The Illusion of Conscious Will (39 page)

Perceptual detail
is a particularly good cue to reality in the case of our own memories. People believe that their recollections represent real events rather than imaginings when they are able to recall more perceptual detail about the events (Johnson and Raye 1981). In Marcia Johnson’s words, “Memories arising in perception should have more perceptual information (e.g., color, sound), time and place information, and more meaningful detail, while memories originating in thought should have more information about the cognitive operations (such as reasoning, search, decision, and organizational processes) that took place when the memory was established” (Johnson 1988, 41). A mental image of an angel, for example, may be amorphous and incompletely detailed. Even if you study the image for a while, your subsequent memory for it will probably include fewer specifics (Was the angel wearing a belt? shoes or sandals? What color was its harp?) than if you studied a painting of an angel for the same length of time. Also, reflecting back on that imagined angel, you might also be able to judge that it had been imagined and not real because you remember thinking about the Archangel Gabriel after hearing a religious song on the radio. Memories of how you came to image the angel would predominate over memories of perceptual detail.

Detail cues are likely to be available during perception itself, not just in memory. A tree in the mind’s eye may have many of the properties of the perception of a real tree, of course, and the number of details available in each case might help us to determine which is real. The details we have available in a waking image may not be as rich as the details we can get from perception, perhaps, and this allows us to distinguish the image from a perception. The perceptual details in an image could be rich enough to support an inference of reality only under certain conditions, as when, for example, the reality we are imagining is itself sufficiently undetailed (as at dusk, for instance) so that images do not differ much from the real. Dreams may seem real even with relatively little detail, however, perhaps because at the time of dreaming there are no perceptions with which the dream image can be compared.

False perceptual details could prompt us to judge imagined agents to be real. Finding out that we know lots of details about a person, for example, might make that person—even if imaginary—seem real. An example of this can be found in the story of the reincarnation of Bridey Murphy (Gardner 1957).

This odd story began when Virginia Tighe, a housewife in Pueblo, Colorado, was hypnotized by Morey Bernstein. She started speaking in an Irish brogue and reported that in a previous life she was Bridey Murphy from Cork, Ireland. In further hypnotic sessions, she reported many bits of Irish lore, even breaking into Irish songs and dancing an Irish jig. Recordings of the sessions were made and sold widely. With the help of a local reporter, Bernstein published a book in 1956,
The Search for Bridey Murphy,
that became a best-seller and started a sensation. The boom in reincarnation had juke boxes blaring
Bridey Murphy Rock and Roll
. Costume parties featured “Come as you were” themes and stage hypnotists were suddenly called upon to help subjects find their past lives.

The inevitable search for the real Bridey Murphy in Irish records revealed nothing, but reporters in Chicago uncovered a Bridie Murphy Corkell who had lived in the house across the street from where Virginia grew up. It was further discovered that in high school drama classes, Virginia had been known for her particularly convincing Irish brogue, and that Virginia had an Irish aunt (no longer living) of whom she was very fond and who used to tell her about the old country. The memories Virginia reported in hypnosis were not her memories of a previous life but an admixture of her own childhood memories with those of her aunt and her early childhood friend.

This example points up the importance of
source memory
(Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay 1993), and more generally of
source perception,
in the creation of imaginary agents. Virginia Tighe failed to remember the source of her detailed memories of Bridey Murphy and so came to attribute them to her own memory and experience. Although it might seem strange that someone would make this mistake, it is actually quite possible for anyone. In one experiment, for example, participants imagined themselves saying words and heard another person saying other words. Later, the participants were fairly accurate at discriminating the words they had thought from those they had heard the other person say. This was not true, however, among people who had been instructed to imagine saying the words
in the other person’s voice
(Johnson, Foley, and Leach 1988). This latter group confused the words they heard the person say with the words they themselves thought of in the other’s voice. The perceptual details people use to judge whether experiences are real may come from unremembered or unperceived sources and thus can lead people to confuse imagination with reality.

Anything that increases the perceptual detail we experience about a particular agent will make that agent seem more real. In the case of virtual agents outside ourselves, this means that multiple perceptual hints of an agent’s existence (such as a whole night’s worth of creaking sounds in the attic) will be more convincing than one such hint (a single creak). In the case of virtual agents that we become, the same rule applies. More detail means more reality, but in this case the detail can arise from our own thoughts and behaviors. So, if we can think of lots of memories that could belong to the virtual agent, or if we notice that our voices or faces or gestures resemble those of some other agent, we may assemble these perceptual details into an overall judgment that we have indeed become someone else. What starts out merely as acting, in other words, may look so good to us that we convince ourselves of the reality of the characters we play.

The tendency to mistake imagined agents for real ones is likely to be further enhanced when the imagined agents have
emotional impact
. Although we may often know that we are pretending, at least at first, our emotional reactions to events in imaginary social worlds can be so compelling that we may drift into deep absorption (Brickman 1978). We can become involved in the experience, and as a result we seem to lose interest in continuing to remind ourselves that it is not real. The knowledge that we are in fact pretending might be quite salient at the start—when we begin to play a role, to act like someone, or to pretend we see someone who really is not there—but this knowledge does not keep surfacing into consciousness during the experience because of the emotions that arise to distract us from this pursuit.

Anyone who has ever wept at a movie knows this: We imagine agents most effectively when we experience the agents through gripping emotions (Hodges and Wegner 1997; Stotland 1969). This happens if we start empathizing with the agent and feel the emotions the agent might feel (such as when we feel sorrow for Bambi when his mother is killed). It also happens if we start reacting to an agent and have emotional responses to what the agent does (such as when we become angry at the hunter who so cruelly gunned her down). We can experience imaginary agents from the inside (when we role-play or empathize) or from the out-side (when we conjure them up or think about what they are like), but we seem to get particularly involved and carried away with such imagining when it impinges on our bodies to create emotional experience.

