7
Mind Control and the Magician’s Force
Derren Brown is one of the most popular magicians in the United Kingdom. Back in the late 1990s, he pioneered a new type of magic called “mind control,” which blends magic and science. Brown claims that his demonstrations rely on a combination of suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship. While traditional magicians are extremely secretive about their mysterious powers, Brown astonishes his audience by telling them exactly how it is done. He does not pretend to read your mind or to contact mystical spiritual forces. No, Brown claims that all of his illusions rely on manipulating your mind using scientifically plausible principles.
In one such performance, a volunteer named Alice is invited to browse through Hamleys, the United Kingdom’s largest toy store, and she is asked to mentally choose one of the nearly quarter of a million toys. After spending a long time deliberating over her choice, Alice finally makes up her mind, but to her absolute amazement, Derren Brown has predicted what seemed like an entirely free choice. Predicting the outcome of a future event is a classic magic trick, but unlike most traditional magicians, Derren Brown explains exactly how this was done. He does not pretend to have time-traveling skills or any other supernatural powers. Instead, he claims to have used unconscious priming techniques that allow him to control Alice’s mind. For example, before entering the store, Brown subtly mimed a giraffe and mumbled the word “giraffe” in her ear. As they browsed through the store, they passed by giraffe patterns and giraffe toys, and the word “giraffe” was printed in lots of locations. Brown explains that while Alice did not consciously process these stimuli, they unconsciously influenced her choice. Indeed, when questioned, Alice is completely baffled as to how he managed to predict her free choice.
Derren Brown is one of the most talented and impressive magicians, but are we really that suggestible? In the next two chapters, we will explore how magicians control your mind, and we will take a closer look at the science behind mind control. Is it possible to take charge of your thoughts? What does this mean for your sense of free will in general?
Taken at face value, Derren Brown’s demonstration suggests that we are easily manipulated into doing things against our will and that we have very little control over our own thoughts and actions. This will jar with many because we intuitively feel as if we are in charge of our own thoughts and behavior, and the idea of abandoning our sense of free will is unsettling. But is this form of mind control scientifically possible? If so, it raises some fundamental questions about who we are.
The debate about free will dates back to the ancient Greek philosophers, and philosophers and scientists have argued for millennia about whether we are truly free in choosing our actions. Determinism suggests that all our actions have been determined by past events, and this includes the neural processes inside our brain. By its own logic, determinism implies that there is no such thing as free will. Abandoning our free will is deeply unsettling, and doing so has major implications for society. If we are not responsible for our own actions, who is? Can you be convicted of a crime if you are not responsible for what you have done? If all of our actions have been influenced by past events, do we have any choice about being good or bad? Although we find it hard to abandon the notion of free will, arguing for free will raises several serious challenges.
The concept of free will lies at the heart of what makes us human, and answering this issue requires us to look at the fundamental building blocks of the universe. One of Isaac Newton’s many revolutionary discoveries was the idea that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. According to Newton’s law, all events in the universe are part of a ginormous causal chain that was set in motion at the birth of the universe. Newton’s law implies that if you have accurate measurements and a correct model of the universe, you will be able to predict any future event.
Newton’s law raises a big challenge for advocates of free will because your every thought and action results from neural activation inside your brain. Your decision to turn the page and all of the fine motor movement required to do so rely on neurons inside your body communicating with one another. Similarly, your decision to continue reading relies on neural activity deep inside your brain. Very few scientists would disagree that all our thoughts and behavior result from complex neuronal activities. Rejecting the biological basis for human cognition involves accepting a form of dualism, but as we have seen in the previous chapter, few accept the idea that our neurons are influenced by some form of metaphysical magical force. However, accepting a biological and physical cause for all of our behavior implies that all of our thoughts are part of the causal chain, which according to Newtonian law implies that they are predetermined. The problem we now face is that unless we accept dualism, our thoughts, including our sense of free will, are part of the causal chain that was set in motion long before we were born.
Abandoning free will is uncomfortable, and philosophers have tried to find ways in which physical determinism and free will can both hold true. This view is known as compatibilism, and physicists and mathematicians have provided new ways in which free will can potentially be regained. During the course of the previous century, it became apparent that Newton’s laws were not as universal as he had hoped. For example, French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré discovered that while Newton’s laws can explain relatively simple planetary systems, it is practically and theoretically impossible to predict more complex systems.1 Although these complex systems are determined by a starting point, it is simply impossible to predict their outcome. Our weather represents one of these chaotic systems, and even though you can use a large number of meteorological measurements and complex computational models to predict tomorrow’s weather, it is impossible to come up with a reliable long-term forecast.
Edward Lorenz illustrates the nature of these chaotic systems nicely by using a weather metaphor, which is now simply known as the “butterfly effect.”2 These chaotic systems do not behave randomly, and while it is possible to make some fairly accurate short-term predictions, it is impossible to predict the future. However, chaos theory does not necessarily kill determinism. Just because you cannot predict the weather does not imply that it has not been predetermined.
