.James the Amaz!ng Randi is back onstage, only this time he’s at the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Florida. He’s doing us a favor by performing several mentalism tricks at the 2009 Best Illusion of the Year contest.*
Mentalists are magicians who use mathematical probabilities, human nature, sleight of hand, gimmicks, and trust to make it appear that they can read your mind. Their acts are highly theatrical, often invoking “mystical” powers of clairvoyance, telekinesis, telepathy, precognition, divination, and mind control.
Unlike many New Age psychics, who claim to possess supernatural powers,† mentalists such as Randi, Max Maven, Derren Brown, and other top performers do not lay claim to paranormal faculties. Rather, their illusions are spun from an ability to exploit human gullibility and, as you will see, to carry out brilliantly sneaky, underhanded maneuvers.
Today Randi is performing a book test. In this act, the magician may ask a volunteer to exercise free will in picking out a magazine, finding a random word somewhere in the magazine, and thinking about the word silently. The magician divines the word by reading the volunteer’s mind.
Randi looks out into the audience, hand shielding his eyes from the spotlights like a sailor blocking the sun as he peers out to the horizon. “I met a young woman outside before the show who agreed to assist me with this next trick. Could you please stand up?” A young woman stands near the center of audience. Randi introduces her as Zoe.
“Now, before we get started, could you please confirm that we have never met before tonight?”
“Correct,” she says.
“That you are in no way being coerced by me, that you haven’t been paid by me, and that any decision you may make has not been given to you by me?”
“No,” says Zoe.
“When we met in front of the hall tonight you chose a word from a magazine completely at random and of your own free will?”
“Yes.”
“Was that magazine a different copy of this specific magazine, which we chose from the rack of free literature outside this very building?” Randi says, as he pulls a folded free apartment rental guide from the breast pocket of his navy blazer and slowly opens each page to show the audience that there is lots of text.
“Yes.”
“And I asked you, did I not, to open that magazine to any page you wanted having lots of text on it, and to choose any word you liked from that page freely, while I stood with my back to you?”
“Yes.”
“And then you destroyed the magazine, correct?”
“Yes.”
“It would be impossible for me to know what word you chose, right?”
“Okay. You have a piece of paper with that word written on it. Could you please circle that word now, as I try to read your mind?”
“Okay,” she says, and she circles the word on the page.
Then Randi begins to pace. He prowls to stage right and to stage left. The shadow he casts from the spotlight jumps in animation against the pleats of the red velvet curtain standing a full two stories high behind him. His brow knots severely as he rubs his forehead and temples. He mumbles to himself in a slightly disconcerting but amusing fashion.
Finally, Randi stops in front of an easel holding a large writing pad next to the podium. He uncaps a huge black Sharpie and, with his eyes closed, looking up into the lights, right hand pressing on his eyelids, left arm extended with unsheathed pen ready to strike, he speaks. “I’m starting to get something,” he says as he writes an N on the paper. “It’s all coming now.” He proceeds to receive mental vibrations for eight more characters as well, spelling out the phrase: NθI+d3)3P.
Finished, and visibly exhausted from the effort, Randi pulls his hand from his face. He looks at the pad for a long time, totally silent, then turns back to the crowd. The throng starts to fidget as they become embarrassed for the poor old coot.
“Is the magazine written in the English language?” Randi eventually asks, failing to hide the disappointment in his voice.
“Yes,” giggles Zoe, as other nervous laughs arise from the audience. Zoe is still standing, and she is so embarrassed for Randi that when she responds she has to lower the paper she has been using as a mask to hide her face.
“Are you a mathematician?” Randi hopes sadly.
“No,” says Zoe.
“Okay, well, I guess I didn’t get it,” Randi concludes, shoulders and chin slumping. “What was the word?”
“Deception,” says Zoe.
“What? Hmm? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,” says the suddenly frail octogenarian, bent over to bring his now cupped ear closer, eyes squinting into the glare.
“Deception!” yells Zoe.
“Hmm. Yes, well … sometimes these things fail,” he says dejectedly. Looking up at the pad one last time, he does a double take and says, excitedly, “Oh, but wait a minute! I think I see what happened!” Now thirty years younger, he positively leaps as he lifts the page from the pad and rips it off. He turns to the crowd with the ripped page and slowly rotates it 180 degrees as he says, “I must have gotten the signal from you upside down and backwards!”
Once the rotation is complete, the page reveals the now legible message: dε(εP+Iθ.
The crowd roars as Randi receives his standing ovation.
The next morning, Randi returned to his home in Fort Lauderdale, the James Randi Educational Foundation, or JREF. Susana and I were thrilled to drive him on the two-hour jaunt back from Naples. Take our word for it, we’ve traveled all over the world with magicians, and in the summer of 2009 we even flew, drove, and sailed across China with two hundred Spanish magicians, so we know: if you ever feel like taking a boisterous road trip, go with a magician.
The JREF serves as a skeptical third party, rooting out fraud and outrageous claims made by psychics, faith healers, hypnotists, and even deluded scientists. We arrived at the foundation building, a refurbished house surrounded by peacocks, in time to find the staff celebrating the news that they had just sold out the next The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM), to be held in London that fall. We were shown to the Isaac Asimov library, the foundation’s extensive collection of magic literature, with books that line every side of a large windowless wood-trimmed conference room complete with a huge central conference table that would be the envy of any CEO. Notes and paraphernalia pertaining to Randi’s next book, A Magician in the Laboratory, were strewn across the desk.
On the road trip, Randi had told us that the magazine test he did on Zoe is one variant among many for a classic trick known as the Book Test. “Every mentalist does one,” Randi says in the library. “It’s fundamentally an illusion of choice.”
