We Are Our Brains (47 page)

No one who has experienced the suddenness and intensity of falling passionately in love will classify partner choice as a “free choice” or a “well-considered decision.” Plato was of exactly the same mind regarding the autonomy of this process. He regarded the sexual impulse as a fourth species of soul, located below the navel, describing it as “rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient to reason.” Spinoza was no believer in free will either. He demonstrated that in
Ethics III
, proposition 2, where he states, “An infant believes that of its own free will it desires milk, a hot-headed youth believes he freely desires vengeance, a coward believes he freely desires to run away; a delirious man, a garrulous woman, a child … believe that they speak from the free decision of their mind, when they are in reality unable to restrain their impulse to talk.” Spinoza shows that characteristics are innate. You can't change them.

Our current knowledge of neurobiology makes it clear that there's no such thing as
absolute
freedom. Many genetic factors and environmental influences in early development, through their effects on our brain development, determine the structure and therefore the function of our brains for the rest of our lives. As a result, we start life not only with a host of possibilities and talents but also many limitations, like a congenital tendency to addiction, a set level of aggression, a predetermined gender identity and sexual orientation, and a predisposition for ADHD, borderline personality disorder, depression, or schizophrenia. Our behavior is determined from birth. This view—the polar opposite of the belief in social engineering that held sway in the 1960s—has been referred to as “neurocalvinism,” alluding to the doctrine of predestination that shaped Calvinist thinking. To this day, adherents of strict Protestant sects believe that God has predetermined the course of everyone's life
from the moment of birth, including whether you will go to heaven or hell.

That a great deal is determined during our early development applies not just to psychiatric disorders but also to our functioning in everyday life. We may have a theoretical choice between a heterosexual and a homosexual relationship, but our sexual orientation, already programmed in the womb, doesn't allow us to choose freely between these theoretical possibilities. We're born into a linguistic environment that shapes our brain structure and function without us being free to choose our mother tongue. The religious environment in which we end up after birth also determines how we shape our spirituality (its level being genetically predetermined)—that is, whether our focus will be belief, materialism, or environmental concerns. In other words, our genetic backgrounds and all the factors that permanently affected our early brain development saddle us with a host of internal limitations; we are not free to decide to change our gender identity, sexual orientation, aggression level, character, religion, or native language. Nor can we decide to have a certain talent, or to abstain from thought. As Nietzsche wrote, “A thought comes when ‘it' wants, not when ‘I' want.” Our influence on our moral choices is also limited. We approve of things or reject them, not because we have thought about the matter so deeply but because we cannot do otherwise. Ethics are a product of our ancient social instinct to do what is good for the group, a finding that goes back to Darwin. So we're left with the paradox that the only individuals who are still free to a degree (apart from their genetic limitations) are fetuses in the early stages of gestation. But they can't exploit this limited freedom because their nerve systems are still too immature. By the time we're adults, the capacity of our brains to be modified has become very limited and, along with it, the potential for our behavior to change. By then we have been issued with a certain “character.” And by then our last little bit of freedom is further curtailed by the obligations and prohibitions that society imposes on us.

We make a great many decisions “in a fraction of a second” or “instinctively” or on the basis of our “intuition,” without thinking about them consciously. We “choose” a partner by falling in love at first sight, and an accused man will tell the court in all sincerity that he killed the victim before he knew it. In his book
Blink
, the science journalist Malcolm Gladwell paints a fascinating picture of the important and complex decisions made by the unconscious brain in a couple of seconds. Yet this happens only after its internal computer has carried out a gigantic number of calculations. Just as today's planes can fly and land on automatic pilot, without the assistance of a flesh and blood captain, our brains can to a very great extent function excellently without conscious thought. But they have to be trained to do so. It's only by feeding the unconscious brain a huge amount of data over a long period of time that an art expert is able to “sense” that he's looking at a forgery, and it's only by seeing a great many patients that a medical specialist develops the “clinical glance” allowing her to make a diagnosis almost as soon as a patient enters the room. Functional scanning has shown that conscious reasoning involves different brain circuits from those used for intuitive decisions. Only in the latter case are the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex activated; these areas are important for autonomic regulation. They also play a role in our gastrointestinal system, so it's rather appropriate to say we make a decision based on “gut feelings.”

Our brains
have
to work on automatic pilot to a very great extent. We're continually bombarded with an enormous amount of information and unconsciously use selective attention to extract what is important to us. Even when photographs of naked people are flashed before an individual too briefly to register the images consciously, a heterosexual man's attention will still be caught more by naked women than naked men. Homosexual men and heterosexual women will focus more on the images of nude men, while the response of lesbian and bisexual women falls between that of heterosexual men and women.

Emotions also play an important role in unconscious processes. In the case of moral judgments, emotions are decisive. An area in the brain's frontal lobe, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is crucial to solving moral dilemmas, like whether to sacrifice the life of a single individual to save many lives. Most of us find these extremely emotional decisions well-nigh impossible, but individuals with a damaged prefrontal cortex weigh them in a clinical, highly detached way. They don't experience emotions like empathy or sympathy when faced with dilemmas of this kind.