A bigger problem for determinism comes from quantum mechanics. Even though objects that we can observe with the naked eye play by the rules of Newton’s laws, subatomic particles play by a very different rule book. In the quantum world, very strange things can happen. For example, quanta can simultaneously act as waves and particles, and on a quantum level, we cannot predict things in a deterministic way. Erwin Schrödinger demonstrated that the simple act of measuring an electron’s position as it orbits the atomic nucleus alters its value. This means that, from a theoretical perspective, it is impossible to measure or predict the future. There is a big leap from quantum mechanics and the biological processes underpinning human cognition, yet some have argued that quantum laws can also apply on a cellar level.3
In the physical world, other principles, such as that of emergence, propose that complex systems may be more than the sum of their parts, which implies that you cannot necessarily predict their function simply by understanding the theory and laws of another level of organization. For example, understanding the inner workings of the human brain does not necessarily inform us about how humans interact with one another or the abilities and functions that emerge from such interactions. As we see with quantum mechanics, different laws apply to different levels of organization, and it is therefore possible that the laws that govern the complex system underlying our conscious experience cannot be simply reduced to the physical laws of causality.4 This argument does not explain how our sense of free will emerges, but at least it provides an argument against determinism and thus opens the possibility that we are in charge of our own actions.
The debate as to whether we have free will or not is complex, and more than two thousand years of discussion have failed to result in any conclusion on the matter. One of the central problems lies in the fact that our sense of control is compelling, but some scientists have started to argue that this sense of control might itself be an illusion.5 Proving that thoughts and behavior can be unconsciously manipulated provides some weight to this argument. However, let’s not take Derren Brown’s performances at face value, because they too may be illusions. Before we abandon our belief in free will, let us look at the psychology underlying this type of mind control. Are you truly able to control a person’s mind through unconscious priming? Can we use hypnosis to create a programmed assassin (as in The Manchurian Candidate)? Is our sense of free will really an illusion? Let us start by looking at some of the ways that magicians can influence your mind.
The Magician’s Force
Imagine that a magician asks you to pick a card from a fully shuffled deck. However, before you do so, he declares that he has made a prediction that is sealed inside an envelope. To everyone’s amazement, the prediction matches your freely chosen card. How is this possible? Although your choice may have felt as though it were free, the magician in fact forced you to choose that particular card, a principle that magicians refer to as the force. While the force is commonly applied in card magic, magicians also use this principle to influence a wide range of selections. The key purpose of the magician’s force is to influence a person’s choice without them being aware of it.6 In some instances, the magician has full control over your decision, while in others he simply increases the probability that you will choose a particular item. It is important to note that forcing is distinct from other forms of social persuasion, such as when a salesperson tries to indirectly yet overtly persuade you to buy his product.7 In the magician’s force, your choice has been systematically biased, but you feel like the selection was entirely free.
There are as many different ways to force your decision as there are to misdirect your attention. It is not my intention to describe them all, nor do I want to reveal the secrets behind some of the cleverest methods. However, let us look at some of the most common forcing principles.
Many forcing techniques rely on restricting your choice by making it physically impossible to choose another item. For example, you may be asked to choose a card from a pack that contains identical playing cards. This is the most basic card force, but there are countless craftier techniques that rely on the same principle. For example, in the classic force, the magician spreads the cards in a particular way and times his spreading action so that your hand reaches for the intended card precisely at the right moment. Although you feel as though you had the opportunity to pick any card, you end up with the card that the magician pushed between your fingers. While the magician forced you to pick that card, you feel like it was your own choice.8
Other forcing techniques rely on exploiting people’s stereotypical behavior. For example, if you place four cards on the table and ask the spectator to touch one, he is unlikely to touch the cards on the outside and is most likely to go for the one just right of center. Similarly, when you ask someone to choose a number between one and ten, the most common answer is seven. Jay Olson and colleagues have recently measured the probability of naming different paying cards, and their analysis reveals that some cards, such as the ace of hearts and queen of hearts are the most commonly named cards.9
The visual saliency force is most closely linked to one of the principles that Derren Brown claimed to be using. Here the magician asks the spectator to mentally choose a card as the magician rapidly flips through them. Each card is only visible for a split second, but one of them, the force card, remains visible for a bit longer. Olson and colleagues have demonstrated that this principle can effectively influence people’s choice nearly every single time (98 percent), yet very few notice that their choice has been influenced. Others have reported similar findings, and these results suggest that when people are required to choose from a select group of items, increasing the visual saliency can unconsciously influence their choice.10
There are countless other forcing techniques that rely on exploiting people’s interpretation of an event. This is the principle underlying the magician’s choice force, where you genuinely make a free choice, but the magician frames the selection process in a way that will always result in you choosing the forced item. For example, he might place two cards on the table and ask you to choose one. If you choose the intended card, he will ask you to keep that card. If, on the other hand, you choose the other card, he will ask you to hand it to him, leaving you with the intended card. This principle ensures that you always end up with the force card, and it is often applied using more than two cards. The beauty of this technique is that you do have a genuinely free choice, and as long as you never witness the alternative outcomes, it is very difficult to discover that the outcome of your selection was rigged. Indeed, Hiroki Ozono presented an experiment at the 2017 Science of Magic Association Conference in which participants watched a short video clip in which the magician’s choice was used to force one of four cards, after which they were required to work out the method behind the trick.11 His results showed that only 12 percent of the participants managed to work out the correct solution to this force, and the majority suspected the involvement of a confederate, sleight of hand, or some other psychological principle. The magician’s force is an extremely effective and surreptitious method to manipulate your choice.
