Yes by today, we can now make a good stab at showing how the brain could make us hear voices, feel depressed, lose the thread and come up with insights. We can even begin to hazard an idea about how romantic and religious experiences of awe and unity might reflect unusual machinations in the cerebral cortex. But the neural language of the 'wet-ware ' is not well suited to talking about the quality of experience - especially that which puzzles us. Nor will it help with thorny issues like `legal responsibility. Yes, there is more to me than meets the rational `I', and this recognition threatens to undermine a sharp distinction between `diminished responsibility' and `being in one's right mind'. But societies need to run on Wise Fictions as well as Scientific Truths, and we may not be done with our ids, or even with our gods, just yet.But Human beings remain a mystery. That is not going to change. They lash out. They remember vivid details of their childhoods in therapy or under hypnosis. They hear voices. They forget names they know perfectly well. They see visions. They are moved to tears by sunsets. They have weird dreams. They fear harmless things. They have premonitions. Bizarre and profound ideas burst into their heads. They can't get tunes out of their minds. They respond
to instructions while under general anaesthetic. They love the strangest people, and they hurt the ones they love. They create the most astonishingly beautiful things. They rape their neighbours. In spite of our science and our rationality, irrationality abounds.
Or perhaps not `in spite of', but `because of'. The more prescriptive the cultural model of the `normal' mind - the more clear-cut the boundary that is drawn between the unexceptionable and the odd - the more odd the odd becomes, and the more it cries out for explanation. We still live in such prescriptive times. Our default model of the mind still puts reason at the centre. Systematic thinking and clear articulation dominate our most respected cultural institutions and professions: government, medicine, education, the law. `Premeditation' makes an offence worse. If the police had found recent receipts for a hunting knife, and for duct tape with which the victim's hands had been bound, Jane Andrews's appeal would have been dead in the water. Planning is prima facie evidence of sanity, of intention, of mens rea, the guilty mind.
The attempt to maintain the fiction of intention generates a range of difficulties. Is the tobacco industry any more or less culpable because its senior managers take great care not to draw consciously the conclusions that seem obvious to more disinterested parties? When the negligence behind the rail crash, the chemical explosion or the Challenger disaster arises from wishful thinking or commercial pressures, rather than from deliberate evil', should that make a difference? Should a drink-driver be guilty of manslaughter rather than murder because, though he `chose' to drink, he did not `intend' to run down those children? Should people whose minds are sophisticated enough to be able to prevent their left hand knowing what their right hand is doing be treated more leniently by the law than those who have not learned to manipulate their own consciousness in this way? If the law gives minds the incentive to turn a blind eye to their own activities, why not jump at the chance?
While this dubious understanding of our own psychology holds sway, it is not surprising that a Heath Robinson collection of ancillary explanations for the oddities piles up. The gods, or God, continue to intervene. Magic remedies such as homeopathy continue to do a brisk trade. Witches are not so much in evidence, but feng shui and aromatherapy are doing well. New mysterious agents continue to be invented, though we might now call them viruses' and `chemicals'. (Following media reports of a possible toxin in Coca-Cola, many children across the UK experienced symptoms of poisoning, though the original reports were soon shown to be untrue.
And various versions of the unconscious, construed as the dissociated rumpus room or the locked ward of the mind, live happily on in our language. We have a super-ego to explain our guilt; an id to cause our neuroses and `repressed traumatic memories' to account for our bad behaviour; a collective, unconscious to generate the symbolism of myths and dreams. And now we have brain states as well, to help us out when we are puzzled by ourselves: serotonin imbalances, frontal lobe dysfunctions and (my favourite) `minimal brain damage' - so slight you cannot see it, but definitely there, or those kids would not be so unruly (sorry, `hyperactive').
The unconscious remains sandwiched somewhat uneasily between the spirits and the brain, reflecting the fact that, though we now think we have probably got one, we are still not sure if we
like it. Faced with the possibility that we might actually have one of these mental cesspits, and carry it around with us wherever we go, the other two kinds of explanation seem rather more attractive. If I have been possessed by a passing spirit, I can always try to argue that it was just bad luck that it picked me. And the same with physical disease: I need not feel ashamed of getting measles (though syphilis is a different matter), nor need I if I am diagnosed as `suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder', or even schizophrenia. It may be tough, but it ain't my fault. Bad luck that it was the brain that caught it, this time round, and not the liver. It is because the unconscious is only wheeled out to account for the wacky stuff that it stays alien. It can do the necessary explanatory job, but it still isn't really `me'. That is the point of it.