“Allow me to demonstrate. My dear,” Randi says to Susana, “if you would please pick any book you like from the shelves.” Susana comes back with a randomly chosen magic book and shows it to Randi. “Good, good,” he says, “but let’s make sure it doesn’t have too many pictures. You need to have plenty of choices of text.” He takes the book and flips rapidly through the pages. “Okay, great,” he says, as he hands back the book. “That book will work nicely.”
“Now I’ll choose a book of approximately the same size,” he says, grabbing another tome from the shelves. “Next I’ll read your mind, but first you need to choose a page somewhere in the middle as I flip through the pages of this book.” He holds the back of the book flat in his left hand as he lifts the cover and all the pages of the book to a forty-five-degree angle. He flips the pages down with his thumb in a cascade, and about halfway through Susana says, “There.”
“Page 174,” says Randi. “Now, let’s review. You chose a book of your own free will, correct?”
“Yes.”
“You chose the page you wanted, right?”
“Correct.”
“Now you will freely choose the word you want from that page in the book you are holding,” Randi says.
“Uh-huh,” Susana confirms.
“So there is no way for me to know what word you are about to choose, right?”
“Well, I’m sure you will, but I don’t see how you will do it!”
Randi chuckles, “Well, that’s where you’re right! Now, my dear, please open your book to page 174 and pick a word from the top line. Don’t choose an article or some unsubstantial word, pick a nice, meaningful, beefy word.”
Susana flips to page 174 of her book, reads the first line, picks a word—“stellar”—and you already know what follows.
SPOILER ALERT! THE FOLLOWING SECTION DESCRIBES MAGIC SECRETS AND THEIR BRAIN MECHANISMS!
But how does he do it? Randi can’t know what word Susana is about to choose, can he? Randi explains that book tests are an illusion of choice because the choices are known to or forced by the magician. In this case, Randi’s retelling of the trick and Susana’s choices are—well, we don’t want to say dishonest, but they are not quite accurate. Let’s go over them. First, Susana does indeed choose her own book. No forcing there. But does she choose page 174? Not really. Randi is the one who flips the pages, not Susana, and Susana never actually sees which page is showing when she says “Stop.” Randi is lying when he tells her it is page 174. So now the question is, how can Randi know the first line of page 174 for a book Susana randomly chose? Has he memorized the first line in every book from the thousands in his library? No. When Randi flipped rapidly through the pages of Susana’s book to “check for pictures,” he wasn’t really looking for pictures. He was looking for a glimpse of any page in which he could resolve both a word from the top line and also the page number from the upper corner. It just so happens he saw “stellar” on page 174 as the pages flew by. It’s challenging with all the blurred movement because he flips the pages quite fast. But with practice it can be done, and Randi needed only the single word and its page number to make the trick work.
How does Randi know exactly which word Susana will choose? He doesn’t. But there are only so many big beefy or stellar-like words on a single line of any normal book. Even if Susana happens to choose a different big word, Randi can recover by saying, “Oh, but the word ‘stellar’ is in fact there, isn’t it? You must have unconsciously found the word ‘stellar’ to be more interesting than the other word you chose, and that’s why I picked it up more in your brain waves.” Randi uses mentalism tricks to restrict her choices to a single word or just a few possible words. So when he “reads her mind,” he is actually just making an educated guess that has a low probability of failure. And in the event of a failure, it’s an easy one to fix.
END OF SPOILER ALERT
Let’s go back to the illusion contest on the previous night. Randi’s just received his standing ovation for reading Zoe’s mind. But how did he do it? What’s the method behind this particular book test? Zoe’s choices seemed essentially infinite. Has the Amaz!ng Randi (he’s told the members of the audience that since they are all friends now they should call him by his first name, Amaz!ng) somehow actually divined the word “deception” from all possible words, and in spectacular fashion to boot? No, Zoe is definitely being fooled. She may feel that she has thousands of secret choices and is being directed by nothing other than her own free will, but that is not the case.
SPOILER ALERT! THE FOLLOWING SECTION DESCRIBES MAGIC SECRETS AND THEIR BRAIN MECHANISMS!
Again, Randi’s retelling of history is, well, telling. It’s true that Zoe chose a word from a magazine that was found outside the philharmonic hall. That’s Randi’s version of “found art.” He likes to use local literature because it makes the illusion seem all that much more convincing, since he could not have prepared anything. And in a way, he didn’t. He relied on his wits.
It is also true that Zoe scanned the magazine without Randi’s seeing her do it, and she circled the word (“so as not to forget it,” Randi had told her) with his pen before ripping out the page and discarding the magazine in a trash can. But wait—Randi announced during the show that the magazine had been “destroyed,” not discarded. An important modification, to be sure, but not enough of a misstatement that Zoe would complain. For most people, when an object enters a trash can, it ceases to exist and is for all intents and purposes destroyed. But no act is beneath the Amaz!ng Randi. Once Zoe entered the philharmonic hall, Randi did indeed go dumpster diving to recover that ripped magazine. Zoe had torn the relevant page from it, true, but now he knew which page was missing. And because Zoe used Randi’s own specially selected pen to circle the word, a nice hard ballpoint pen, the circling of the word left an impression that was barely discernible on the adjacent page of the magazine. So Randi knew the page and its exact location. To find the word itself, Randi took a second copy of the magazine, ripped out Zoe’s chosen page, put it under the embossed page from Zoe’s magazine, and lined up their corners so that they overlapped perfectly. Randi then poked a hole through the embossed circle, marking the word Zoe chose on the page below. It was, of course, “deception.”
In yet another incredibly devious move, Randi took a third pristine copy of the magazine and ripped out the same page Zoe had ripped out, with the same tear pattern, before putting it in the trash can to replace Zoe’s original. This new copy had never been touched by the pen and so it had no embossed circle in it. If Zoe, or some other person in the audience, reconstructed Randi’s methods and came back to do a little dumpster diving of their own, they would find what looked like Zoe’s original ripped magazine. They would remain mystified.