It is clear from this short discussion that magicians have powerful techniques to influence your choice, and we are starting to learn more about why they work. I use a range of forcing techniques in my performances, and I have experienced the ease with which you can influence someone’s choice. However, during a magic show, it is very difficult to ask the audience about how free they felt the selection was. Scientific studies on forcing have revealed that people experience these forced choices as genuinely free. For example, people feel no difference between choices that were genuinely free and those that were forced.12 However, there is a big difference between forcing a playing card and getting someone to choose a giraffe in Hamleys. Before we fully abandon our sense of free will, let us now turn to mind control techniques in more complex real-world contexts.
Mind Control through Drugs and Subliminal Persuasion
There is a long and dark history of scientists and government agencies searching for subversive ways to influence people’s behavior. For example, during the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up a top secret research program that aimed to develop mind-controlling drugs that could be used against Soviet enemies.13 At the time, there was a strong belief that the Soviets had come up with effective brainwashing techniques, capable of altering peoples’ thoughts. In fear of losing out on these new psychological warfare tools, the CIA set up Project MKUltra in 1953. This top secret research project, which included researchers from nearly eighty universities, spent the next decade exploring and testing cutting-edge mind control techniques, which ranged from hypnosis to mind-altering psychedelic substances. This research often involved administering drugs, such as LSD, without the subject’s consent, after which information on their behavior was secretly gathered. Even at the time, this research was considered highly unethical, so most of the documentation was destroyed, and it is therefore difficult to assess the details of the program. Hallucinogenic drugs and even alcohol can significantly alter our minds, but it is rather doubtful as to whether they can be implemented to control more specific behaviors.14 Psychologists and government agencies have spent much time and effort researching alternative forms of mind control, and many of them have tried to exploit the idea of tapping into our unconscious mind.
The idea of controlling your mind using unconscious primes dates back to the early days of experimental psychology, and it has always been extremely controversial. The key principle underlying this unconscious persuasion technique, which is also known as subliminal perception, involves presenting you with a prime (some visual or auditory stimulus) that you cannot perceive consciously but which will still influence your choice in some way. One of the earliest subliminal perception experiments took place in 1898, a time that preceded our modern projection techniques. The psychologist Boris Sidis studied subliminal perception by showing cards that contained alphanumeric characters to participants who were seated at such a distance that they could barely see the cards.15 Although most of the participants claimed that they could not consciously perceive the characters, they were able to accurately guess their identity. In other experiments, Sidis asked participants to choose between two different characters immediately after the subliminal presentation. Although his volunteers claimed that they did not know the identity of the character they had seen, when forced to choose between two alternatives, they performed significantly better than would be expected by chance. Nearly a decade later, Marie Stroh and colleagues demonstrated that you can whisper a name into someone’s ear, and although the person is not able to consciously recognize what is being said, they are able to guess the word correctly.16
Several other early studies seemed to demonstrate the possibility that our thoughts can be influenced by things we cannot consciously perceive.17 These findings came at a time when scientists and the public were fascinated with the idea that many of our thoughts and behaviors are influenced and controlled by forces outside our conscious control. For example, Sigmund Freud’s highly influential psychodynamic theory relies heavily on unconscious processes, and thus the idea of unconscious mind control found a fruitful seedbed.
The concept of subliminal perception, however, truly captured the public’s imagination in the late 1950s, after the publication of a newspaper article in the little-known journal Advertising Age. The journal reported a story about a market researcher by the name of James M. Vicary, who discovered a new secret weapon for advertisers: the invisible commercial. His new form of persuasion was based on subliminal perception. Vicary claimed that he was able to flash a commercial for an incredibly brief amount of time—as short as three one-thousandths of a second—and while these messages could not be perceived consciously, they effectively influenced people’s consumer behavior.18 His claim appeared to be based on real scientific data, and he reported that an invisible commercial urging people to drink Coca-Cola and eat popcorn had increased popcorn sales by 57.5 percent and Coke sales by 18.1 percent.
Early in 1958, Life magazine picked up the story and ran an article on Vicary’s “hidden” selling techniques, which reached a wide readership. Life treated Vicary’s claims as facts and elaborated on the idea of how this subliminal persuasion technique could be used to change people’s behavior more generally, ranging from antilitter campaigns to promoting political candidates.19 News commentators quickly jumped on the broader implications that this new persuasion technique offered and drew parallels with the totalitarian propaganda in George Orwell’s 1984.20 These newspaper articles were all published under the backdrop of the Soviet Union launching Sputnik 1, which represented the beginning of the space race and offered the possibility of global remote surveillance and mind control weapons. The concept of subliminal mind control also caught the government’s attention, and attempts were made to ban this form of advertising. In the United Kingdom and Australia, subliminal advertising is still banned today.