Yet the evidence and ideas I have reviewed in the last few chapters suggest that the unknown substrate of what makes me tick is very much broader than this Freudian mixture of sporadic nuisance and convenient excuse. The problem is much worse than we thought, because it begins to look as if the unconscious brain-body - context system ('brain' for short) is in charge not just sometimes but all the time. When all the oddities are mounted up, and we take them seriously, we come up with an image of our own minds that places unconscious intelligence at the very centre, rather than on the margins. The oddities are not just a jumble of curiosities; they point to fundamental misconceptions in the Cartesian folk psychology of `normal' human nature. The idea of the calm, well-lit Executive Office of rational consciousness as the mind's centre of operations, occasionally interrupted by the id or inspired by the muse, is a misleading image. The brains behind the operation turns out to be the brain itself - augmented by its blistering array of social and technological 'mindware upgrades'.
When we try to look downwards into the `darkling pool' of our own minds, we see only metaphors reflected in the surface. So we need the best, the most accurate, the most helpful images we can find. New images of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious are needed. The idea that they are two equivalent - but warring - realms in the mind, one light and the other dark, wont do. Depicting `the unconscious' as a place - the `depository' of memories, searched by the conscious librarian; the `locked ward' of waywardness guarded by a nervous attendant - does not do justice to its intrinsic dynamism and intelligence. There is no evidence that we have anything like an invisible person inside us - no librarian, no lunatic, no censor, no CEO - separate from the brain. These are outdated metaphors, like `élan vital', the Tooth Fairy and Mount Olympus. It no longer works to see the atom as a currant bun, nor heat as a subtle substance that flows from hot to cold bodies. And it no longer works to explain the oddities of human experience in terms of an `upstairs, downstairs' architecture, or a supernatural soap opera, or a demonic sub-personality at odds with the conscious Me.
Fresh images are beginning to emerge. Cognitive scientists now liken consciousness to the dashboard of a car, the cockpit displays of an aircraft, or simply the screen of a computer. Conscious perceptions are not video images from the `security cameras' of the senses; conscious thoughts are not the musings of the CEO. They are readings that summarise the state of some of the unconscious processes that are going on `under the bonnet'. As I look around, what I `see', consciously, is not `what's there'; it is a representation of what the brain is currently treating as novel, or useful, or important. As I `think', the strings of words that seem to slide across my consciousness, like subtitles on the screen, are likewise read-outs from decision-making processes that are, in themselves, always and ever beyond my ken.
`No activity of mind is ever conscious', said the American psychologist Karl Lashley, though of course many of these activities generate consciousness. No intention is ever hatched in consciousness; no plan ever laid there. Intentions are premonitions; icons that flash in the corner of consciousness to indicate what may be about to occur. As that wise sceptic Ambrose Bierce said in his Devil's Dictionary, an intention is `the mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of the act intended by the person incurring the intention'. (Bierce comments on his own definition, `when figured out and accurately apprehended, this will be found one of the most penetrating and far-reaching definitions in the whole dictionary'. And it is beginning to look as if he may well be right.)
The brain actually produces two kinds of thing: physical effects and mental experiences. Its patterns of activation spin around, and then they cause changes in the body - muscle contraction, hormone release, enzyme activation - and in consciousness - emotions, perceptions, thoughts, images and so on. Sometimes it produces actions without accompanying conscious experience; sometimes consciousness without any corollary action; and sometimes both. And when it produces both, sometimes they seem to be coordinated, and sometimes not. In fact there is often some degree of mismatch, simply because the kinds of brain activity that eventuate in `thoughts' are not the same kinds of activity that result in `actions'. For example, you recall the experiment on reaching for the disks in the middle of the Titchener circles, where the grasp of the hand unconsciously adjusts to the actual size of the disks, while the conscious perception is distorted by the contrast between the central circle and the size of the circles surrounding it. Or: when young men's pulse rates have been raised by walking across a rather scary rope bridge, they tend to fancy the first young woman that they then meet! They mistakenly attribute their own physiological arousal to sexual attraction - a more consciously acceptable motive than fear. They do not think it or surmise it: they actually experience their anxiety as attraction.
