O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.
—JULIAN JAYNES, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Early in the Iliad, in the tenth year of the Trojan War, Agamemnon—the leader of the expedition to Troy and the most powerful and prideful of Greek chieftains—announces to Achilles that he plans to rob him of his bride in retribution for supporting the return of a woman Agamemnon had taken from a local priest. Enraged, Achilles sets out to do what he would normally do in such situations: slaughter his challenger and everyone in his path. Just as Achilles is pulling his sword from his scabbard, however, the goddess Athena, protectress of the Greeks, descends from the heavens to placate his wrath and coax him onto a more prudent path:
The goddess standing behind Peleus’ son caught him by the fair hair, appearing to him only, for no man of the others saw her….
“I have come down to stay your anger—but will you obey me?—from the sky; and the goddess of the white arms Hera sent me, who loves both of you equally in her heart and cares for you. Come then, do not take your sword in hand, keep clear of fighting.”1
Achilles, uncharacteristically but wisely, takes Athena’s advice; he does not seek his revenge.
Critics have interpreted the role of the gods in the Homeric epics in various ways. Some have considered them a metaphor for the internal turmoil of the characters, some as a narrative device, some as reflective of an ancient pagan belief system. But only Julian Jaynes, a professor of psychology at Princeton, considered the intrusion of the gods in the Homeric epics literally. In his only book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a cult favorite first published in 1976, Jaynes put forth his view that the ancient Greeks depicted in the Iliad actually heard the voices of the gods instructing them. His interpretation of the Iliad was evidence in support of a greater theory: that man was once guided not by a unified consciousness but by verbal hallucinations—instructions spoken from within one’s own brain. Ancient voice-hearing, according to Jaynes, was caused by a physical split between the right and left hemispheres of the brain that only “mended” itself three thousand years ago in response to cataclysmic cultural changes, leading to the consciousness we possess today. Before that, everyone was a voice-hearer:
Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices…. The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.2
Anyone who now considers the problem of how voices are possible must contend with the theories—not to mention the enthusiasm, the ecstatic prose, and the polymathic erudition—of Julian Jaynes. He has his admirers, including the novelist John Updike and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and he has his detractors. (“How many students of cognitive science,” one reviewer has written, “have read this deeply unfashionable book under, as it were, the bedcovers?”)3 But his theories have been undeniably influential.
I cite Jaynes’s theory that we were all once floridly hallucinatory not because I believe it is true—perhaps the only thing that his boosters and critics agree upon is that it can’t be proved—but to introduce the idea that the problem of voice-hearing is in large part indistinguishable from the problem of consciousness, and that the relationship between the two has been fruitful in determining the attributes of each. This is because voice-hearing provides a vivid thought experiment in regard to one of the great problems of science: how the matter of the brain creates the feeling of the mind. With voice-hearing, the brain pops its head, like the Loch Ness monster, above the surface. For an instant one can actually “see” or, rather, “hear” the brain. Some thinkers believe that if we could catch that instant, we might have an opportunity to peer into the biology of consciousness.
Jaynes’s speculative theory also provides one of the finest descriptions available of the single most important phenomenological attribute of voice-hearing, an attribute that is also linked inextricably to the study of consciousness: lack of control over our thoughts. When an individual hears a voice, he is at that moment not the agent of his own thoughts but the vessel for them. He becomes, at the moment of voice-hearing, separate from himself, without control over his own mind—in effect, one of Jaynes’s noble automatons. The sense of ownership of one’s thoughts that is a hallmark of our conscious lives—the “I-ness” of consciousness—is dissolved, disintegrated. The voice-hearer becomes flooded with the awareness of the confident man caught in the earthquake—that the ground’s solidity has all along been nothing but a well-maintained illusion.
To Jaynes this perilous sensation did not register among ancient man. For Achilles and Agamemnon, the lack of conscious control went unnoticed because it was neurologically determined, and it was neurologically determined because it was culturally necessary: Without a reliable political structure, unseen verbal commands kept the social order intact. Voice-hearing was a form of disembodied political rule. To modern man, by contrast, the lack of conscious control over one’s thoughts almost always registers acutely. The abrogation of the conscious will is among our greatest fears, associated with madness and the dissolution of identity. For the voice-hearer, saddled with a brain that produces sensation unilaterally, he is forced to be an automaton but robbed of any sense of nobility.