Although Vicary and his team tried to file for a patent on subliminal advertising, they never actually tested the system, and the results they published in the paper were fabricated. The story that created all of this paranoia was a hoax. Meanwhile, scientists started to question some of the earlier subliminal perception claims by pointing out methodological flaws in their experimental design.21
One of the central controversies back then, as is still the case today, surrounded the extent to which the primes were truly invisible. Did the primes really influence people’s behavior without them being aware? Charles Eriksen argued that while participants may claim that they did not see the stimulus, they may have glimpsed it and are simply not confident enough to report it when asked.22 Vicary claimed that his stimuli were presented for less than three milliseconds, and it is unlikely that anyone could consciously perceive a word that has been presented for such a short amount of time. Incidentally, back in the 1950s, the technology was not available for such a rapid presentation. The big problem in much of the subliminal perception research is that if the stimulus is presented for too long, people become aware of it, and it is no longer considered to be subliminal. However, if it is presented too rapidly, it fails to have any influence on subsequent behavior. There is only a very narrow window in which the effects are observed.
Even though there is very little, if any, evidence to suggest that subliminal messages can influence complex behavior, American consumers spend more than $50 million annually on self-help tapes that contain subliminal messages intended to help enhance self-esteem, increase memory, and even lose weight.23
Even though Vicary made up his results and the self-help industry unscrupulously exploits people’s misconceptions about subliminal perception, this does not mean that subliminal perception does not work. There are countless more recent studies that have illustrated how subliminal primes can influence our behavior. Neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography, are providing new insights into how these unconscious primes can influence our brain while being unnoticed.24 The main debate now concerns the types of behavior that these unconscious stimuli can influence, and it is clear that they are relatively basic. For example, while it is possible to prime someone with an emotional face, it is more doubtful as to whether these types of primes can be used to control more complex behavior.25
There are, however, several other techniques that have been used to influence behavior unconsciously. In the previous chapter, we learned about inattentional blindness and the fact that people are blind to things that they fail to attend to. In inattentional blindness, it is possible for people to fail to notice a word, but this word can still influence subsequent behavior.26 For example, Arien Mack and Irvin Rock demonstrate that even though participants often fail to notice a word presented while their attention is being distracted, this “invisible” word effectively influences their own choice of words.
The idea of controlling your mind through unconscious processes gains further support from studying patients who suffer from a rather common neurological disorder known as hemispatial neglect. This is a neurological attentional disorder that results from damage to one of the two cerebral hemispheres, often as the result of a stroke. Patients suffering from left hemispatial neglect fail to consciously perceive anything that is presented to their left. For example, these patients may only read the left half of a page and simply ignore all of the words that are presented on the neglected side. Neglect can also affect a wide range of nonvisual behaviors, such as dressing and self-care. For example, some patients with visual neglect may only shave one side of their face and only eat food that is located in the nonneglected side. In these patients, there is nothing wrong with their eyes or their perceptual system; they simply cannot attend to that part of the world, making them “attentionally blind.” However, even though they cannot consciously perceive things in their neglected field, this unconscious information still influences their behavior. For example, Anna Berti and Giacomo Rizzolatti set up an experiment in which patients with hemispatial neglect were required to respond as quickly as possible to a target picture that was either an animal or a fruit.27 The patients were also presented with a picture of a different fruit or animal in the neglected field, and even though these images were not consciously perceived, the patients responded much more quickly when the two images were from the same category. This “invisible” stimulus managed to prime their response. These and many other neuropsychological studies add weight to the idea that stimuli we cannot consciously perceive can influence our thoughts and behavior.
All of the unconscious mind control techniques we have looked at so far rely on finely tuned stimulus presentation techniques or brain damage. In 1972, Wilson Bryan Key published an influential and controversial bestseller entitled Subliminal Seduction, which suggested there might be easier ways of controlling your mind.28 Key claimed that advertisers embed sexual images of body parts such breasts and genitals, which, while not immediately obvious to the observer, are picked up by our unconscious mind. Key argued that these hidden symbolic messages stimulate our unconscious mind, which in turn motivates us to purchase the advertised products and brands. The book contained no systematic empirical research but included lots of rather amusing examples. He claimed, for example, that the word “SEX” appeared in the ice cubes of a Gin advertisement, which he saw as clear evidence of this type of trickery.
Key’s book was immensely influential and fueled people’s paranoia about being subversively brainwashed. Unlike unconscious priming, this form of subliminal persuasion presents fully visible images, but the hidden messages are not consciously perceived. I think that this is the principle most closely related to Derren Brown’s claimed method for manipulating Alice to buy the giraffe. Let us therefore look at the evidence supporting this claim in more detail.
Many social psychological theories are based on the idea that people can be primed to behave in certain ways, and in many situations, this priming is incidental and occurs automatically.29 For example, if you get people to read a set of words that are all related to the concept of kindness, people view others as being kinder.30 There is little doubt that you can prime someone using a visible prime, but this is not what Derren Brown claims to be doing. Is it possible to prime someone without them noticing the prime? In the priming study described above, all the volunteers were consciously aware of the words that they were reading, and as such, we cannot consider this to be subliminal persuasion. However, more recently, John Bargh and colleagues have published a highly influential and widely discussed study that seems to suggest that the unconscious persuasion of more complex behavior is possible.
Bargh and colleagues designed a clever experiment to test whether words that were associated with being old could influence people’s behavior even when they were unaware of the prime.31 Their participants were told that they were taking part in a language study that involved putting a scrambled sentence into the correct order. For example, the words “piece,” “gray,” “of,” “fabric,” and “a” would be reordered to form “a piece of gray fabric.” The clever part of this experiment was that, unbeknown to the participants, one of the words always related to being old. They were presented with thirty different words of this type, such as “gray,” “conservative,” “bitter,” and “wise.” Much like the subjects in Brown’s Hamleys demonstration and Key’s subliminal persuasion, the participants in this study were completely unaware of the relationship between the words. Indeed, when later questioned, only a tiny minority reported that they had noticed the concept.