Unconscious forces are everywhere, determining social patterns as much as individual ones. For example, people tend to like things that are familiar - but only if they are not aware that it is mere familiarity that is at work. That's one reason why swings in fashion are so powerful and so ephemeral. A clothing style catches on when people are beginning to pick up on an emerging trend - but before everyone is wearing it, and they become conscious that it is a trend. By the time it has achieved visible popularity, the fashionistas would not be seen dead in it. The same applies to choosing baby names. How come, in 2002, that thousands of people in the UK independently decided that Bethany and Amelia were attractive and original girls' names, and Cameron and Bradley were pretty cool for boys? Probably because there is a positive feedback loop happening. As a name begins to become popular, it is more likely to come to mind. But if you realise that it comes to mind because lots of other people are choosing it, you are likely to discard it. ('Oh not Jessica, sweetheart - every second baby is called Jessica these days!") Or if a famous person becomes too famous, their name stops being attractive. (In the US, the number of Hillarys peaked in 1992, and plummeted as soon as the Clintons moved into the White House.) One part of the unconscious is informing the choice in a way that would not happen if the part that is informing consciousness `knew about it'.
There is a good deal of evidence that the part of the unconscious brain that concocts explanations for why we did something - what neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga calls the `interpreter' - is not the same part of the brain that decided to do it. The former part does not have direct access to the workings of the latter. All the interpreter can do is notice what you actually did, or felt, and then construct a plausible story about How Come. Gazzaniga suggests that for most of us the interpreter is located in the left hemisphere of the brain, and he has been able to show it at work in so-called `split brain' patients, those who have had the two sides of the brain disconnected. If you flash the word `Laugh!' to one of these patients in such a way that it only goes into the right hemisphere, they laugh, but the left hemisphere does not know why, because it did not see the word. If you ask the patent why they laughed, the interpreter, quick as a flash, makes something up. The patient says: `You guys come up and test us every month. What a way to make a living!' And, like the young men on the bridge, they do not know that this is a confabulation - they genuinely believe that they are reporting the actual cause of their laughter.
So consciousness may be the dashboard of the mind - that is, of the unconscious biotechnological system - but far from being infallible and transparent, it turns out, some of the time at least, to be inaccurate and untrustworthy. It reflects something of what is going on down there, but it does so `through a glass darkly'. And one of the main reasons why its reports are partial and skewed is that, through consciousness, we are seeing the mind at its most inhibited. We see what has been preselected by the backroom boys as being of potential danger, delight, or at least relevance to current goals - and thus what we experience is essentially reflected in Hesse's `cloudy mirror' of our own hopes, fears and expectations, both those that have been hard-wired by evolution, and those we have absorbed from our own culture.
The evidence suggests that the brain manufactures the sharpest consciousness
when it is being selective;
when it is busy sequencing and prioritising;
when we are at our most circumspect;
when we are startled and alarmed;
when the smooth flow of activation from sensation to reaction is blocked, and we have to pause and reconsider;
when what we are about to do matters terribly, and we have to be sure to get it right;
when the unexpected happens (the stairs creak at 3 am), or the expected does not (the clock stops ticking);
when our self-respect is dented, and we feel, acutely, pangs of guilt or remorse;
when we are made self conscious and suddenly awkward by a chance remark;
when we are getting our story straight, rescuing our self and presenting it in a favourable light.
Conversely when the brain relaxes, when the frontal lobes quieten and allow patterns of activation to diffuse and flow more freely, awareness diffuses too, and we drift into the foggy borderlands of reverie, and on into the recurrent loss of consciousness we refer to as sleep. And then, in dreams, as we have seen, the brain chews over the day, seeking out significance, and thus becomes more emotional, more selective and more value-laden again. The metaphorical surface of the brain puckers up, becomes more rutted, setting up more clearly etched channels for its activity to run along: in dreams we see the brain back at its grooviest.
