial magnetic stimulation and response bias in a forced-choice task. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 55, 964-966.

3. Wikipedia entry for the ideomotor effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_effect).

4. Daniel Wegner's home page (http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner) and his book on this topic. Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.