After completing the language task, participants thought that the experiment was over. However, the real experiment was just about to start. The experimenter then measured participants’ walking speed as they left the room. Rather remarkably, participants who had been exposed to the old-age words walked more slowly than participants who had not been exposed to these words. Importantly, they appeared to be doing so even though they were completely unaware of the link between the exposure to the words and the behavior. These results seem to suggest that Derren Brown’s unconscious persuasion may indeed be plausible. The findings caused quite a stir in the scientific community because they contradicted many of the conclusions based on a large body of research from the unconscious priming literature.
The long history of subliminal perception has taught us to be cautious about extraordinary claims, and indeed, John Bargh’s findings were too good to be true. More recently, Stéphane Doyen and colleagues tried to replicate the findings using more controlled measures.32 Rather than relying on subjective timings, the experimenters used automatic triggers to measure participants’ walking speed, and under these more controlled conditions, the priming effect disappeared. These recent findings cast doubt on the possibility of unconsciously priming complex behavior.
There has been a long and controversial debate about unconscious persuasion. While it is clear that some stimuli can influence our cognitive processes, it is important to note that these effects are quite small and often depend on having precisely the right experimental conditions for them to emerge. While research on subliminal perception has important implications for many of our current models of cognition and illustrates that cognition can be influenced without us noticing, these effects are generally too small to be of much practical use in advertising or any other domain.33 They are simply not sufficiently robust to be applied in any magic performance.
Is Free Will an Illusion?
Most forcing techniques do not rely on priming, yet people still feel as if their manipulated choice has been free. At the center of most forcing techniques lies a more fundamental manipulation of free will, and some scientists have started to argue that our sense of free will may simply be an illusion.34
Back in 1853, Michael Faraday, who is best known for his pioneering work on physics and electricity, carried out groundbreaking research on people’s conscious sense of control by studying spiritualist séances and in particular the phenomenon of table turning.35 As we saw in chapter 3, spiritualists held séances in which objects would mysteriously start to move. To do so, a group of people would gather around a table and place their hands flat on the table in front of them. The medium would then call upon the spirits and ask for a sign, and in most instances, the table would start to move mysteriously.
Mediums have often been accused of fraud; indeed, many employed tricks such as hidden devices to move objects. However, table turning seemed to be different. Tables appeared to move even in situations where the medium could not have interfered with the table. During this time, many new physical forces were being discovered, and Faraday was curious about the true cause of this mysterious effect. If the spirits could truly influence the physical world, this would dramatically change our understanding of physics.
Faraday came up with an ingenious experiment to investigate the table turning effect. He glued pieces of card to the tabletop with a soft, flexible cement that would give a bit if the sitters’ hands moved. He then attached a device to both the table and the card that allowed him to measure the timing of the movements. If the card moved before the table, it would indicate that the movements were initiated by the sitters rather than the spirits. The results were clear: the card always moved first, and thus there was no need to rewrite the laws of physics.
When questioned, the sitters were convinced that they were not moving the table, and most participants were convinced that their hands remained stationary throughout. In a follow up experiment, Faraday used a pressure gauge to illustrate the amount of pressure his sitters were exerting on the table. Once they received feedback about their actual movements, the table stopped moving. Faraday concluded that the sitters were not cheating but that they were using “unconscious muscular actions” to influence the table’s movements. Table turning is a very powerful illusion, and it works just as well now as it did in the past. My friend Arthur Roscha often performs this illusion in his magic shows.
Faraday’s table turning study was pioneering because it illustrated that people can initiate motor movements without noticing that they are doing so, and there are countless other examples that illustrate these unconscious actions. For example, in the Ouija board, letters are placed around the edge of a board, and sitters are asked to put their fingers on the bottom of an upturned glass. When they start to ask questions, the glass suddenly starts to move without anyone consciously controlling it. While some people argue that the glass is moved through spirit forces, it is in fact moving through physical means, but the movements are initiated by unconscious processes. If you apply pressure to an object, it is difficult to hold your fingers completely still. As our arm gets tired, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of individual movements. If someone initiates a tiny movement, others will compensate and adjust their finger positions, which results in bigger movements. In most situations, our bodies continuously adjust position, which is essential to standing on two feet or picking up a drink without spilling it. These small, finely tuned ideomotor movements are part of our everyday lives, yet we rarely notice them. In the case of the Ouija board, this force is amplified to produce astonishing movements.
These ideomotor movements illustrate an intriguing dissociation between our conscious will and our motor actions, and they explain a wide range of ancient mystical phenomena, such as automatic writing, dowsing, and pendulums. More recently, however, Hélène Gauchou and colleagues have argued that Ouija boards can potentially be used to tap into unconscious processes that are inaccessible through conscious reflection.36 Using a specially designed Ouija board and a memory test, the researchers demonstrated that the Quija board could elicit significantly more accurate responses than a volitional report. As with hypnosis, you are initiating these ideomotor movements yourself, yet you simply do not realize that you are doing so, which is why you experience the movement as if it were controlled by an alien force.