But for whose benefit are these conscious indicators generated? Surely they must be for `me', to make use of or take into account. Otherwise what is the point? Evolution could surely not have designed something as ingenious as this intricate display system if there was not going to be anybody sitting in the pilot's seat to `read' them. So do we need the ghost in the machine after all? Does the soul have to be sneaked back in? Or can we dare to suggest that consciousness is merely a concomitant of certain important kinds of activity in the brain; an evolutionary miracle, a happy accident that had and has no design? Sure, the kinds of reverberation that underlie consciousness are of obvious and extreme utility. It is only our ability to inhibit ourselves - to pause, prioritise, consider options - that enables us to juggle our plethora of goals with more or less success. But is it `me' doing that, or is it my brain? Does the brain just serve up spread-sheets and sketches for the Cartesian ghost in the machine to deliberate upon? Or is the experience of deliberating simply what passes across the screen, while the microchip is busy performing computations that are infinitely more speedy and more subtle?
Actually, there is no way of deciding the issue. It certainly seems as if `I' am busy, somewhere inside here, weighing up factors, making decisions, and presumably issuing orders to my larynx and my spleen to make their contribution to my cunning plan. But there is a lot that `seems' that isn't so. It seems as if the sun goes round the Earth. It seems as if there are bright bars obscuring the cube. And it seems as if I am in control. But here is philosopher Daniel Dennett musing on the phenomenology of decisionmaking: noting what actually occurs in consciousness, if we watch carefully:
Are decisions voluntary? Or are they things that happen to us? From some fleeting vantage points they seem to be the preeminently voluntary moves in our lives, the instants at which we exercise our agency to the fullest. But those same decisions can also be seen to be strangely out of our control. We have to wait to see how we are going to decide something, and when we do decide, our decision bubbles up to consciousness from we know not where. We do not witness it being made, we witness its arrival. This can lead to the strange idea that Central Headquarters is not where we, as conscious introspectors, are; it is somewhere deeper within us, and inaccessible to us. E. M. Forster famously asked `How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?' - the words of an outsider, it seems, waiting for a bulletin from the interior ... [And] once we recognise that our conscious access to our own decisions is problematic, we may go on to note how many of the important turning points in our lives were unaccompanied ... by conscious decisions. `I have decided to take the job,' one says. And very clearly one takes oneself to be reporting on something one has done recently, but reminiscence shows only that yesterday one was undecided, and today one is no longer undecided; at some moment in the interval the decision must have happened, without fanfare. Where did it happen? At Central Headquarters, of course.
What we observe, if we look closely, is a process that can flip backwards and forwards like a Necker cube: we see ourselves making decisions, and then we see decisions - images, thoughts, regrets, fantasies - welling up into consciousness by themselves. We see a mystery. And perhaps because we are inveterate storytellers, we are dissatisfied with the latter perspective, the one of astonished receptivity, rather than busy authorship, so we invent a Doer behind the Deed. Dennett again:
Faced with the inability to `see' (by `introspection') where the centre or source of our free actions is, and loath to abandon our conviction that we really do things (for which we are responsible), we exploit the cognitive vacuum, the gaps in our self-knowledge, by filling it with a rather magical and mysterious entity, the unmoved mover, the active self.
What we call our `self' is an agglomeration of both conscious and unconscious ingredients. We have Needs: basic requirements and basic threats to attend to, like finding shelter and avoiding predators. We have Senses: our range of species-specific sensitivities that rapidly gets customised into our `point of view'. We have a repertoire of Cans: zones of control, where there is a tight correlation between what the brain tells the body to do, what the muscles actually do, what proprioceptive information results, and what changes in the world are reported back by the senses. We have a personal portfolio of Haves, of possessions: objects, places, even animals and other people, in which we feel we have some special investment, and over which we feel we can exercise some kind of remote control. We have our unique profile of Dos: our signature repertoire of habits, traits and preferences. We may not think much about our Needs, Senses, Cans, Haves and Dos - we may not have them very well formulated, so they can function as objects of conscious scrutiny - but they nevertheless combine to define who we are.