There are cases of brain damage that can hamper the emotional authentication of the experience of agents. In Capgras’ syndrome, for instance, bilateral frontal and right hemisphere damage may lead patients to experience the delusion that people they know well are actually “doubles,” stand-ins who merely look or act like these individuals (Alexander, Stuss, and Benson 1979; Berson 1983). The usual sense of familiarity experienced on encountering a friend or relative may be replaced by a sense of strangeness—the wrong emotional reaction—and the conclusion the patient reaches after such repeated lack of familiarity is that the friend is not the same person the patient once knew. There is also evidence for an opposite phenomenon, the Frégoli syndrome (De Pauw, Szulecka, and Poltock 1987), in which a patient comes to identify many different people as the same familiar person (who is usually thought, therefore, to be stalking and persecuting them). In this case, there appears to be an overreliance on a sense of emotional familiarity without sufficient attention to the details of the other people.

A further related syndrome, as yet unnamed, occurs in rare cases when brain damage leads people to fail to recognize themselves in mirrors (Breen 1999; Feinberg 2001). The absence of the usual sense of familiarity may help fuel the delusion that the reflection in the mirror is really some-one else looking back from the other side (“That’s old Tom over there, not me”). Cases of such misidentification syndromes are rare, of course, and are complicated by what may be associated brain damage that makes the person have difficulty in many life tasks. A lack of emotional familiarity of self or others might not influence a person who is otherwise normal to reach the radical conclusion that doubles are all around or that the self has gone missing. Still, it seems reasonable to conclude that there are at least two “layers” of the perception and imagination of agents: a surface identification of the person and a deeper emotional familiarity (Ellis and Young 1990). Part of what can make imagined people seem real is the enhanced emotional response we achieve when we become familiar with the characters.
⁵

The perception of detail and the experience of emotion both help to transform imagined agents into seemingly real ones, but there is a third source of this transformation: the perception that the imagined agent does things that are
uncontrollable
. Johnson (1988) observed that the realm of the mental and the realm of the real can often be distinguished by their controllability. A real car, for example, might be broken down on a deserted street in the middle of the night. It might steam and shake and even burst into flame. And no matter how much we wish or hope it to be fixed, it will just sit there. When we imagine a car, however, we can imagine it to be running. For that matter, we can imagine it to be a fine new limousine with a smiling driver, a wet bar, and bud vases in the doors. The fact that we cannot create these changes in reality is tragic, true, but it is also a fine cue to help us discern what is real and what is not.

5.
This dual aspect of experience—the surface recognition of details and the deeper sense of familiarity—is echoed in another neurological disorder in which the two are dissociated because of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Stuss (1991, 77) recounts that “three of our TBI patients with moderate head injuries described alterations in their recall of remote memories from various periods of their lives. Memories were not lost, but the recalled facts had lost their personal reference, i.e., although the patients could remember the facts, the memories did not belong to them. There was a loss of warmth and immediacy to these memories. . . Although biographical, the memories were no longer truly self or autobiographical. . . . This detached, impersonal memory disrupts at least in part the feeling of continuity, the community of self.”

The observation that an imaginary agent does not respond to our conscious will, then, is a cue that the agent is real. It is also a cue, however, that the agent is not the self. Control is only a cue to reality relative to an agent, a particular subjective perspective. One’s current subjective self seems real if the thoughts and behaviors attributed to this virtual agent appear controllable, whereas virtual agents other than one’s current subjective self seem real if their thoughts and behaviors are
not
controllable by one’s current subjective self.
⁶
So, for example, from the perspective of a person whose body is taken over by a spirit, the body’s actions may seem uncontrollable during the possession. To the person the spirit is real because the body inhabited by the spirit can’t be controlled by the person. But from the perspective of the spirit, in turn, all of this must be reversed. When the spirit takes over, any actions of the self will now be viewed as uncontrollable by the spirit and so will have reality from the spirit’s point of view.

In the creation of new subjective perspectives, then, the judgment of what is real and what is only in the mind must make a revolutionary reversal. Can this happen? Such trading of imagination for reality as people change virtual authorship is concretely illustrated in the phenomena of spirit possession.

The Spirit Is Willing

How can a person become possessed by a spirit? The transformation from a normal self to possession by a spirit or entity is one that many of us have not experienced, at least not in its most extreme form. Admittedly, we may have noticed ourselves becoming pretty darn strange at a drunken late-night party, overwrought by emotion at a funeral or in church, loudly boorish at a sporting event, or possessed one evening by some sex-crazed impulse that seemed to override politeness. The ancients often spoke of these different versions of self as though they were distinct agents, each causing its own range of relevant behavior, and they often believed these agents were gods (Jaynes 1976).
⁷
Indeed, there is a sense in which our different moods and desires create different states of mind that might be understood as different selves or spirits (Bower 1994). But in contemporary culture we use the idea of “self” to refer to a wide range of such flavors of being, and reserve talk of spirits or possession for phenomena that are radically unlike our usual sense of subjective agency.

6.
The uncontrollable self is often a motivation for developing a further perspective on the self from outside—an outside view that is itself more controllable.
Alice in Wonderland
does just this: “‘Come, there’s no use in crying like that!’ said Alice to herself, rather sharply; ‘I advise you to leave off this minute!’ She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people” (Carroll 1882, 22).