There is much neurological evidence to support the idea that our sense of free will may be an illusion. For example, Wilder Penfield stimulated parts of his patients’ motor cortex while they were awake.37 Since the brain itself does not contain any pain receptors, patients could feel this stimulation. Stimulating specific parts of the motor cortex caused the patients to initiate complex movements that resembled volitional movement patterns. Seeing your hand move without you consciously initiating the movement must be a rather odd experience, and these patients often reported that they did not do the action. Instead, it felt like Penfield had “pulled it out of them.” According to Daniel Wegner, these clinical observations illustrate that people’s experience of free will may be an addition to the voluntary action rather than the cause of it.38
Most of the evidence we have discussed so far is based on neurology patients, and this often makes it rather difficult to generalize to the normal population. However, in 1985, Benjamin Libet published a paper that stirred up debate regarding our sense of free will.39 As I am writing these words, I feel like I am consciously deciding which finger to press down on the keyboard, and I am pretty convinced that it is my conscious intentions that are causing my fingers to move. Libet set up an experiment to test this intuitive assumption. He asked each volunteer to flex their wrist at random times. Electrodes were attached to their arm and scalp by the experimenters, which allowed them to measure both when the wrist movement occurred and when their brain initiated the motor command. The really hard part of this experiment was finding an accurate measure of when participants felt that the action was being initiated, and to do so, they developed a clever measure. They placed a special clock in front of the participant that had a dot moving around a clock face. All that participants were required to do was to note the dot’s location when they decided to move their wrist. Using these three different measures, Libet was able to get independent readings of the time when participants intended to move, the time when the brain initiated the move, and the time when the actual movement occurred.
Libet’s results were astonishing: they consistently demonstrated that although the decision to act came about 200 milliseconds before the actual action occurred, the brain prepared the action about 350 milliseconds before the intention to act occurred. What this means is that our brain starts processing the action nearly a third of a second before we intend to act. You might think that a third of a second does not sound like much, but in terms of neuronal processing, this is a significant delay. Even more remarkably, John-Dylan Haynes and colleagues used fMRI to show that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of the prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex up to 10 seconds before people become aware of their decision.40
It is hard to envisage that your brain makes decisions before you consciously decide on them but so is the idea that you perceive the future or that your conscious experience is riddled with holes. As we have seen throughout this book, many of our intuitions about our mental capacities are illusory. Likewise, some are arguing that our sense of conscious will is simply an illusion.
Jay Olson and colleagues have recently developed an experimental setup that combines ancient magic techniques with science fiction to further illustrate that our sense of will is rather more malleable than we think.41 Olson invited volunteers at McGill University to participate in a study that ostensibly tested a cutting-edge mind-reading and insertion technology. Although fMRI can be used to measure specific brain activations, we are far from being able to use these neuroimaging technologies to measure specific thoughts. This was not so in Olson’s lab though. He met his volunteers at the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at McGill University and asked them whether they had heard of the Neural Activation Mapping project, which he described as a well-known technology capable of reading and manipulating thoughts. He then proceeded to explain that they were developing new tools to map neural activation patterns onto specific thoughts and were ultimately capable of using this technology to insert thoughts deep into your mind. McGill University is equipped with state-of-the-art neuroimaging technologies but not in Olson’s lab. Although the scanner and all of the attached equipment looked impressive, it was all an illusion. The scanner was made of plywood, and the computers for interpreting the neural activations were not even connected to the boxes. All of this was simply intended to convince participants that the researchers were capable of manipulating people’s brains.
The experiment started with a calibration procedure in which each participant was required to freely choose a number between one and one hundred and to think of this number while they were lying inside the plywood scanner. Olson then walked back to the data analysis computers and picked up a printout that contained the outcome of the analysis. With the piece of paper clipped to a clipboard, Olson returned to the participant and asked her which number she had been thinking of. The volunteer named the number 41, and while not perfectly correct, the number written on the piece of paper was only off by one. Olson then repeated the same procedure another two times, and on both occasions the number on the printout perfectly matched the freely chosen number.
It is of course impossible to read a person’s precise thoughts with a scanner—let alone one made of plywood. All of this was simply theater. Olson used a secret writing device to write the chosen number onto the computer readout after the volunteer named the number, thus ensuring a perfect match on each occasion. Being off by one number was intentional and relied on the “too perfect” theory to make the illusion more compelling. After these compelling illustrations, most of the participants were convinced that the scanner was capable of reading their mind. The most surprising results, however, came when they used the same machine to influence people’s thoughts.
Now that the volunteers were convinced that the scanner could read their minds, Olson wanted to see whether the same machine could be used to convince them that it was capable of inserting thoughts. As before, the volunteers were asked to think of a number, but this time, they were told that the scanner was influencing their brain activity in a way that would direct them toward choosing a particular number. After a few moments in the fake scanner, the volunteers were asked to reveal the number that had come to their mind, after which Olson revealed that this was the number that the scanner had sent. To prove the point, he revealed the piece of paper with the matching number.