And then there are ingredients that are more commonly conscious. There are my Wants: the collection of projects, goals and interests that organise my choices and my time. There are my Oughts: the duties, commitments and obligations that tell me who I am supposed to be, whether I want to be or not. There are my Coulds: the range of possible selves and possible futures that I can conceive of; the life courses that seem available and appropriate (to a working-class boy; to a retired accountant ...). There is my special trail of Was-es: the autobiographical thread of memories and memorabilia that seem to secure my continuity; to reassure me that there is an important sense, despite the shrinking hair and expanding waist, that I am the same person as the sevenyear-old boy in the holiday snap, playing cricket on the beach. And finally there is my ongoing ticker-tape of Thinks: the conscious commentary that accompanies my actions, and which seems - though Dennett tells me otherwise - to select and influence the way they go.
None of these is in dispute. Of course who I am is woven out of all these threads. The only question is how I put them together. What do I make of them? The conventional response is to tidy them all up by inventing a tiny word with the grand title of The First Person Singular Pronoun - `I', to you and me - and to turn all the various ingredients of the self into Auxiliary Verbs. So the English-speaking child has to learn how to talk about herself as the Subject of all these different kinds of Predicates. I do not just `have' or `experience' needs: I Need (a drink, a pee). I Sense (hunger, roast chicken). I Can (tie my shoelaces, count to ten). I Have (a hamster called Polly, new trousers). I Do (like my room tidy, have Shreddies for breakfast). I Want (to be friends with Anna, to get into the team). I Ought (to write to Granny, to do my piano practice). I Could (aim to be a nurse, but not a civil engineer or a hot-air balloonist). I Was (a terror when I was two, in hospital with asthma when I was six). I Think (I'll go downstairs, that Sophie was really mean).
Used over and over again, these constructions hold out an overwhelming temptation: to assume that the `I' is the same in all of them. So instead of having an intricate web of things that make
me Me, I have to create a single imaginary hub around which they all revolve, and to which they all refer. When I think about a cake, I do not make the mistake of assuming that there is something called `the cake' which is separate from all the ingredients (bound together in interesting ways). But when I think about my Self, `I', on the conventional view, I do. The assembled oddities of human nature point to the fact that it is not just the mind that bursts out of the Cartesian straitjacket into which it has been forced; it is the very core of self, of human identity, that threatens to escape. I am darker, and more dispersed, and more various, and more changeable, than I am supposed to be - than I would have to be, if the Great I Am were as real and coherent as the theory says.
The attempt to keep this fiction going, to `hold it together', can become quite tiring and bothersome. If I AM essentially reasonable, then wild dreams and mystical experiences become a problem. If I imagine that my zones of control - over my own feelings, for example - are wider and more robust than they are, then I am going to get in a tangle trying to `control myself'. If I once decided that Who I Am is Clever, then my increasingly familiar Senior Moments aren't funny. If I AM determined to be Pretty, then ageing becomes my enemy in a different way. If I was brought up to be the innocent ray of sunshine in a moody family - to think of myself as the one who brings happiness and makes things light - then my moments of surliness or selfishness are not just unfortunate, they put me at odds with myself. By playing Jekyll too hard, I make myself Hyde. Creating the hub of `I' locks everything together, and prevents it moving. It stops Me expanding to include the unconscious, or graciously shrinking to accommodate old age. I can't enjoy my waywardness, nor see it as an intrinsic part of Me (a valid and valuable form of psychological weather; the heat haze and the thunder of the mind).
Try this. It is an experiment invented by V S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Phantoms in the Brain. It will give you a two-foot nose. You will need two friends (call them Anne and Bill) and two chairs, placed one behind the other. Bill sits in front, you behind with your eyes closed. Anne takes your right hand and uses your right index finger to make a pattern of taps and strokes on Bill's nose. At the same time, she uses her left hand to stroke and tap your nose in exactly the same rhythm. After about a minute of this, if you are susceptible, you will feel the stimulation at the tip of your own nose - which is now where Bill's nose is! Your brain has matched the fact that your right index finger is tapping two feet away, with the experience that is coming in from Anne's taps on your nose, and put them together in the only way it can: by giving you a Pinocchio-like proboscis. Just as the brain is happy to invent, occluding bars in front of a cube, so it is willing to monkey around with your body sense, if the evidence seems to warrant it. The question is: do you experience this as funny or unnerving, or perhaps a bit of both?
