The first surprise is how new brains are. The earth has existed for a full four and a half billion years, and yet it was just six hundred million years ago that the earliest of them began to form. It has taken almost all of that time for nature to work out the stunning mechanics of the human iteration. The first neurologically recognisable Homo sapiens, known as ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ (to whom, incredibly, genetic studies have shown that everyone on earth is related), lived only two hundred thousand years ago. Nobody knows what caused the human brain to accelerate its form and function until it was so dramatically in advance of our fellow creatures, but for some reason we gained an oversized prefrontal cortex, which enabled us to strategise, socialise and make lateral associations.
We left our sunny Eden in East Africa sixty thousand years ago and began colonising the world. Then, around forty thousand years ago, the next evolutionary mystery took place. For reasons that remain unclear, there was a sudden explosion in creativity that saw paintings springing up on cave walls from Australia to Europe and the crafting of intricate articles such as rope, oil lamps, drills and sewing needles as far away as Siberia. We began painting our bodies, wearing jewellery and burying our dead.
It is for behaviours such as these that we humans like to flatter ourselves that we are made of a different metaphysical stuff than the animals. But our DNA does not lie. Even today, we remain a specific variety of African ape that evolved in the Great Rift Valley. The last survivors of the hominins, we once lived alongside at least four other varieties of nearly-humans. In terms of time alone, though, we are nowhere near the most successful hominin to have inhabited the planet. We might have been here for two hundred thousand years, but some of our cousins lived for more than two million.
From the confidence that is exuded by some neuroscientists, it might be easy to assume that the riddles of the brain have mostly been solved. But that is not so. How does it generate thoughts? How, exactly, does it store memories? How does it create that sensation of oneness, of coalescence, of having an identity, a narrative purpose, a soul? Although there are plenty of theories, the answers to all of these questions remain far from clear. In truth, this most magical of organs remains deeply mysterious.
It begins its formation in the embryo as a tiny fluid-filled tube. Pinched off in the centre as the foetus develops, one end of the sac becomes the spinal cord, while on the other grows – at the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand cells a minute – a piece of organic technology that is so advanced, and yet so wondrously strange, that nothing in the known universe is comparable. Built from what has been described by neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman as ‘an alien kind of computational material,’ it is pink, has the texture of almost-set jelly, consumes 20 per cent of our bodily energy and is said to be capable of receiving millions of pieces of information at any given moment.
It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is as complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity that bloom to life at speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, ‘The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.’ And yet, he continues, ‘We know so little about it that even a child’s questions should be seriously entertained.’
Those still desperate for evidence that we are of a special category of being should start their hunt for clues in early childhood. Other mammals give birth to their young when their brains have developed enough that they can control their own body. But not us. We arrive into life, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, as an ‘unfinished animal.’ Our brains are so monstrously oversized that we are born about two years prematurely, at the point at which our skulls can still be squeezed agonisingly, bloodily and dangerously through a birth canal. We are then effectively useless for years, relying entirely upon a parent for survival until the gigantic computational device that sits on our neck is finally capable of running the body it is attached to.
Between the ages of zero and two, babies create around 1.8 million synapses per second. Throughout childhood, the brain is extraordinarily alive with the activity of warring neurons, fighting for connection space across its epic territories. Although it never stops changing, it remains in this heightened learning phase until late adolescence. In his book Brain and Culture Professor Bruce E. Wexler writes that ‘During the first part of life, the brain and mind are highly plastic, require sensory input to grow and develop, and shape themselves to the major recurring features of their environment. By early adulthood, the mind and brain have a diminished ability to change those structures … much of the [brain] activity is devoted to making the environment conform to the established structures.’