To further throw off the audience, Randi had Zoe circle the word during the act itself so that if any of the other audience members saw the ripped page during or after the act, they would assume that the circle had been created during the show and not before. (Randi was careful not to mention that the word had been circled before the show.) Randi similarly implied that Zoe had written down the word on a piece of paper rather than saying that she had the page ripped from the magazine, so that people wouldn’t even think of trying to get the evidence and reconstruct the trick.
Randi allowed Zoe to make her word choice in truly free manner, but it was not a secret choice, though it felt like one to everybody, including Zoe. Randi had controlled her every move from the minute he said hello. Then, all he needed to do was figure out how to spell “deception” upside down and backwards. For a master magician like Randi, that little bit was the hardest part of the whole trick.
Since watching Randi perform, we have investigated other mentalist tricks to see what they reveal about human nature. Here are three of our favorites.
In the 1089 Force, the magician first asks you to pick a three-digit number whose first and last digits differ by two or more. Let’s say you pick 478. You write it down. Step two, the magician asks you to reverse the order of the number and write it down: 874. Third, you are asked to subtract the smaller number from the larger number, in this case 874 − 478 = 396. Fourth, reverse that number to become 693 and add it to 396. Your answer is 1,089.
So far, so good. Now the magician hands you three or four books (or more if he wants to lug them around). You choose one, any one, your free choice. The books look normal, not marked in any way. He says, “Excellent choice! Now turn to page 108 and look at the first line. Count over to the ninth word and hold it in your mind. Got it?” You follow his instructions. The word is “yellow.”
“Concentrate now,” says the magician. “I am going to read your mind. The word is coming into focus, slowly, slowly. I see a, hmm, a color? It starts with, let me see, it starts with a y? Yellow! The word is ‘yellow.’ Am I right?”
Indeed he is. The ninth word at the top of page 108 in the book you picked is “yellow.” He memorized it before the show. He also memorized the ninth word at the top of page 108 in all the other books. If you had chosen any one of them, he would have known the word you’d find.
The 1089 Force is a mathematical trick based on the fact that any three-digit number manipulated in this manner always—always!—adds up to 1,089. The magician simply picks the books and looks up the word he wants you to find. He could, for example, tell you to turn to page 10, count down to the eighth line, and look up the ninth word in that line (1089.) The effect is astounding and always entertaining.
Another mathematical force convinces you that everyone in the room can be made to share the same mental picture. You all are asked to think of a small number and then silently perform the following operations. Double the number. Add 8 to the result. Divide the result by 2. Subtract the original number. Now convert this number into a letter of the alphabet (1=A, 2=B, 3=C, 4=D, and so on). Next, think of the name of a country that starts with this letter. Got it? Now think of an animal whose name starts with the next letter. Finally, think of the color of that animal.
The magician makes a dramatic pause. “Oh, my, your collective image must be wrong. There must be a problem. There are no gray elephants in Denmark.” The trick works because everyone must choose a country that starts with D, and Denmark is the most common. The next letter is e, and most people think of an elephant. And who isn’t going to think of a gray elephant?
People usually make the same choices because when they are asked to stand up and speak in front of hundreds of other people, they tend to say the first thing that comes to mind. Mentalists know that the number of countries starting with D is vanishingly small, and that the likelihood that they’ll pick the Dominican Republic is low unless they are either unusually cool under fire or have some time to consider. Most people then choose “elephant” and not “emu” for the same reasons. They are nervous. They’re scared of looking stupid in front of so many people, and they can’t think clearly enough to come up with something clever.
Mentalists may also use something they call the “one-ahead principle”: to give the impression of reading your mind, they stay one step ahead of you at all times. The coincidences are multiplied in your mind, resulting in the illusory feeling that the only explanation is supernatural ability.
Magic Tony showed us a trick based on this principle. He gave us a deck of cards to shuffle thoroughly and then he spread the deck facedown on a table and announced that he would predict our choices. “First, you will choose the nine of hearts,” he said. We slid a card out of the spread, Tony looked at it, and set it aside.
Without showing it to us, he exclaimed, “Good job! Now I predict you’ll choose the two of clubs.”
We chose another card at random and slid it to him, still facedown. He looked at it and said, “Excellent!”
Tony gathered the remaining cards and shuffled them. “Now you will choose the queen of spades. “Pick any card as I run my thumb down the corner of the deck by saying ‘stop.’ ” He held the deck in one hand and riffled his thumb down the deck.
About halfway through the deck we said, “Stop.”
Tony removed the card, picked up the other two cards we had chosen, and turned over all three in front of us: the nine of hearts, the two of clubs, and the queen of spades. Wow!
To accomplish this trick, Tony first surreptitiously memorized the card at the bottom of the deck: the nine of hearts. He then spread the cards facedown and asked us to make our choices, announcing that we would choose the nine of hearts.
When we picked the first card, we thought it must be the nine of hearts (after all, this was a trick by a terrific magician) but we could not verify that with our own eyes. In fact, the card was the two of clubs, which Tony saw with his own eyes.
Then Tony announced that for our next card we would choose the two of clubs. (Hmmm, he already had that card on the table but we followed his direction and pulled another card. He saw that it was the queen of spades.)
Tony then collected the remaining cards, did a false shuffle so as to keep the nine of hearts exactly where he wanted it, and asked us to choose a card as he riffled the deck with his thumb. We chose a “random” card in the middle of the deck, but he lifted the cards from where he was keeping the nine of hearts while distracting us from the sleight with eye contact. He removed the nine and laid it out with the other two chosen cards to show that his three predictions were correct. In fact, he had simply “predicted” whatever card had previously been chosen.
END OF SPOILER ALERT
You get the idea. Mind reading is a setup, flimflam, bunkum, even treachery—but why does it work again and again? Why are you so taken in? Why do you entertain a nanosecond of belief that a magician could even begin to have this ability? How does he force you to follow his will?