The orthodox sense of self is thrown by such experiences, and tends to suffer a sense-of-humour failure. It sees all waywardness as an affront, and tends to become earnest or myopic in response. In a nutshell: it is bad enough to have a nightmare, without your rattled sense of self telling you that you. are going mad. Weird experience can never be just funny (as the Pinocchio effect can be), or matter-of-fact (as possession is in Bali), or transiently inconvenient (as a bad dream is), or wonderful (as a mystical experience can be), or just mysterious (as a premonition might be). For the locked-up self they have to be denied, explained or dealt with. All the evidence is that a more relaxed attitude towards the bounds of self makes for a richer, easier and more creative life. Perhaps, after all, waywardness in all its forms is in need not so much of explanation, but of a mystified but friendly welcome. We can explain it if we wish, and the brain is beginning to do a reasonable job. But the need to explain, when not motivated by the dispassionate curiosity of the scientist, is surely a sign of anxiety: of the desire to tame with words that which is experienced as unsettling.
I said earlier that we need the most accurate and the most useful models of the mind, through which to see ourselves. It is true, but there is an issue here that I glossed over before. The most accurate and the most useful are not the same thing. The Underground map of London is highly inaccurate, wrong in almost every respect; yet it is an extremely useful map precisely because it is so crude and stylised. And so, having driven the model of the mind as far as we can currently go in the direction of accuracy - of scientifically validated detail - we might close by drawing back and asking if this image, for all its sophistication, is the best, or the only, one we need. There are dozens of maps of London, all good for different purposes. The traveller has no problem switching between the Tube Map and the `A to Z Street Map'; she experiences no epistemological crisis as she does so. Why should we restrict ourselves to just one map of the mind? Should we not, after all, allow ourselves a set of complementary perspectives as we try to make sense of our personal and social waywardness?
Remember that the Balinese today happily switch between Western and indigenous approaches to various forms of trance, possession and what we would think of as physical and mental illness. Like many people who find themselves camped at the crossroads of cultures, they solve the problem of deciding which way to go, which account of waywardness to subscribe to, by refusing to choose. A headache can be treated with an aspirin. But a persistent headache, accompanied by melancholia or withdrawal, may well signal the disapproval of the ancestor spirits, and the need for a ritual of repentance or atonement. Is there a sense in which we too would be better off if we were to let go our exclusive commitment to the scientific perspective, and allow ourselves the same fluidity? Might there, after all, be some method in the messy mixture of models of the unconscious which our society is heir to?
Here's a suggestion. The scientifically founded view of the individual mind as intrinsically more mysterious, more embodied and more variable than the Cartesian bubble of rationality, is an improvement when it comes to thinking about our own experience. It allows us to be more relaxed about our own wayward tendencies, and more interested in them. We can expand our identities to embrace the mystery, rather than being rattled by it. The stories we create, whether of ids or frontal lobes, Freudian repression or neural inhibition, can be constructed more leisurely and held more lightly. They can encourage genial acceptance of our vagaries, rather than anxious efforts to control the uncontrollable. (Just as the phrase `a senior moment' helps to take the embarrassing sting out of the momentary loss of a familiar name, so a more widespread vernacular appreciation of the broader, deeper view of mind could encourage a greater equanimity in the face of all kinds of waywardness. Not that serious dysfunction is not hard to deal with; but that the additional distress generated by the fact that it does not fit the normative `official doctrine' only makes matters worse.)
When all is said and done, explanations based on scientific models of brain and mind are predominantly individual. The mechanisms, and to a large extent the causes, of waywardness are placed inside us. And the language of the modern brain-mind does not offer much in the way of a public language which we can collectively sign up to. The language of science deliberately has no symbolism, no resonance. Though it continually fails, its aim is to be literal and transparent. It offers no way to make cultural, as opposed to scientific, sense out of madness, creativity or spiritual experience. And that may be a loss. Though the public exorcisms of the seventeenth century were subject to all kinds of manipulations, by both priests and victims, nevertheless the whole mythology of devils and demons had its positive side too. Possession could be seen to have a sociological, as well as a psychological, dimension.