It may have passed you by as you read it, just now, but what that rather formal, rather dry sentence is saying is amazing. It is the keyhole through which the first, fuzzy outlines of my answer can be spied. Although the context is neurological rather than psychological, it actually speaks to the whole picture: to the brain’s form and the mind’s function. To me, Wexler’s words are an ancient spell, a revelation of long-hidden magic. They contain the essence of the brain’s sly modus operandi – the organising principle behind the worrying fact that a central function of this wondrous machine is to deceive you. By the time you have reached adulthood, your brain has decided how the world works – how a table looks and feels, how liquids and authority figures behave, how scary rats are. It has made countless billions of little insights and decisions. It has made its mind up. From then on, its treatment of any new information that runs counter to those views can sometimes be brutal. Your brain is surprisingly reluctant to change its mind. Rather than going through the difficulties involved in rearranging itself to reflect the truth, it often prefers to fool you. So it distorts. It forgets. It projects. It lies.
These untrustworthy processes run far deeper than the realms of opinion and belief. Your mind contains internal models of everything, from the physical geography of the room you are sitting in to the rights and wrongs of the conflict in the Middle East. The brain loves its models. It guards them like a bitter curmudgeon, making adjustments only when it has to. It uses these models as a shortcut, in order to more easily conjure an illusion of a sane, whole and coherent reality. This illusion is so complete that we don’t believe it is one. It is hard to underplay the brilliance of this lie: up to 90 per cent of what you are seeing right now is constructed from your memories.
Practitioners of lucid dreaming know how convincing these mental models of reality are. When writer Jeff Warren was trained to ‘wake up’ during a dream by expert Dr Stephen LaBerge of Stanford University, his mind’s projection of the room that he had gone to bed in was so accurate he didn’t realise that he was still asleep. ‘It was my room, seamlessly modelled by my brain,’ he writes in Head Trip. ‘I could see the outlines of furniture from under the bottom edge of the mask, feel my bed underneath me, hear Kelly’s breathing – everything was perfect. It even smelled like my room. At that moment there was no recognisable difference between my waking and my dreaming perception.’ This experience is so common in students of lucid dreaming that Dr LaBerge teaches a variety of ‘reality tricks’ – such as looking at a clock’s second hand to see if it is behaving predictably – to enable them to check if their eyes are open or closed. We all have these models. When we dream, and it feels real, it is because our models of reality are so detailed and textured and perfect it might as well be. It is all there: the sights, the noises, the textures and touches and scents. Our brains contain worlds. And it is mostly those worlds that we are seeing when we are awake.
If you are thinking that you must be misunderstanding all this, because it is just too spooky, too grotesque, too much like a disturbing science fiction film, then I am sorry to tell you that you are not. The truth really is this weird. We think of our eyes as open windows and our ears as empty tubes. We experience the out-there as if we are a tiny homunculus gazing from holes in our heads at a world that is flooded with light, music and colour. But this is not true. The things that you are seeing right now are not out there in front of you, but inside your head, being reconstructed in more than thirty sites across your brain. The light is not out there. The objects are not out there. The music is not out there. A violin has no sound without a brain to process it; a rose petal has no colour. It is all a re-creation. A vision. A useful guess about what the world might look like, that is built well enough that we are able to negotiate it successfully.
Of course, real versions of everything are out there – but not the versions that you are seeing. Those are merely your brain’s impressions of how the world appears. Our eyes, skin, tongue and ears receive information, not as pictures, touches, tastes or notes, but as pulses of electricity. That is all we really know – the pulses. Your brain translates those pulses into a re-creation of reality that it can sensibly interact with. It is not known how all this disparate electrical data coalesces into the experience we all have of viewing some kind of inner television screen – but we do know that there is no television in your head; no single area, that is, which all the neural wiring leads to. We also know that the brain has a great many sleights and shortcuts and mirage-generating powers in its arsenal, and that it somehow manages to bring them together into one central, magisterial illusion: that reality and your place within it is simple, understandable and clear. Under its spell, you have become, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, ‘the invisible actor at the centre of the world.’