Forcing is a method used by magicians to make you think you’ve made a free choice when in fact the magician knows in advance exactly what you will do—what card you’ll choose from a deck, what word you’ll choose from a book, what object you’ll choose from an array of items on a table. He is in complete control. When a mentalist has you in his clutches, your sense of free will is an illusion.
A classic method of forcing is called magician’s choice. You are asked to make a free choice among items but, no matter what you choose, the magician calls the shots by how he verbally responds to your choices.
SPOILER ALERT! THE FOLLOWING SECTION DESCRIBES MAGIC SECRETS AND THEIR BRAIN MECHANISMS!
For example, if the magician puts two cards facedown on the table and wants you to choose the one on the right, he will say “Choose either one.” If you choose the one on the right, he goes on with the trick. If you choose the one on the left, he will say, “Good, you keep that card and I’ll use the remaining one.” Thus he forces the card he wants.
END OF SPOILER ALERT
A “force” is not unlike the cinematic version you may have seen in George Lucas’s original Star Wars movie. There’s a scene in which the Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi and our hero Luke Skywalker, along with robot sidekicks R2-D2 and C-3PO, are trying to leave the planet Tatooine. En route to the spaceport they are stopped by two armor-clad, gun-toting imperial storm troopers. Obi-Wan gives a sly smile and wave of his hand as he tells them, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” The storm troopers appear confused. One of them parrots back, “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.” Obi-Wan dominates their minds, forcing them to believe and say whatever he tells them. After the storm troopers wave our heroes past the checkpoint, Obi-Wan explains to the young Luke Skywalker, “The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.”
Except that in the real universe we are all weak-minded, and magicians are the Jedi masters.
Forcing works because your brain is on a constant, active lookout for order, pattern, and explanation and has a built-in abhorrence of the random, the patternless, the nonnarrable. In the absence of explicability, you impose it. When you think you are choosing something, but the choice is changed on you or distorted in some way, you nevertheless stick to your guns and justify your “choice.” You confabulate.
Confabulating is a fancy term for shamelessly making things up. It is another of those potent and ubiquitous brain processes that occur all the time but to which you are seldom wise. Normally this process is beneficial. For instance, confabulation is what allows you to “see” people and objects in drawings instead of the tangle of dark lines that you are actually looking at. It is also what allows you to “see” faces in clouds; it allows your perception to be flexible and creative. But when this sort of pattern imposition goes on at higher levels of cognition, the implications can get a little uncomfortable. Your mind will go to surprising lengths to preserve its sense of agency and choice and continuity of the self. When you are influenced by others, you rationalize their influence as being good decision making on your part.
The breadth and depth of confabulation is revealed following some kinds of brain injury, when the mind’s normal system of checks and balances is perturbed. For example, when the right brain hemisphere is damaged, spectacular delusions can arise about the state of the body. Here is Dr. Anna Berti, a neuroscientist at the University of Turin in Italy, interviewing one her patients, “Carla,” whose paralyzed left arm rests in her lap next to her good right arm.
“Can you raise your right arm?”
“Yes.” Carla’s arm goes up.
“Can you raise you left arm?”
“Yes.”
The arm remains motionless. Berti tries again.
“Are you raising your left arm?”
“Yes,” says Carla. But still her arm does not move.
“Can you clap your hands?”
Carla moves her right hand to the midline of her body and waves it in a clapping motion. The left hand is motionless.
“Are you sure you’re clapping?”
“Yes.”
“But I can’t hear a sound.”
Carla replies, “I never make noise when I do something.”
Insistent denial of paralysis was long thought to be a psychological problem, Berti says. It was a reaction to a stroke: I am paralyzed, it is so horrible, I will deny it.
But it is not a Freudian dilemma. Rather, it is a form of so-called neglect syndrome in which a brain area involved in the mental simulation of movements, the supplementary motor area, is damaged. When you close your eyes and simply imagine a golf swing or skiing motion, you activate this part of your brain.
When Berti asks Carla to raise her left arm or clap her hands, the region that imagines such movements produces a familiar pattern of activity in her brain. But the regions that carry out those movements and also maintain awareness of making them are not working.
The conflict is overwhelming. Carla’s sense of having moved via simulation is powerful. Awareness is absent. Paralysis is complete. Her brain’s solution: confabulate.
If prodded, patients make up stories to explain their lack of action, Berti says. One woman said her arm “went for a walk.” A man claimed that his motionless arm did not belong to him. When it was placed in his right visual field, he insisted it was not his.
“Whose arm is it?” Berti asked.
“Yours.”
“Are you sure? Look here, I only have two hands.”
The patient replied, “What can I say? You have three wrists. You should have three hands.”
Neuroscientists can also unmask your confabulatory nature in the laboratory. Two young Swedish scientists have developed a new scientific method that uses magic techniques to examine the fascinating way in which confabulation operates in the intact, healthy, ostensibly rational brain.
We are in Benasque, Spain, nestled in the heart of the Pyrenees, at the Pedro Pascual Center for Science, a retreat designed to bring together scientists from every discipline to hash out ideas in hopes of inspiring new interdisciplinary approaches. Miguel Angel, the Spanish magician whom you met in chapter 5, has just completed his demonstration of change blindness. Now up on stage are two neuropsychologists from Sweden, Petter Johansson and Lars Hall, from Lund University. These two twentysomethings are today’s fair-haired boys of cognitive science, and not just because they’re Swedish. They have brought a veritable smorgasbord of methods to the discipline. One especially sweet meatball was featured in an October 7, 2005, article in Science magazine describing the invention of a new and powerful method for studying human cognition, rationalization, and decision making called choice blindness. And they did it using magic.