Again, this was simply an illusion; Olson was surreptitiously writing the number on the printout after it was named. After each of the trials, participants were asked how much control they felt they had exerted over their decisions. Rather surprisingly, participants reported feeling significantly less control over the number that had popped into their mind when they were told the machine was influencing their thoughts. Some participants reported hearing an internal voice that directed them toward specific numbers. The volunteers had a completely free choice, and these findings beautifully illustrate that our feeling of voluntary control is highly malleable and susceptible to top-down influences.
As you reflect on your daily thoughts and activities, it is difficult to abandon the sense of free will that you typically experience. However, there is ample scientific evidence to suggest that this compelling sense of free will may in fact be an illusion. Daniel Wegner has suggested that your experience of conscious will might simply be a marvelous mind trick and therefore an illusory experience analogous to the other illusions we have discussed so far.42 Wegner has argued that our conscious will may be no more than a rough and ready guide to such a causation, and as such, your sense of free will can be manipulated and misled in many ways. According to Wegner, we experience conscious will when we infer that our thought has caused an action, regardless of whether or not this inference is correct. What this means is that as long as three specific conditions are fulfilled, you will experience conscious control of an action, even if the action has been caused by outside forces: (1) the thought of the action must appear in your consciousness immediately before the action; (2) it must be consistent with the action; and (3) it cannot be accompanied by any conspicuous alternative cause of the action.
Let me explain this theory using an example: Imagine that you are about to flip a light switch. What makes you feel that you consciously intend to initiate this action? According to Wegner’s theory, if you think of switching on a light immediately before doing so and if you do not notice anything else that could be causing the light to turn on, you will automatically conclude that you turned on the light after seeing the room illuminate. However, if you suddenly find yourself flipping the switch without having thought about turning on the light beforehand, the lack of consistency between your thought and the action undermines your feeling of free will, and you will not necessarily experience the action as having been initiated by your conscious self. Similarly, if you see another person’s hand on a different switch, you might also be inclined to experience less conscious will over having turned on the light. Crucial to this theory, you will experience a sense of agency over your actions regardless of whether or not your thoughts have actually caused the action. Your sense of agency is highly malleable.
In most situations, there is a pretty close correlation between your conscious thoughts and your actions, and thus this correlational approach to free will provides us with a fairly reliable estimate of who’s in charge. However, as with our perceptual experiences, there can be huge discrepancies between perception and reality. We are more familiar with perceptual illusions because they can be easily demonstrated in print, but our conscious experience of agency is just as malleable. Let me give you an example that I frequently use to entertain my kids: The next time you are waiting at the elevator and you hear the “bing” sound informing you that the elevator has arrived, use a magical gesture to open the doors. If you get the timing right, the illusion is quite compelling, and as we have learned earlier in the book, our mind is willing to perceive illusory causal connections. This elevator trick often bemuses other observers because the effect is surprisingly enthralling. However, sometimes I even perform the illusion just for myself because, at times, it allows me to genuinely experience a magical force. As I am thinking of opening the doors, I forget about the true cause of the event, and my mind is tricked into believing that it’s my mental superpowers that are exerting their influence on the physical world.
Wegner’s theory of agency can explain many of the illusions that we have discussed so far, but he reports one experiment that illustrates why people experience the classic force as a genuinely free choice.43 In this experiment, people were presented with pictures of two objects on a computer screen, and they were asked to use the mouse cursor to select one of them. The volunteers shared the mouse with a confederate, who gently forced the mouse movements without the participants’ knowledge. Performed like this, most participants felt that their action had been influenced and thus felt that they had less conscious control over their selection. However, when the experimenters primed the volunteers with a thought that was relevant to the action, the forced movement was interpreted as being initiated by their own will. To do so, the experimenter played a tape recording of the word “swan” about two seconds before they were forced to click on the picture of the swan, and this simple priming resulted in people experiencing the selection as being their own. It is rather remarkable that simply triggering a thought in someone’s mind can change the extent to which they experience a forced decision to be their own.
I believe that the same principle is involved in many of the forcing techniques used by magicians. For example, in the classic force, the magician spreads the cards, and immediately before you reach for a card, he inserts the thought that you are choosing a card, when in reality he simply pushes the force card between your fingers. I regularly use this force, and I’ve been amazed as to why people experience such an obvious forced choice as being genuinely free. Until I started to look into the psychological mechanisms that underlie this force, I underestimated the extent to which people genuinely experience the choice as being free. Indeed, research by Diego Shalom and colleagues has shown that people experience a choice that has been forced using a classic force as equally free compared to a genuinely free choice.44 However, in light of what we have learned so far about our illusory sense of free will, these results can be explained by Wegner’s theory. As long as the thought of freely choosing a card coincides with the card selection, people will genuinely experience the choice as being free, regardless of whether it was forced or not.
So far, we have predominantly focused on thoughts about simple actions, but at times, you have thoughts that do not necessarily involve a physical action. For example, you may prefer blondes to brunettes or strawberry jam to plum. Similarly, you are probably confident in why you will choose to vote for a particular party in the next election. However, although we often claim to know why we make a particular decision, our conscious introspection into the true source of our decisions is often more limited than we think.