We naturally assume that our senses are our principal source of information about what is happening at any given moment. They are not. They are mere fact-checkers. Consider your face as if it is a machine. There is barely a space on its surface that is not dedicated to the analysis of new information. When our environment is as we expect it to be, we mosey through life, wandering peacefully through the neurological illusion, thinking about the weather or the shops or the fight we have just had with our Internet provider. But as soon as we detect something unexpected, we become alert. The brain, concerned that its illusion might break down, is ever watchful for surprises. It directs the powers of the face and mind at the disturbance. Anxious to discover its source, so that it can integrate whatever it is into its projection of reality, it moves your neck so that you can focus squarely on the weirdness. Your skin, eyes, ears and nose are pointed towards it, your train of thought is interrupted as you seek to answer the question, ‘What is that?’
Even when your surroundings contain no surprises, your brain is continually checking its guesses against what your senses are telling it. It uses them to make running adjustments to its projection, ensuring greater accuracy now and in the future. But because the brain is so heavily reliant upon what it already knows, it is difficult for us to experience things we have no prior knowledge of. In a startling 1974 experiment that tested these principles, cats were raised from birth in an environment where they only ever saw vertical lines. When a horizontal bar was placed in their cage, they walked straight into it. Until that painful point of learning, their visual cortices had never received any information about horizontal lines, and so to them the bars were invisible.
Humans, too, suffer when their brains have been deprived of information. When deaf people are successfully operated upon they can initially make no sense at all of the novel experience of hearing. Their brains have not yet learned how to translate all those new electrical pulses into their model of the world. Scott Krepel, who was fitted with a cochlear implant, enabling him to hear for the first time, told a reporter from the US radio show This American Life, ‘It didn’t feel like hearing; it felt more like a vibration in my whole body. I was sitting there and nothing was happening, except for like a little thing that was tingling throughout my body. But eventually, after a while, the vibrations localised to my ears. I didn’t really know that it was sound at first. And eventually I came to realise, “Wait a minute, this must be it!” … I couldn’t understand any of the sounds. It was just all noise.’ After five years, his brain had still not caught up. Krepel abandoned his implant, preferring the safety and sanity of the silent world in which he had grown up.
As you might expect, it takes time for the brain to take its multisensory barrage of pulses and to process it into its grand illusion. Estimates vary, but the most dramatic that I came across had it that we are all living half a second in the past. The ‘now’ we appear to be experiencing is another illusion: a prediction that the brain calculates once it has received the already slightly out-of-date information from the senses. If a ball is thrown into the air, your brain predicts it will be slightly closer by the time you ‘see’ it and therefore ‘moves’ it to the correct place, enabling you to catch it.
Vision is of such importance to the construction of your virtual realm that one-third of the human brain is devoted to its processing. And yet your eyes themselves are nowhere near as good as you have been led to assume. Hold out your arm and look at your thumbnail. That is about the extent to which your sight is clear, coloured and detailed. Beyond ten degrees from this vivid centre, your vision is blurred, black and white and only able to detect potentially important information. It achieves the effect of showing you a detailed whole by building it up surreptitiously. Your eye darts at high speed around the scene that you are in and takes multiple high-definition snapshots of it. You are fooled into thinking your gaze is steady, still and under your conscious control but, in fact, these ‘saccades’ – which are the fastest movements made by the human body – happen up to five times per second. They are sensitive to change, patterns, contexts and textures – anything that might trigger a need for the brain to update its best-guess impression of the world. From what it shows you, it edits out the jarring motion of these saccades, as well as the blinks that happen every five seconds (it has been calculated that blinking makes us blind for a total of four hours per day). It also overlays a series of magnificent special effects, including colour and movement and filling in your blind spot and adding depth, generating a 3D version of what, writes neuroscientist David Eagleman in his book Incognito, is only ‘2.5D at best.’