In 1908, a German neurologist named Kurt Goldstein examined a fifty-seven-year-old woman who was exhibiting an odd symptom. One of her hands would not follow her commands. It tried to pull off her bed covers, to spill her drink, to choke her. The woman could control the hand only by forcefully moving it with the other. “I hit it and say: ‘Behave yourself, hand,’” the woman told Goldstein. “I suppose there must be an evil spirit in it.”4
The phenomenon introduced by Goldstein is known as alien-hand syndrome—or, more colorfully, the Dr. Strangelove effect—and it has been documented extensively ever since. It is typically caused by damage to or a severing of the corpus callosum, a tight bundle of nerve fibers that allows the two hemispheres of the brain to communicate with one another. Patients who have had their corpus callosum damaged or destroyed are called split-brain patients. They have a “bicameral mind,” as Jaynes would say, and their behavior and experiences have been an invaluable source of information about how the hemispheres interact and how the brain creates the feeling of an integrated selfhood. The patients also serve as an invaluable resource when exploring how we should interpret occasions on which the brain bypasses the conscious will.
Consider another example from the annals of alien hand. In 2000, Benson Hai and Ib Odderson, physicians in Port Jefferson, New York, and Seattle, respectively, published a case study with the wonderful title “Involuntary Masturbation as a Manifestation of Stroke-Related Alien Hand Syndrome.” The paper told the story of a seventy-three-year-old man whose left hand began pleasuring him against his will shortly after he suffered from a stroke. After going to the hospital with complaints of weakness on his left side, the man was transferred to a rehabilitation facility, where his more bizarre troubles began:
The patient’s wife…expressed deep concern when her husband’s left hand would publicly expose his genitals and begin masturbating. This occurred on many occasions when the patient was conversing with his caregivers and was confirmed by the authors on their daily rounds. The behavior was never seen to occur through the action of the right hand.5
If an observer did not have recourse to the knowledge of the physical damage to this patient’s brain, he could perhaps be excused if he interpreted the man’s actions in psychological terms—as the intrusion, perhaps, of the id into the ego. Certainly part of the man wished to masturbate in public; he simply must examine the part of him that did and figure out why it wanted to do so. With our knowledge of the man’s neurological injury, however, comes a responsibility to confront different questions. We are able to “see” an injury prior to which the man did not engage in such strange, albeit enjoyable, behavior. Some part of the man’s right brain, which controls the left side of the body, would seem to be acting in such a way as to create a purposeful action in his left hand. In the search for the cause of his behavior, we have no need to confront obscure motives. It is the man’s brain, not his subconscious, that is at fault. The questions then are: Are his actions still his own? Is he responsible for actions he has not experienced as his own?
Questions of responsibility become more complicated when we consider an individual whose brain is apparently whole and yet the individual still claims an inability to control his own actions. Examples for this are not hard to find. The dissolution of conscious control is the distinguishing characteristic of most mental illnesses. One man whom I have written about suffers from an especially severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He spends hours each day on his hands and knees picking leaves from his front yard or scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen floors, polishing tiles, dusting, scouring—all against his will. He says he feels as though he is under the control of some external force. He still has a conscious will, of course; he is not a puppet. He can cause himself to move and to think certain thoughts. He pays his bills and sees his family and goes to church every day. But when he attempts to apply his will to prevent himself from performing certain actions, he finds that he can’t. He is competing with another will that seems beyond him.
Inevitably, the battle between two wills—one experienced as self-generated and another experienced as external to the self—that is the hallmark of OCD leads to great self-recrimination, the result not only of having one’s self co-opted but of a real cultural stigma. Many people of this man’s acquaintance, for example, cannot understand why he simply does not stop cleaning. He seems to them, and to himself, unforgivably flawed. He has had two wives, both of whom have divorced him. The only solution he has found to this kind of judgment, aside from suicide, is stealth. Deeply ashamed, he spends a great deal of energy trying to hide his illness from others.6
The example isn’t arbitrary. Though it is rarely acknowledged to be the case, voice-hearing has a great deal in common with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Like OCD, voice-hearing often manifests itself in the form of direct commands that the hearer feels compelled to obey. Also like OCD, voice-hearing occurs in such a way as to make the experience akin to a painful cleaving of the will. It is difficult enough to ignore voices that come from the outside. To ignore voices that come from within takes a heroic effort that is made more difficult by the knowledge that one’s assailant is one’s self. The experiences of OCD and voice-hearing—voice-hearing that at least is not accompanied by a complete lack of what psychiatrists call “insight”—are both marked by an awareness that the conscious will is secondary in power and importance to the unconscious will.