Johansson explains that their experiments were inspired by the so-called introspection illusion. Introspection, he says, does not provide a direct pipeline to your unconscious mental processes. Instead, it is a process whereby you use the contents of your conscious mind to construct a personal narrative that may or may not correspond to your unconscious state. When you are asked to say why you have a particular preference or how you arrived at that preference, your personal self-report of your internal mental processes is confabulated. To put it bluntly, you are unaware of your unawareness.
Johansson and Hall describe their incredible experiments in a fast-beat tag-team style. They show a short movie of themselves, made by the BBC the previous year, to illustrate their new approach. It starts with one of them displaying two photographs of two young women to either male or female subjects. The images have been previously matched for attractiveness, so the women are more or less equally good-looking. When they hold up the photos, the subject, seated across the table, points to the one he or she deems more attractive. Next the photos are placed facedown on the table and the selected photo is pushed across the tabletop to the subject, ostensibly so that he or she can pick it up and examine it more closely. “Here, take a closer look and tell us why you chose it!” the researchers ask, entreating each subject to consider the reasons leading to their choice. Johansson and Hall run the experiment dozens of time on each subject and dutifully record the considered opinion of each beauty judge, each time with a new attractiveness-matched pair of photographs.
What Johansson and Hall don’t tell their subjects, until after the experiment ends, is that they secretly swapped the photos on one-fifth of the trials, after each subject made their first choice but before they could expound on why they had made it. Most subjects didn’t notice the swap. So instead of explaining why they chose the face they now held in their hands, each subject was in fact explaining why they picked the face they had actually just rejected. And boy oh boy, did they lie.
SPOILER ALERT! THE FOLLOWING SECTION DESCRIBES MAGIC SECRETS AND THEIR BRAIN MECHANISMS!
Johansson and Hall pulled this off by using what magicians call Black Art (similar to that of Omar Pasha in chapter 1), but in this case instead of a black curtain they used a black tablecloth and black-backed photos. In order to fool subjects, they asked them to point to the preferred photo and laid it facedown on the table. That photo had a black back. On top of it they had hidden a second photo, this one of the rejected face. That photo had a red back. When it came time to move the photo toward the subject, the scientists slid the red-backed card (rejected face), leaving behind the black-backed card (preferred face), which was now invisible against the tablecloth. The subjects never saw the swap.
While each subject’s brain made up a story for itself to rationalize the “choice,” Johansson and Hall (they would take turns serving as experimenter on each sequential subject) surreptitiously swept the actually chosen card off the table and into their laps. Meanwhile the subject assumed that the photo that had been pushed across the table was the same one he or she had chosen. This unspoken assumption served as a powerful method of duplicity.
END OF SPOILER ALERT
The swaps were discovered less than a third of the time. On the successfully swapped trials, the subjects actually confabulated their reasons for having chosen the substitute photo.
One man said, “I preferred this one because I prefer blondes,” when in fact he had first chosen a dark-haired woman. One woman chose a woman without earrings, and when the photo was secretly swapped for a woman with earrings, she said she had chosen that one because she liked earrings. Pants on fire! The subjects hadn’t chosen the people whose photos they now held in their hands, but they thought they had. So what do you do when you are made to justify a choice you believe you made? Confabulate. Stick to your guns.
In a follow-up experiment, shoppers in a supermarket tasted two kinds of jam and then explained their choice while taking further spoonfuls from the “chosen” pot. The pots were rigged so that the subjects effusively praised jam they had previously rejected. A similar experiment was done with tea.
Currently, the researchers have begun to examine choice blindness for moral and political opinion. Using a new tool, a “magical questionnaire,” they are able to manipulate people’s answers to questions presented in a survey format. Participants are asked to rate to what extent they agreed with a specific moral statement, e.g., “It is morally reprehensible to purchase sexual services even in democratic societies where prostitution is legal and regulated by the government,” and then, at the end of the experiment, they are asked to explain why they agreed or disagreed with the statement. Again, the results show that a majority of the participants are blind to the changes made, and that they often construct elaborate arguments supporting the opposite of their initial position.
These studies help us understand how we rationalize many of our decisions. It’s not so much the nature of decision making but the repercussions of those decisions that affect our lives.
CHOICE BLINDNESS AS A WAY OF LIFE
Choice blindness works havoc in your everyday life. Have you ever been the victim of the bait-and-switch, where you thought you were buying one thing but came home with something else?
If you truly had free will, advertising and salesmen’s pitches would have no effect. For example, when Steve was a postdoctoral fellow splitting his time between two labs, he needed a car to drive between Harvard Medical School in Boston and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. So he bought a shiny new black Dodge Intrepid ES with a moon roof, motorized leather seats, upgraded rims, Infiniti surroundsound system, and automatic air temperature controls. It was expensive for a postdoc’s salary and put a drain on his resources, but he rationalized the decision because it was an incredibly safe car with side air bags (which were new at the time), traction control, an automatic braking system, and other advanced safety features. After all, the long drives between Massachusetts and New York required an extra measure of safety, right?
Sure they did. His decision had nothing to do with thinking that chicks dig a cool car.
To be fair, he did go to the car dealership with a list of desired safety features. He arrived at the car lot driven by a strong sense of responsibility. The salesperson took one look at Steve’s list, knew that the high-end models were the only ones that came with the features he wanted as standard, and then preyed on the fact that his customer was a single male with testosterone-driven needs. Steve could have ordered a cheaper, drabber, smaller model with the same safety equipment and then waited two to three months for the new car to arrive. But the salesman forced him (in the sense that magicians use the word) to buy the fancy car instead.
In the Western world we choose our own mates, right? Arranged marriages and professional matchmakers have joined siegecraft and alchemy in the dustbin of history, have they not? Perhaps. In theory, we can go forth and multiply with anybody we want, so long as there is mutual agreement. We are free, and our number of choices seems for all intents and purposes infinite.