The world appears to be coloured because, in the back of each eye, in an area of just one square millimetre, we have three varieties of cone that interpret incoming visual information as either red, blue or green. Every colour you will ever see is a blend of this triumvirate of basics. We assume that this is simply what the world looks like but, yet again, this is a lie. The atoms that make everything up have no colour. There are no colours inside the brain. Light waves are not coloured. So where are colours? They are another illusion, created in specific cells in the brain that have been located, so I am informed, in the visual area of the striate cortex V4. A fish such as a skate has no colour cones at all and so experiences the world in black and white. If you now feel superior to the skate and assume that you, the special human, have access to the full and fantastic panoply of shades that make up true reality, then I am afraid that I have to tell you that some birds and insects have four, five or even six colour receptors, compared to our sorry three. Their experience of the multi-multi-multi-coloured world is impossible for any human to even begin to imagine.
Because sight is of such pre-eminent importance to us, we assume that vision is the best way of negotiating the world. But this, too, is not objectively true. Dogs live, principally, in a world of smells; moles in a world of touch, bats in a world of noise and knifefish in a world of electricity. Their experiences of reality are specialised for their particular environments and survival needs, their perceptions profoundly different and no less valid than ours.
According to Professor Eagleman, ‘Our brain is aware of very little of what is out there.’ Its preoccupation is with presenting to us – and drawing our attention to – the things that might be important for our well-being. Our ears are only capable of hearing a small number of the sounds that are actually present in our environment; our eyes are blind to whole rainbows of visible light – less than a ten-trillionth of the spectrum is available to us. Right now, mobile-phone signals, soap operas, radio-broadcasted music and who knows what else are everywhere: in front of you, above your head, inside you. And yet you don’t see them or hear them, because – much like a black-and-white television is blind to blue skies and green seas – you lack the equipment. In a sense, brains operate on a ‘need to know’ basis only. In Making up the Mind, Professor Frith describes the inexact and humble panorama that we inhabit as having a specific use: it is, he says, a ‘map of signs about future possibilities.’
The world that you experience as objectively real is your own personal model of reality, and your brain tends to assume that everything new that you experience coheres to that model. There are good reasons for this. It hardly needs to be pointed out that if the brain really is receiving millions of pieces of information (Professor Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia quotes a figure of over eleven million, whilst in his book Straw Dogs, Professor John Gray has it at ‘perhaps 14 million bits of information per second’), we are consciously aware of nowhere near that amount. As V. S. Ramachandran writes, ‘The brain must have some way of sifting through this superabundance of detail.’
What are you aware of as you read this? The feeling of your back on the chair, an early rumble of hunger from your belly, the sound of nearby traffic, the fact that you need to get off the train at the next stop? It is not nearly eleven million things. Indeed, it is thought that the maximum number of points of information we are able to appreciate consciously at any one time is less than forty. One part of this sifting process involves the matching of incoming information with the personal belief system that you have about the world. Any information that fits is incorporated effortlessly into your experience of now. But what of the information that runs counter to your belief system? What then? ‘One option is to revise your story and create a new model about the world and about yourself,’ writes Ramachandran. ‘The problem is that if you did this for every little piece of threatening information, your behaviour would soon become chaotic and unstable. You would go mad.’ So instead we minimise, distort, rationalise and even hallucinate our way into disregarding this information. And the cost we pay for our feeling of sensible, sane and simple coherence? We lie to ourselves.
It is possible to catch the liar out. The brain may excel at making accurate predictions about what should be out there, but it sometimes gets it wrong. People who lose portions of their sight have been known to see cartoon characters, loved ones and historical characters romping across their blind spots, as their brains frantically try to guess at what should be in the darkened gaps. Ten per cent of elderly people who suffer from severe blindness or deafness experience hallucinations due to similar processes. Some stroke patients live, at least temporarily, in a state of complete psychological denial of their paralysis. A Dr Clarence W. Olsen has spoken of a patient who lost sensation and movement in her left side. Because her numb limbs now felt and behaved as if they belonged to someone else, her mind explained them in exactly this way – by telling her they actually belonged to someone else. Olsen has recounted, ‘When she was shown that the limbs were attached to her, she said, “But my eyes and my feelings don’t agree, and I must believe my feelings.”’ In his book Altered Egos, Dr Todd E. Feinberg writes of this and similar patients, including a forty-eight-year-old woman who, when asked about her numb side, grumbled, ‘That’s an old man. He stays in bed all the time.’