“One of the most extraordinary facts of our life,” wrote William James, “is that, although we are besieged at every moment by impressions from our whole sensory surface, we notice so very small a part of them. The sum total of our impressions never enters into our experience, consciously so called, which runs through this sum total like a tiny rill through a broad flowery mead.”7
James placed great emphasis on attention and effort, on the ability of the conscious will to decide where that tiny rill—the “stream of consciousness,” as he more famously put it—will go and what it will carry. But what happens after that effort is made? I may steer my thoughts in the direction of voice-hearing, as I do every morning when I sit down to write, but offense invariably gives way to defense. I am besieged—an apt word—by memories and images and associations that I must work strenuously to ward off. I remember a movie I saw the night before; I think of what a friend said to me about her romantic problems; I take note of a chore I’ve promised to complete. I can, by an effort of the will, brush these thoughts aside, distract myself retroactively, call up other thoughts. But I am powerless to prevent the initial cognitive assault from occurring. Simply put, thoughts often just occur. One cannot control their entry into consciousness.
The matter of how much control we have over which thoughts appear in consciousness can be demonstrated by way of a well-worn but instructive thought experiment. The experiment goes like this: Do not think of a fish. If the person who reads this statement knows what the word fish means, he will inevitably think of one. It will be beyond his conscious control. Perhaps one person will think of a carp, another of a flounder, another of a shark, but some representation of a fish—verbal, visual, olfactory, etc.—will enter into his or her consciousness. The thinking will be automatic.
There is a long-standing and heated debate over how much of our mental activities are automatic, over to what extent we are merely, as T. H. Huxley famously put it, “conscious automata.” Regardless of quantity, however, there is undoubtedly a quality of automaticity to our everyday lives. The lack of willful control that is so clear in alien-hand syndrome and so psychologically destructive in obsessive-compulsive disorder and other mental disorders and symptoms is in fact the definitive aspect of what we like to think of as “normal” mental life as well.
In a brilliant article on the cognitive basis of voice-hearing published in 1986, the psychiatrist Ralph Hoffman, whose work focuses on the treatment of hallucinations, illustrated automaticity of action with the simple example of driving to work:
It so happens that I can, if I wish, consciously access a set of goals and subgoals (wish to drive car, wish to be transported to work, wish to be on time for work, etc.), certain beliefs (my car will start, my work place is accessible by certain roads, etc.), and the rudiments of a behavioral plan (walk to car, open door, turn ignition key, etc.). Though I generally get myself to work without being explicitly conscious of any such plan and its relationship to goals and beliefs, it is almost impossible to imagine how such…behavior could occur without representations such as these in a psychologically real sense.8
The key word in this passage is representations. Certain thoughts can be said to exist in our mind but not in our consciousness. We are unaware of them; we are limited by what James called the “narrowness of consciousness.” The brain engages in vast operations into which we have a severely restricted view, as if we were looking from a small, attic-size window.
What would happen if we did not have the ability to act on “autopilot,” so to speak? For one, we would likely be frozen by the myriad claims to our attention, like a mother overwhelmed by the onslaught of demands from too many children. If I were consciously aware of all I was engaged in while writing, for example, I would have no time to think of what I wanted to say. I would be much too busy directing the movement of my fingers on the keyboard, my posture in the chair, or the placement of a capital letter at the start of each sentence. “Writing” would become impossible. It is the automaticity of action that permits me to decide “I will write” and then, when engaged in writing, to concentrate only on higher functions such as argument and sentence structure.
Unconscious actions that follow from decisions of the “I will…” variety have been called conscious automaticity. There is unconscious automaticity as well, and it accounts for a large proportion of our everyday behavior. These behaviors do not require any conscious decision to call them into action. They are automatic reactions to the external world. The conscious will comes into play mainly on a macroscopic level, on what direction we guide that stream in or what rocks and branches we throw into it. On the microscopic level, the brain’s activity takes over. The benefit of the brain’s complexity is that it has evolved toward apparent top-down efficiency, leaving the conscious will to be the issuer of executive decisions. Automaticity allows us to act quickly—to respond to our name without thought when it is called out or to jump out of the way of a falling brick.