But in practice most of us are no less restricted in our choice of mates than a tradition-bound Eastern youth heading toward an arranged marriage. Consider the fact that we must actually know and interact with the person with whom we pair. We are therefore restricted, in general, to the same geographic location, socioeconomic background, religion, age, current state of availability, and roughly the same level of attractiveness. In reality, it’s hard to find a mate who matches all of these parameters, especially after you’ve completed high school and college. It’s hardly a surprise that so many people marry either their high school or college sweethearts.
So how free are we really? Not very. Eastern practices of matchmaking seem fairly intelligent considering that the choices are made by people (usually parents) who care about the couple, who have hard-earned perspectives on the full course of life, careers, and parenthood, and take all of the issues listed above into account during their decision-making process. Further, with notable exceptions in certain isolated parts of the world, the “lovers” nowadays usually have veto power, at the very least.
Finding a great mate (and one whose baggage is lifetime-tolerable—heard any good mother-in-law jokes lately?) requires real luck in the West, and yet it feels completely free. “I make my own luck,” say the enlightened, empowered masses. “Believe you will get what you want,” says the mega-bestselling self-help book The Secret, “and it will manifest.” This mass enchantment is one of the grandest magic tricks ever devised.
Why do our choices feel so free and unlimited? One answer lies in a psychological principle called cognitive dissonance. This arises when two competing ideas, behaviors, facts, or beliefs are in conflict in your brain. A common way that your brain reconciles the conflict is to change its attitude, beliefs, or behaviors to bring one of the competing ideas into prominence. Magicians love cognitive dissonance, since it leads spectators to feel as though they’ve made decisions freely for themselves.
An example of this comes from the 2009 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Chicago, where we organized a presentation to illustrate the power of magic and its potential usefulness in the lab. Our colleagues Apollo Robbins the Gentleman Thief and the mentalist Eric Mead demonstrated various tricks and magic principles to more than seven thousand neuroscientists gathered in a huge ballroom.
The night before the big event, we saw cognitive dissonance in action when Mead performed a magic trick at a party hosted by the society’s president, Tom Carew. Scores of world-famous neuroscientists were gathered in his opulent multiroom hotel suite overlooking Lake Michigan.
At one point, Mead had a scientist pick a card from a deck and then asked him to randomly spread out all the cards over a large area of the floor. Only the scientist knew which one was the chosen card. Then Mead took one end of a linen napkin, handed the other end to the scientist, and, pulling it tight, dragged the fellow around the strewn-out cards. Mead boasted that he would detect minute changes in the napkin’s tension and thereby read unconscious signals from the scientist’s mind to find the correct card. After a minute of this performance, Mead found the card.
The interesting thing about this trick* is that after the party, when people were tittering to each other during the descent to street level in the elevator, the scientist who participated in the trick opined that Mead must have known in advance which card he would choose. This was met by a quick denial from another scientist, a world expert in the field of motor control, who said it was no trick at all. To her mind, Mead had clearly used neuromuscular feedback from the napkin to find the card. She knew that Mead had made no bones that it was a trick, and yet here she was, arguing for something far less likely. Swept up in the moment, her cognitive dissonance had taken her for a wonderful ride down a magical road.
When you make a decision between two things that seem equivalent, cognitive dissonance frequently comes into play. You elevate the value of your choice for the simple reason that it was your choice. Have you ever had a boss who made a dumb decision that became immutable policy long after she realized she had been in the wrong? Cognitive dissonance. Have you yourself ever made a dumb decision concerning your children, but then stuck to your guns so as to “provide consistency”? Cognitive dissonance. Have you ever looked down on people who live in a rival sports team’s city for no other reason than that their zip code places them in the enemy camp? Cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance happens because our free will isn’t truly free; it’s highly constrained by our context and history. And history, we know, is written by the victors. This is as true of the potential thoughts and deeds that populate our minds as it is of cultures and nations: the winning choice orchestrates emotion, language, and memory to make itself the inevitable and infallibly correct one. In reality, all behavioral decisions are nothing more than a reflection of our genetic and environmental history.
Many people get upset when neuroscientists and philosophers state that free will is an illusion. Those who believe that the mind is wholly separate from the brain—a supposition called dualism—tend to believe that free will is a fundamental property of the mind. According to this view, free will is a separate, numinous quality of being that is not subject to physical laws or reducible to chemistry and circuitry.
But in the realm of neuroscience, there is not a shred of evidence for dualism. The mind is what the brain does. Consciousness and mind are products of your brain.
How could that be? You feel as if you are in full control of your mind. Sure, your brain carries out many tasks without your being conscious of them. You drive home on automatic pilot. You put cups into a dishwasher while carrying on an interesting conversation. But making important decisions? Isn’t mental life dependent on the fact that you are free to choose among different possible courses of action? Your decision-making process seems to be driven by your own volition. This feeling fits your sense of justice and moral responsibility.
Let’s look at several lines of evidence for the idea (dare we say fact) that free will is an illusion. In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a neurophysiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, carried out a series of studies that first challenged the notion that we make decisions consciously and freely. Libet asked people to stare at a clocklike timer with a ball moving around the periphery once every three seconds. They had to press a button with their right index finger whenever they felt an urge to do so and afterward tell Libet where the ball was (what time it was) when they decided to make the move. Two testing devices—an EEG (electroencephalograph) and an EMG (electromyograph)—recorded their brain activity and the electrical activity of their muscles. Libet found that participants had the conscious sense of willing the movement about 300 milliseconds after the onset of the muscle activity. Moreover, the EEG showed that neurons in the part of their motor cortex where movements are planned became active a full second before any movement could be measured. You might think that the delay was due to the conduction time between the brain and the muscles. But a full second? No way. There was definitely something interesting happening here.