It is important to underline that none of these people are ‘mad’. Their brains have simply failed to adjust to their catastrophic new realities. In most cases of this sort of denial, it takes between two and three weeks for their unpleasant situation to be absorbed into their working perception. Experiments on healthy individuals have revealed similar mistakes. Academics at the University of Wisconsin made an audio recording of a predictable sentence – ‘The bill was passed by both houses of the legislature’ – but covered a portion of it with static. Almost everyone who heard it said, ‘Yes, I heard the words and the white noise.’ But when asked where the static had actually taken place, a large proportion had no idea at all. Despite the fact that they weren’t all present, they had heard all the words. Their brain had predicted what they would be, and produced them. It had lied. We tend to see and hear what we expect to see and hear, not necessarily what is there.
Other incredible insights come from people who have had body parts amputated and, because their brains have not correctly acknowledged the loss, continue to experience their presence as ‘phantom limbs’. In his work, V. S. Ramachandran has come across tennis players ‘catching’ balls with phantom arms, women experiencing phantom breasts following a full mastectomy, phantom pain in a phantom appendix and even phantom erections in phantom penises.
The human realm, though, is not simply one of things that we see, sounds that we hear and vanished appendixes that feel sore. The University of Virginia’s Professor Jonathan Haidt writes in The Happiness Hypothesis that our world is ‘not really one made of rocks, trees and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints and sinners.’ It is one of beliefs.
One result of this simple fact is that vast differences exist in the behaviours of human brains around the world. Some cultures, for example, experience emotions that are unique. In New Guinea, the Gururumba men have a mental state that is known as ‘being a wild pig’ in which they run around stealing things and attacking passersby. Dylan Evans of the University of Bath writes that this emotion ‘is seen as an unwelcome but involuntary event, so people suffering from it are given special consideration which includes relief from financial obligations.’ He adds, ‘The fact that different cultures can produce human beings with different emotional repertoires is testimony to the remarkable plasticity of the human mind … if your culture teaches you that there is an emotion called “being a wild pig” then the chances are you will experience this emotion.’
Many South Koreans are terrified of ‘fan death’, which they believe is a serious risk if you sleep in the same room as an electric fan. Panicked news reports about fan death are common during the summer and fans are sold with timer switches that automatically shut off after a preset time. In Iceland – a country that boasts a 100 per cent literacy rate – contractors carrying out huge public works, such as road building, have to consult with specialists to ensure that they bypass the homes of fairies and gnomes, while builders hire ‘elf-spotters’ to scope the land before work begins on a new house. In China people suffer from a condition known as ‘koro’ in which they feel their sexual organs – penises in men and vulvas and nipples in women – retracting into their bodies. They have a family member hold their shrinking part in place, all day and all night, for as long as it takes until the koro threat passes.
Even the nature of a state such as drunkenness is defined by where you come from. In the UK, Australia and the US we believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, so we become flirtatious and aggressive and inadvisably honest when drunk – even when all we have had is a placebo cocktail. In Latin and Mediterranean countries, meanwhile, it is believed to encourage peacefulness and friendliness – and, for those civilised people, this is precisely what it does. ‘The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical effect of ethanol,’ writes the anthropologist Kate Fox in her book Watching the English. ‘The basic fact has been proved time and time again. When people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.’
It should not come as a surprise to learn that a good deal of our often faulty beliefs and tendencies come as a result of us being highly tribal. We remain, today, modern creatures with prehistoric thinking equipment. Which perhaps offers a clue as to why it was that – as Louise Ogborn discovered when she was compelled to strip in that McDonald’s back office – we still have an instinct for obedience to authority. Studies by researchers in Switzerland have found that we are also programmed to punish, and to take pleasure in revenge. We have an additional, irresistible urge to divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. A study by three major US universities found that between 90 and 95 per cent of people have an unconscious racial prejudice. Others have observed that the only thing necessary to trigger tribal behaviour in humans is the creation of two completely arbitrary groups. Leave them alone in a room and watch it all begin: the people we identify with automatically become a part of our ‘in’ group. A series of unconscious biases flares up around then – haloes surround ‘our’ people, which magnify their virtues and minimise their faults. A dark, opposing magic happens to our view of those who are on the ‘out’. But as damaging as it can be, we need prejudice. It is the shape of our models, the starting point for our guesses about the world.