But our automatic thoughts are not just of this reflexive variety. We are also able to recall spatial and temporal information very well without any conscious attention, and we even react emotionally, without any conscious awareness, to facial expressions, physical gestures, and even hints about a person’s character. In a 1996 study, for example, a group of subjects was asked to order scrambled sentences that happened to contain words which are commonly associated with old age, such as Florida, wrinkled, gray, and retired. Another group was asked to order scrambled sentences that did not contain such words. Both groups were then timed without their knowledge as they left the experiment and walked down the hall. The subjects that had read sentences containing the old-age words walked significantly slower, as if they were acting out what those words signified. Later questioning revealed that they had no conscious awareness that the sentences they read contained the words in question, let alone that they had reacted to it. They had been moved by forces of which they had no conscious awareness.9
Where does this leave the conscious will? Much in our daily lives is driven by operations of the brain outside our control, but we obviously don’t experience the world in this way. We go through each day quite satisfied with the fact that we are not automatons, that we have willed our actions and our thoughts, and that we are in control of our lives. When we drive to work, to use Hoffman’s example, we do not experience as unintended our subtle manipulations of the gas and break pedals, our shifting of the gears, and our glancing in the side-view mirror. And while it is true that perhaps we don’t think about them as intended, either—we don’t think about them at all—if asked whether we chose to engage in those actions, we would feel as though we had willed them into being.
This feeling of conscious will in the absence of any real conscious control has been examined extensively by Daniel Wegner, a Harvard psychologist. In his book The Illusion of Conscious Will, Wegner develops the thesis that the brain creates the experience of willful action even when, as decades of psychological research have illustrated, an action is reflexive or illusory. The brain does this in order to provide the individual with a sense of control over his actions and thoughts, and a pragmatic belief that others are in control of their actions and thoughts, so that he might be able to distinguish sentient beings from inert objects. The experience of will, Wegner concludes, is just “a feeling that occurs to a person.” It is an illusion—a necessary one that allows us to act morally and responsibly, but an illusion nonetheless.10
The cause of the illusion of conscious will, according to Wegner, is the very fact that we are privy only to a very small portion of our mental activity. Imagine, Wegner writes, that by some magical power you have the ability to know exactly how and when a tree branch will move in the wind, and that the same magical power will make certain you will be thinking about the branch prior to each of its movements. It would probably seem to you that you were the agent of the branch’s movement, that you had caused it to move. Despite the fact that it was the wind that caused the branch’s movement, the knowledge you possessed would make it seem that you had power over the branch. “People experience conscious will,” Wegner writes, “when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action.”11
People are often wrong. Many studies of stimulus reaction time have showed that the experience one has of consciously willing an action often follows that action by a mathematically significant amount of time. One of the most famous experiments regarding this phenomenon was conducted by the physiologist Benjamin Libet in the early 1980s. Libet asked a group of subjects to move a finger at will while they wore electrodes on their scalp that would measure electrical potentials prior and up to the action itself. “Let the urge to act appear on its own any time without any preplanning or concentration on when to act,” Libet told his subjects. The subjects were also asked to report, based on the movements of a specialized, refined clock known as an oscilloscope, precisely when they experienced a “conscious awareness of ‘wanting’” to move their finger. What Libet found was that the brain geared up for the movement prior to the subjects’ being consciously aware that they intended to move. Furthermore, the subjects were aware of their finger moving before the finger actually moved. Will, Libet concluded, is an add-on that is often inconsequential to the action itself.12
If you accept the validity of Libet’s study—and by no means does everyone—then you might concede that the lack of conscious control over normal mental operations is similar to the lack of control that occurs in voice-hearing. The difference is that voice-hearers experience their lack of control quite dramatically. They are phenomenologically different from the rest of us. Unintendedness is the norm, but so is the experience of the will. When he hears a voice, the voice-hearer possesses one but not the other, and he is rightly troubled by this split in his conscious world. But it is worthwhile to consider that when the illusion of control is lost—when the brain whirrs in such a way that it seems as though someone who is not there has spoken aloud, when it seems that there is no will in our thoughts or our experiences or our perceptions—perhaps it is not the encroachment of unreality that we are witnessing but the arrival of reality, of the horrible truth: the absence of true will. This is not to say we should glorify the voice-hearer. To do so would be to glorify what is often a disturbing aberration in consciousness. Those voice-hearers who jealously uphold their originality and their insight are to be envied by those voice-hearers who don’t, but they are not in the majority. The majority are the sufferers, the men and women who have had their tail fins bumped unceremoniously by their own thoughts and gone wildly, frighteningly spinning groundward.