Back in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published a paper that seriously challenged the extent to which we can consciously introspect about the true nature of our decision-making process.45 Nisbett and Wilson conducted an experiment to investigate how people reason about the choices they make. To do so, the researchers disguised their experiment as a market research project. They set up a supermarket stall and asked shoppers to rate the quality of stockings. Once they had made their choice, the volunteers had to explain why they had chosen that particular product. As in most psychological experiments, there was a twist: although the shoppers thought they were examining different products, the stockings were in fact all identical.
Rather surprisingly, most of the volunteers came up with elaborate and convincing explanations to justify their choices, but since the stockings were all identical, these explanations must have been fabricated. Moreover, most of the volunteers were completely oblivious to the true cause of their choice: physical positioning. There was a pronounced left-to-right effect in that items on the right were chosen much more frequently than those on the left, but none of the participants claimed to base their decision on spatial location. As you would expect, participants were rather shocked to discover that all of the stockings were identical and even more so that the positioning had influenced their choices. This experiment offered early evidence to suggest that we often fabricate reasons about why we came to a particular decision and that we have poor insight into the true source of our decisions.
The stocking experiment is surprising, but Petter Johansson and Lars Hall used the help of magicians to explore our lack of reliable introspection, which is truly unsettling.46 The researchers presented their volunteers with pairs of photographs of people and asked them to indicate which of the individuals they found more attractive. Once the participant had chosen their preferred face, the researchers used clever sleight of hand to switch the preferred picture with the face that had previously been rejected. In most of the cases (about 70 percent), people failed to notice that the face had changed. This in itself may seem rather surprising, but based on what we have learned about change blindness, we now know that people are often oblivious to changes in their environment. After the switch, participants were given the face that they had previously rejected, and they were asked to explain their choice.
This is where things turned truly strange, because most of the participants fabricated explanations for their choice. For example, some claimed that they chose the picture because they preferred blondes to brunettes, but we know that this must have been a confabulation because the picture that the person chose in the first place had been a brunette. Rather strikingly, there were no detectable differences in the types of reasoning that participants gave for their real and their false choices, which suggests they were oblivious to their confabulation.
Johansson and Hall have applied the principle of choice blindness to a variety of settings, and the results are surprising and sometimes rather unsettling. For example, in a different experiment, shoppers in a supermarket were asked to taste two types of jam, after which they had to choose the jam they preferred.47 After revealing their preference, they were encouraged to taste another spoonful of the chosen jam and to verbalize why they had chosen that particular one. As in the previous experiment, the researchers used a magic technique to swap the chosen jam for the one that had previously been rejected. Again, only a small handful of people noticed the switch, and the rest were happy to taste the previously rejected jam while coming up with elaborate explanations as to why they preferred it.
The most dramatic example of confabulations about our choices comes from studies that have looked at how swing voters will confabulate about their political choice.48 Intuitively, you would think that most voters hold firm political attitudes that they can accurately reflect upon. Lars Hall and colleagues ran an experiment just before the Swedish general election in which they asked potential voters to complete a survey that tested their opinions on some of the key issues that distinguished between the left-wing and right-wing coalitions. Their experiment used clever sleight of hand and trickery to secretly alter the answers on the survey so that the replies were now placed in the opposite political camp. After this sneaky switch, the voters were asked to look back at the survey and explain their attitudes on the questioned issues. As in the other experiments, most of the participants did not notice that their answers had been changed. However, most shockingly, 92 percent of the participants accepted and endorsed the altered political scores. The researchers explained that the survey could be used to identify the political party that most closely reflected their views and opinions. After they summarized the fabricated scores, nearly half of the participants were willing to accept a left-to-right switch. These results are surprising in that they not only illustrate our lack of insight into why we make particular choices but also just how easily those choices can be manipulated.
Magicians have developed astonishing forcing and persuasion techniques, and you are completely oblivious that your choice was anything but free. As with all of the cognitive processes we have looked at so far, forcing relies on exploiting a counterintuitive cognitive illusion: the idea that we have full conscious control and insight into the nature of our behavior. We feel as if we have full control over our thoughts and actions, but much of the scientific evidence suggests that this sense of free will may in fact be an illusion. It is an illusion that is as compelling as the ones we experience through our conscious perception and memory.
Magicians frequently claim to manipulate your mind through scientifically plausible psychological processes. In modern mentalism, spiritualist pseudoexplanations have been replaced by plausible yet often highly exaggerated psychological processes. In recent years, there has been a rather worrying trend in which magicians lecture about psychological persuasion techniques in TED talks and other nonentertainment contexts, which simply fuels people’s misunderstanding of the mind. Advertisers and political propagandists have learned to manipulate our thoughts using a wide range of effective psychological persuasion techniques, but these effects are much subtler and less spectacular than those typically demonstrated by magicians.49
Derren Brown’s unconscious persuasion is a wonderful performance piece, but in light of what we have learned about the human mind so far, there must be more to the illusion than meets the eye. While many other forcing techniques undermine our sense of free will, Brown’s unconscious persuasion is implausible if not impossible. Brown is one of my favorite magicians, and I have no intention of revealing how his trick is done (nor the right to do so). As a scientist, however, I can tell you that unconscious persuasion is a pseudoexplanation, rather than the real explanation of the trick. Rest assured that while magicians may exploit your illusory sense of control, we are more resilient to some of the unconscious mind control magicians claim to be using. However, in the next chapter, we will look at a form of mind control that at least superficially gives people complete control over your mind: hypnosis.