When our brains are told things that contradict their models, we often enter a state known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. In their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describe this as ‘a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are inconsistent, such as “smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day”. Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it.’ As a result of dissonance, they say, ‘most people, when directly confronted with proof that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously.’
We all know it. It is that feeling of tortuous thickness, of psychological scrap and spit, of internal obsession. We find ourselves chewing over something that we have done or heard or experienced. It can last for hours, days or sometimes longer. That upstairs agony, that bickering between the warring voices in our head – that is what it feels like to have your brain taking apart an experience and rearranging it in such a way that it doesn’t have to rebuild its models. It doesn’t stop until it has convinced you that you were right; until your hero status has been restored, rebuilt. It is the feeling of you lying to yourself.
It is a process that has been widely studied since the 1950s, when its existence was first hypothesised by Leon Festinger of Stanford University. One of the most egregious methods the brain uses to avoid the constipation of dissonance is with a thought-flaw known as confirmation bias. The pattern, which you may also recognise, goes like this: when confronted by a new fact, we first feel an instantaneous, emotional hunch. It is a raw instinct for whether the fact is right or wrong and it pulls us helplessly in the direction of an opinion. Then we look for evidence that supports our hunch. The moment we find some, we think ‘Aha!’ and happily conclude that we are, indeed, correct. The thinking then ceases.
Psychologists know this as the ‘makes sense stopping rule’. We ignore anything that runs counter to our hunch, grab for the first thing that matches, think, Yep that makes sense, and then we rest, satisfied by the peerless powers of our fantastic wisdom. Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of confirmation bias is the fact that we mistake the process of searching for favourable evidence as a fair survey of both sides of the argument.
Throughout the last few decades, a huge number of entertaining studies have been carried out that have revealed just how devious this delusion is. One of the neatest looked at unconscious sexism, and how the brain justified its secret, unpleasant prejudices to its owner. Participants were asked to consider candidates for the role of police chief. They had a choice: would a ‘streetwise’ man or a ‘formally educated’ woman be better suited to the job? The majority chose the man. When asked why, they said that they had thought carefully about this, and decided that it would be most useful for a police chief to be streetwise.
For a second group, researchers switched the genders. This time, the male candidate was ‘formally educated’ and the female was ‘streetwise’. The majority chose the man. When asked why, they said that they had thought carefully about this, and decided that it would be most useful for a police chief to be formally educated. It is a discomforting thing, reading of these ordinary men and women, who presumably consider themselves to be kind and rational and fair, operating in such an unknowingly prejudiced manner. The study suggests that they had no idea why they believe what they believe, why they say what they say.
We deal with dissonant information using a variety of yet more devious cognitive stunts. Psychologist Deanna Kuhn found that participants in a pseudo-murder jury quickly compose their own story of what I think happened and then proceed, as they survey the evidence, to pay attention only to the facts that fit their narrative. In an earlier study, Kuhn found that the brain has a tendency to simply forget things that it considers contradictory to its models. But perhaps the most breathtaking trick of all is in how exposure to the opposing side of any argument often makes us even more biased towards our own beliefs.