The findings mean that your brain unconsciously makes the decision to move well before you become aware of it. In other words, your brain, not your conscious mind, makes the decision. This does not match your experience, but it is how your mind actually works. Before you get discombobulated, know that there is a silver lining to these results: while decisions are unconsciously prepared ahead of time, you can still veto your actions. According to Libet and others, you may not have free will, but you do have “free won’t.”
UNWILLINGLY WELL ENDOWED
The feeling of free will is pervasive to our psyche, but carefully designed laboratory conditions, such as in Libet’s experiment, can reveal free will for what it is: a sophisticated cognitive illusion. And if we pay close attention, we can also find rare instances in our everyday life in which the illusion breaks down. Have you ever been flung uncontrollably down a trajectory of complex behavior that you couldn’t control no matter how hard you tried? We’re not talking about bodily functions like coughing, sneezing, or orgasm. Those are certainly complex behaviors in which you feel dissociated from the actions of your body, but they are reflexes rather than choices. Drug addicts, alcoholics, and patients with a variety of neurological disorders lose the sense of free will, but what about healthy people?
We saw a great example of someone “losing it” in 2005 while visiting Susana’s hometown of A Coruña, Spain. A politician in the mayor’s office, Carlos González-Garcés, was on television giving a boring press conference on a new program regarding the city’s fire safety readiness.
“This last year twelve specialization courses were offered, with a very strong focus in the courses given to new firefighters,” he said. Some minor details about firefighter courses followed before he began discussing the fire department’s equipment status.
“They are well endowed,” González-Garcés told the reporters. He gave a small smile and corrected himself: “They are well endowed in regards to material resources.” But then he realized he’d made the situation worse and gave an even bigger smile, which he then tried to suppress. The poor guy tried to hide his face by looking down and to the side of the bank of microphones. “As a matter of fact, this year a concrete investment was made.” He was openly laughing now, punctuated by giggles. “I did it by accident,” he said, and began rocking side to side, as if to stave off peeing his pants. By this time, his staff was laughing with him. “It was not premeditated,” he assured the press. González-Garcés regained control briefly but then lost it as the reporters’ guffaws could be heard in the background. “Okay, let’s see,” he said before another failed attempt to suppress laughter. He was now wiping the tears from his eyes. “Never … this never happened to me before.” He wiped his eyes again and tried to plow ahead. “All right, so the thing is … a specific truck was bought …” but he couldn’t keep himself from another fit of laughter “… for the old part of the city.” He was giggling again. “Ay-ay-ay.” He sniffled against his running nose and once again failed to suppress the laughter. Like a marionette on a string, González-Garcés threw himself against the back of his chair, convulsing with mirth. “This seems so childish … it is a laugh attack.” He snorted, wiping both eyes. “Ay-ay-ay. Okay. Forgive me.” He cleared his voice, brought his chair closer to the table, sniffled, cleared his voice again, and suppressed his giggles. “Okay, here you have the number of vehicles,” he started, but he was still completely out of control. He threw himself back in his seat again, laughing uproariously. “And no further explanation is needed,” he explained by way of surrender. “If you have any questions about the firemen’s endowment,” he added between guffaws, “the gentleman who is in charge can answer you.”*
The politician’s uncontrolled laughter was not a reflex, which by definition is a process that takes place in the shortest possible route through a given neural pathway. When the doctor hits your knee with a hammer and your leg jerks, that is a reflex. No brain required. Laughter, on the other hand, involves a highly complex series of emotional, cognitive, and motor actions that you think you can control. You always have the option of not laughing when you don’t want to, right? You have control over your body and behavior, correct? Wrong. This example of the poor guy laughing so hard he almost wet himself on TV shows that while we feel we are in control, we are actually just along for the ride.
* See http://sleightsofmind.com/media/laughattack.
A colleague of ours, John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, recently reprised Libet’s work using functional brain imaging. He wanted to see what happens in people’s brains when they make conscious choices. If you had taken part in the study, you would be lying in a scanner when Haynes tells you that you can decide if you want to press a button with your right hand or left hand. You are free to make this decision whenever you want, but you have to remember the time when you feel you have made up your mind. The researchers used a sophisticated computer program trained to recognize typical brain activity patterns preceding each of the two choices.
Haynes was astonished to find that brain signals—tiny patterns of activity in your frontal lobes—predict your decision (that is, whether you will press the button with your left or right hand) up to seven seconds before you make a conscious choice. This means that parts of your brain can sometimes know what choices you are going to make several seconds before you become consciously aware of them. Because these brain areas are clearly active with information indicating the choice you are about to make, well ahead of the time that you consciously feel you’ve made a decision, it seems likely that these brain areas serve to bias your upcoming decision. You may be convinced that your decision was a free, open choice, but it’s just not true.
If your actions are determined by the prior neural activity happening in your unconscious brain seconds before you consciously make a decision, do you have a choice about anything? Are you responsible for what you do? In his book The Illusion of Conscious Free Will, the Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner digs into such questions by comparing the illusion of free will to the perception of magic. You perceive magic, he says, when an apparent causal sequence (the magician saws his assistant in half) obscures a real causal sequence (the box is rigged so the saw blade never touches her). You do not perceive the real thing even though the apparent sequence violates common sense and you know it’s impossible.
Wegner argues that the “self” is magical in this same sense: “When we look at ourselves, we perceive a simple and often astonishing apparent causal sequence—I thought of it and it happened—when the real causal sequence underlying our behavior is complex, multithreaded, and unknown to us as it happens.”
Wegner wonders how people develop this magic sense, what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls “some concentrated internal lump of specialness.” Why do we experience our actions as freely willed, arising mysteriously from the self? And why, too, do we resist attempts to explain those actions in terms of real causal sequences, events that are going on behind the curtain of our minds?