Decisions that involve social norms and values are apparently made on an emotional basis even when it's possible to weigh them rationally. The products of conscious reasoning processes are by no means always superior to unconscious decisions. In fact, conscious reasoning can even get in the way of good decisions. According to psychologist Ed de Haan, it's sometimes better to make important financial decisions, like buying a house, on the basis of intuition—that is, without conscious reasoning. Just like Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man
, the autistic savant Daniel Tammet tried to win money at blackjack by counting cards in a Las Vegas casino. He lost very badly until he decided to use intuition instead, whereupon he started winning again (see
chapter 9
). When you drive to work in busy traffic you make hundreds of decisions in complex, potentially life-threatening situations completely automatically. You can also, as it were, “park” a problem at the back of your mind for a while, giving
it no conscious thought, and then all of a sudden, while you're doing something completely different, the solution pops up. In other words—in perpetual homage to Sigmund Freud—our behavior is for a very great part steered by unconscious processes. A hundred years later we have returned to the subconscious, but this time without the Freudian vision of repressed, infantile, sexual, and aggressive urges and other dubious claims.

Physical factors, like temperature and light, can also greatly affect our actions. Outbursts of aggression can be triggered by long hot summers. A study of the 2,131 major conflicts of the last 3,500 years has shown that in both the northern and southern hemispheres the decision to go to war has tended to be made in the summer, while in countries near the equator such decisions are unaffected by the seasons. In other words, it isn't military strategy or “reason” or “free will” but the temperature that appears to be decisive when taking the momentous step of declaring war.

Of course, making so many unconscious decisions also has drawbacks. The racist and sexist views that we unconsciously hold are often unexpectedly influential, for instance in job interviews. But on the whole our brains have to function as efficient, unconscious computers that nevertheless make rational decisions. Unconscious, “implicit” associations enable us to make countless complex decisions quickly and effectively, something that would be impossible if we were to consciously weigh up all the pros and cons in every instance—it would simply be too time-consuming.

Yet all these unconscious decisions leave no room for a purely conscious free will. This has far-reaching implications, because when we hold somebody responsible for their actions, we're assuming the existence of free will, which—at least as far as most of our actions are concerned—simply doesn't exist.

Because our overburdened brain constantly makes decisions using unconscious processes, Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner speaks of an unconscious will rather than a free will. The unconscious will makes split-second decisions on the basis of events in our surroundings, a process that's determined by the way our brains formed during development and by what we have learned since. The complex, ever-changing environment in which we live means that our lives can never be predictable, and the way in which our brains have developed means that there can be no such thing as complete free will. Yet we believe that we're constantly making free choices, and we call this “free will.” According to Wegner, this is an illusion.

Wegner has carried out an experiment that supports his theory. Person A stands in front of a mirror with his arms tucked out of sight. Person B stands behind him and stick his arms out under A's armpits, where A's arms would normally be. When B's arms carry out commands that are given aloud (like “scratch your nose,” “wave your right hand”) A sees the movements in the mirror and feels as though he is controlling them with his will. Wegner's work clearly shows that both actions themselves and the “conscious” idea of initiating an action are prompted by unconscious processes in the brain. You can't oversee these processes, but you can interpret the resultant action. The “conscious picture” that our brains register when we carry out an action gives us the feeling that we have knowingly performed that action. But that feeling doesn't constitute proof of a conscious, causal chain of events leading to the action. According to the Amsterdam psychologist Victor Lamme, the illusion of conscious will only occurs belatedly, when the information about the
action being performed is transmitted back to the cerebral cortex. Wegner believes that the illusion of free will is necessary in order to give an action personal legitimacy. It's like a rubber stamp saying “I did this!”

In his famous experiments, Benjamin Libet showed that when we initiate actions, it takes half a second before our brains consciously register the action. His conclusion that “conscious” experiences are preceded by half a second of unconscious brain activity (“readiness potential”) raised serious doubts as to the possibility of acting from free will. Although Libet's observations have been hotly debated, recent fMRI scans have shown that there are areas of the cerebral cortex in which motor actions are prepared for as much as seven to ten seconds before they are consciously perceived. And the time lag between action and consciousness has been demonstrated in numerous ways. In one experiment, people were given the task of quickly touching a spot that lit up on a computer screen. Their visual cortex worked with great speed. One-tenth of a second after the light appeared, it fired off a message to the motor cortex to initiate the movement to touch the light (
fig. 22
). If the processing in the visual cortex was interrupted by a magnetic pulse, the action was carried out, but the person wasn't conscious of the screen lighting up. All of these observations support the idea that the notion of acting from free will is indeed illusory. Whether it's possible, as Libet believed, that we do at least have the power of veto over an action as soon as we become aware of it (“free won't”) remains to be seen. It's of course equally possible that vetoing an action, too, is preceded by unconscious brain activity.

But even if consciousness is somewhat slow on the uptake, it remains useful. We plan consciously (see
chapter 13
) and learn to drive consciously (a process that can be carried out automatically after a lot of training; see
chapter 14
). If you weren't conscious of the pain caused by a wound or infection, you'd be unlikely to do something about it, and your chances of survival would be slim. What's more, consciousness ensures that you try to avoid similar hazards in the
future. The fact that many of our actions occur unconsciously doesn't mean that we can't act consciously when we pay attention. Driving a car on autopilot is fine until something unexpected happens that requires your attention. Then slow, conscious action takes over—with all its own inherent dangers.