Studies have shown that we tend to subject the evidence of our foes to much closer scrutiny than we use on our own. One had people reading two arguments about the death penalty – a first report that conflicted with their opinions and a second that agreed. Most of the participants concluded that the essay that agreed with them was a ‘highly competent piece of work’. As for the document they disagreed with, they examined it with the eye of a prosecution lawyer until they found genuine flaws and magnified them, using even minor issues as the basis for disregarding the entire thing. As Thomas Gilovich writes in How We Know What Isn’t So, ‘Exposure to a mixed body of evidence made both sides even more convinced of the fundamental soundness of their original beliefs.’ Confirmation bias is profoundly human and it is appalling. When new information leads to an increase in ignorance, it is the opposite of learning, the death of wisdom.
Recent studies have revealed even more unpleasant truths. In 2004, clinical psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues used the bitter US election milieu to undertake an examination of the seductive power of the lies that we all tell ourselves. They took fifteen intelligent, educated Democrat voters and fifteen equally able Republicans and slid each into a brain scanner while presenting them with six pieces of ‘information’ (some made up by the psychologists) about John Kerry and George Bush. Each slide of information showed clear inconsistencies between the politician’s words and deeds. They saw one, for example, that quoted John Kerry telling an anti-war constituent, ‘I share your concerns. I voted in favour of a resolution that would have insisted that economic sanctions be given more time to work.’ The next slide had Kerry writing to another voter, a week later: ‘Thank you for expressing your support for the Iraqi invasion. From the outset, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush’s response to the crisis.’ Each of the statements was written in such a way that any dispassionate observer would rate both politicians as duplicitous. Westen wanted to find out exactly how the brains of these ordinary voters dealt with this dissonant information.
After they had read the slides, the participants were asked to rate each politician’s level of inconsistency on a scale of one to four. As Westen writes in The Political Brain, ‘They didn’t disappoint us. They had no trouble seeing the contradictions for the opposition candidate, rating his inconsistencies close to a four. For their own candidate, however, ratings averaged closer to two, indicating minimal contradiction.’
But that was just the beginning. Westen also had his scans to consult. He wanted to know exactly what happened on the neurological level when new data arrived that conflicted with internal models; when their minds were blasted into a state of cognitive dissonance. As he expected, the unpleasant emotion was soothed away quickly. ‘But the political brain also did something we didn’t predict,’ he writes. ‘Once participants had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on. The partisan brain didn’t seem just satisfied in feeling better. It worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased reasoning.’
We fall for the lies of our own brain. When we do, it rewards us. It seals its little mischief with a neurochemical kiss, drugging us into feeling good about what we have done. Of course, if we did carefully consider and fairly assess every new argument that we encountered, we would become confused, socially isolated and, quite possibly, insane. And mostly concluding that we are right about everything does have other benefits. As Tavris and Aronson so eloquently put it, ‘Dissonance reduction operates like a thermostat, keeping our self-esteem bubbling along on high.’ Indeed, a great many of the findings of decades of experimental psychology point to one grand and shameful conclusion: we are all deluded egotists.
Humans are subject to a menagerie of biases, a troubling proportion of which hiss seductive half-truths in the ear of our consciousness. They tell us that we are better looking, wiser, more capable, more moral and have a more glittering future in store than is true. One of my favourite studies involves participants trying to find a photograph of themselves that has been hidden in a panorama of hundreds of portraits of others. People tended to find their own image more quickly when it had been digitally enhanced to make them appear more attractive, suggesting that none of us are as good looking as we really think. Discussing a related experiment, behavioural psychologist Nicholas Epley told the New Scientist, ‘When we ask people to rate how attractively they will be rated by somebody else and correlate it with actual ratings of attractiveness we find no correlation. Zero! This still shocks me.’
Another experiment had participants reading an essay about Rasputin – one set of readers were presented with the correct text while another group had a version in which the monk’s date and month of birth had been altered to match their own. When questioned, the group with the similar birthdays generally thought more highly of the mad monk than the others, without having any clue as to why. Studies have also shown that we consistently overrate the quality and value of our own work.