We feel as if we have free will because we have independent thoughts and desires that are then acted upon accurately by our bodies. Our brains are correlation machines, as the magicians prove to us over and over with the presentation of impossible causal events. Because we have the ability to connect cause and effect, there is no evolutionary pressure to develop the sensory pathways necessary to track every bit of the information flowing through our brains. Remember that our neural resources are limited and that we cannot attend to everything in our visual field. Well, that attentional limit would be even more woefully deficient if we also had to attend to every single little process in our brains. Do you really want to know every minute detail of the information that the neurons in your prefrontal cortex are sending to your primary motor cortex in order to reach for a glass of water? Suffice it that when we are thirsty, our arm successfully picks up a glass of water and brings it to our mouth. We conclude that our free will directs the action because we didn’t tell anybody else about our internal wishes.
Wegner designed an experiment to see if he could prime people to experience thoughts consistent with an event they did not cause and if they could be convinced that they caused it.
Roll back the clock and assume you are a participant. You are asked to help with a study on psychosomatic influences on health. Your task is to play the role of a witch doctor who lays a voodoo curse on another participant, a victim, by sticking pins into a doll. In reality, this person is a confederate in the study (she works for Wegner). Not long after you jab the pins into her ersatz doll body, she feigns a headache. Would you believe you caused her headache? Many of the study participants did. Moreover, if the “victim” acted in an obnoxious manner, the level of magical witch doctor thinking increased. But no harm had really been done at all.
This readiness to make correlations illustrates the general processes by which people succumb to the belief in the paranormal, especially clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis, says Wegner. Our bodies respond effortlessly to our wishes, and we witness the result as a correlation between our wishes and our body’s reaction. It’s not too far afield, then, for us to wish for the improbable and, when it happens, to believe that we caused it with our hopes and prayers.
Because we are so used to getting what we wish for in life (like one foot stepping in front of the other), we can’t stop ourselves from wishing for the physically forbidden. An exception may be the ancient Greeks, who believed that each of their motivations and feelings was granted to them by a god. Chuck Palahniuk, the American novelist, explains, “Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.”
You can prove to yourself easily enough that the universe does not accede to your every whim. Wish to perform a Chopin étude on the piano when you’ve never taken a lesson, and it won’t happen. But Wegner explains why we nevertheless overextend our propensity for wishful thinking: “If our wishes seem to prompt a range of activity within our personal sphere of influence, why not hope for more? Many forms of supernatural belief, including belief in prayer, may develop as a natural next step from the magic we perceive in ourselves. If mere wishing can pop the lid off a bottle of beer, why not wish for the moon?”
Two psychological effects further influence the illusion of free will. In the priority effect, your sense of agency seems causal when the thought of an action occurs just prior to the action. For example, you can be led to experience the arm movements of another person as if the movements were your own. In our professional opinions as neurobiologists, we can tell you that this effect is downright freaky. Imagine you are draped in a robe, arms at your sides. A helper stands behind you and puts his arms through the sleeves. He wears gloves. You hear instructions for how to move your arms through a headset. As the helper makes the movements, you feel as if you have control over his arms. It is an illusion of agency. Has anyone ever called you on the telephone at the same time you were thinking about him or her? It’s a coincidence, but you feel agency. But then every feeling of free will that you have is an illusion of agency.
In the exclusivity effect, you perceive that your thoughts cause events for which there are no other plausible explanations. But there may be reasons for making choices that you are not aware of. Wegner gives a nice example. Say you are at a restaurant and the person next to you orders the shrimp special. You were about to order that but, wait, it might look like you were copying that person. So you change your order so as not to look influenced by the other. You think you are choosing of your free will but it isn’t so. The fact that you can be influenced about something as trivial as an order of shrimp shows that your free will is a wet tissue. Indeed, no idea is an island.
Wegner says that we have only our conscious thought and our conscious perception to explain our actions post hoc. We may believe that they are connected to free will, but when we do so we take a mental leap over the demonstrable power of the unconscious that guides our actions and conclude that the conscious mind is the sole player. Your conscious thoughts merely provide a rationale for what you just did, which was motivated in a very unfree, deliberate way by your unconscious brain.
Can you break the spell? Some worry that if we prove free will is an illusion that arises from the flesh, the human spirit will be dead. But such a shift in popular thinking is not likely to happen. The ubiquity of perceived conscious agency in our everyday life is sufficient to quell our inner skepticism telling us that our behaviors are caused by brain mechanisms and not by our free will. The illusion of the magic self cannot be easily suppressed. Moreover, many philosophers and scientists argue that conscious will may be an illusion, but responsible, moral action is quite real.
CAN A MACHINE READ YOUR THOUGHTS?
Can a machine read your thoughts? Can scientists read the contents of your mind via functional magnetic resonance imaging?
The answer depends on what you mean by “thoughts.” Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, has come a long way since its discovery in the early 1990s. In a nutshell, the technique measures brain activity by tracking increased blood flow, the idea being that more active brain regions will use more energy and will “light up” in the scanner. In the early days of fMRI research, scientists located regions that specialize in things like our basic sensory processes, speaking, reading, or feeling strong emotions. More recently, they found areas specialized to recognize faces or places.
But can the machines reveal what you are thinking? At the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England, scientists are using a new computational technique called multivariate analysis to predict your thoughts based on observed patterns of activity. If you were in their scanner, they might ask you to imagine playing tennis and then to imagine walking around the rooms in your home. Based on the patterns observed, they could tell you which activity you were thinking about.
Thus far such studies are highly constrained. Only a handful of mental states have been correlated with brain patterns, which are noisy, indirect measures of neural activity. For example, you could imagine playing soccer and moving around your office, and the machine might not be able to tell the difference. Thus researchers cannot do genuine mind reading—they cannot tell you that you are thinking of a hippopotamus, silently reciting the Gettysburg address, or wondering what you will have for dinner tonight. Mind reading remains science fiction.