Our ego acts upon the truth as a planet acts upon gravity. Reality warps as it pulls towards it. A cognitive error we all share, known as the spotlight effect, means that we go through our social lives convinced that everything we are saying, doing and feeling is being closely examined by those around us even though, in reality, they are all preoccupied with themselves, equally convinced the spotlight is on them. Gamblers rewrite their memories, crediting payouts to their excellent judgement and recalling their losses as near-wins or down to simple bad luck. Athletes tend to put their victories down to training, strength and stamina and their losses to unfortunate circumstance; 74 per cent of drivers consider themselves better than average; 94 per cent of university professors think they are better than average. When husbands and wives are asked to guess what percentage of housework they do, their totals average 120 per cent. Half of all students in one survey predicted that they would protest upon hearing an overtly sexist comment. When secretly tested, just 16 per cent actually did.
When we behave badly, it is usually because we were put in an unhappy situation. Circumstance has conspired against us. Really, I had no choice. When others do wrong, it is because of their character flaws. Professor Roy Baumeister, who specialises in the study of evil, has found that even domestic abusers and murderers tend to view themselves as having acted reasonably in the face of unfair provocation. The Nazis believed that they were on a mission of good. He writes, ‘The perpetrators of evil are often ordinary, well-meaning human beings with their own motivations, reasons and rationalisations for what they are doing … many especially evil acts are performed by people who believe they are doing something supremely good.’
We love to judge others. We love to categorise. We love to divide. We are the good guys, they are the bad guys. We the hero, they the demon. Why? Because it fits the model. It bolsters the ego. It makes us happy. It has even been demonstrated that depressed people, with their dysfunctionally gloomy predictions about themselves and the world, are more accurate in their outlook than the mentally ‘healthy’. The world, and your life within it, is far bleaker than you have been led to believe.
A final example should, I hope, offer some idea of the brilliant power of the lies we tell ourselves. We typically have a bias that tells us we are less susceptible to bias than everyone else. Our default position tends to be that our opinions are the result of learning, experience and personal reflection. The things we believe are obviously true – and everyone would agree if only they could look at the issue with clear, objective, unimpeded sight. But they don’t because they’re biased. Their judgements are confused by ill-informed hunches and personal grudges. They might think they’re beautiful and clever and right but their view of reality is skewed.
You might have read all of that thinking, Yes, yes, I know people just like that. But I’m not really one of them, to be honest. I’m modest and humble and only too aware when I’m getting things wrong. That’s the sound of your brain lying to you. You are like that. If you are now thinking, Yes, yes, yes, I hear what you’re saying – but if you knew me you would realise that I’m not one of those people, I’m sorry to say that you’re still at it. Most of us think we are the exception. This most disturbing of truths has been widely demonstrated in study after study. When individuals are educated about these ego-defending biases and then have their biases re-examined, they usually fail to change their opinions of themselves. Even though they accept, rationally, that they are not immune, they still think as if they are. It is a cognitive trap that we just can’t seem to climb out of.
Our prejudices and misbeliefs are invisible to us. They form in childhood and early adolescence, when our brain is in its heightened state of learning, when it is building its models, and then they disappear from view. We can think as long and as hard as we like about our biases – we can root about our own heads for hours, utterly convinced of our own objectivity, and still come up with nothing. They are inaccessible to the conscious part of our minds. The trick is so embedded – our warped sensations of right, wrong and truth are so folded into our fundamental sense of self – that we are immune from detecting them.
Just as the knifefish assumes his realm of electricity is the only possible reality, just as the hominin believes his tricolour palette allows him to see all the colours, just as John Mackay is convinced that lesbian nuns are going to hell, we look out into the world mostly to reaffirm our prior beliefs about it. We imagine that the invisible forces that silently guide our beliefs and behaviour, coaxing us like flocks of deviant angels, do not exist. We are comforted by the feeling that we have ultimate control over our thoughts, our actions, our lives.
There are seven billion individual worlds living on the surface of this one. We are – all of us – lost inside our own personal realities, our own brain-generated models of how things really are. And if, after reading all of that, you still believe you are the exception, that you really are wise and objective and above the powers of bias, then you might as well not fight it. You are, after all, only human.