Though it is hard to see the witch-hunts of Salem, now, as anything other than pernicious, the language in which they were couched did allow a collective discourse, as well as an individual interpretation. When Freud took possession and turned it into neurosis, the private perspective was developed, but at the expense of the public one. The phenomenon was pathologised and dragged out of sight. Where exorcism offered a chance for a whole community to think about its values, procedures and its health, therapy becomes private and invisible, and runs the risk of loading all the responsibility for waywardness inside the `victim', and concealing its social or cultural dimensions. For a teenage girl to `become possessed' could be seen as a stigma. But it could also provide a framework within which she could `behave badly' (in the face, perhaps, of sexual repression and confusion) and let off steam. The framework could - and sometimes did - allow her society to cut her a bit of slack. It is not clear that getting drunk and vomiting in a city centre on a Saturday night is a vast improvement. There are costs to the public framework of devils and possession, but there are benefits as well. Without it, there is less containment. Things do not make so much sense. One feels more alone with one's waywardness.
The arena where this tension between cultural utility and scientific accuracy is at its strongest today is that of the law. From the scientific point of view, the attempt to maintain a strong line between behaviour that is deliberate or intended, and for which one can be held responsible, and behaviour which is in some sense involuntary, and for which one can be excused, looks increasingly doomed. Was Jane Andrews in the grip of uncontrollable forces - eruptions of passion caused by childhood events for which she could not be held accountable - or was she 'in her right mind', as she clubbed her lover to the ground? The only intelligent answer is: we don't know. If even the simplest decision to move a finger up or down is initiated by the brain before the conscious mind is privy to the 'intention', how can we possibly maintain the fiction that Thought is ever the instigator of Action?
Yet if we allow that Thought and Action both bubble out of a darker place to which we have - can have in principle - no conscious access, how on earth can anyone ever be held to account? No doubt Hitler and Saddam had `bad' childhoods, just as Fred and Rosemary West, and Jane Andrews, did. But does that mean that societies have no right, no mandate to regulate themselves? That it is inhumane to punish the drunk driver, unintentional killer of two small children, who had just been chucked by her boyfriend? If she was not `in her right mind' when she ordered the third double vodka, nothing that ensued could have been her `fault'. The science of the unconscious leaves us in a terrible social mess, if it is taken to undermine the crucial notions of `responsibility' and `intent' on which many judicial systems are founded.
Perhaps here we need the complementarity: the unapologetic right to treat people as if they were, responsible, for the greater good. Though single thoughts never lead to distinct actions - that cause-and-effect model of the mind is orders of magnitude too simple - nevertheless the brain is forever calculating the odds. It reads newspapers, it watches the news, it knows about punishment and prison. And it computes contingencies and likelihoods that can weight in the intricate, intuitive, unconscious balance that underlies our every twitch. So it is perfectly acceptable for a society to do whatever it can, in defence of its values, to try to maximise the weight of such considerations - knowing that, in the heat of some future moment, their weight may well not be enough to tip the scales and prevent a crime. We act as if responsibility could be assigned because the fiction enables us to punish certain kinds of acts, and, most importantly, to broadcast and dramatise the humiliation and privation of the punished, pour encourager les autres. In regulating and maintaining the social order, the `truth' about human nature is what works. And such a strategy is both highly dangerous, allowing all kinds of oppression and legalised skulduggery, and partially effective.
There might even be a place for the gods and the ancestor spirits, to help to reinforce cultural agreement about what is Right and Wrong. The scientific unconscious, the biotechnological mindware that runs the show, is amoral. There is nothing in the neuro-cognitive story that tells us what to do or how to behave. Moment to moment, the brain adds up a bewildering array of influences and expectations, and computes a best-guess course of action. And sometimes it blows a conscious bubble that seems to justify that course. But there is nothing intrinsic to this image of the mind that makes it overwhelmingly want to behave `well', in social terms - unless we can embed in the brain-mind a moral narrative, an image of a moral world, that can interrupt the smooth computations of the brain and give it, literally, `pause for thought'. As you rush to action, the learned story may trip you up, and as you gather yourself to carry on, so the higher ideals that are embedded in the narrative (in the conduct of the heroes, and the hideous fate that befalls the villains and the unwary) come to mind, and serve to adjust the weights on the unconscious balance in favour of The Good.
So `Olympus Inc' and the Ancestral Spirits are devices that encourage the preservation of a particular social order, for good or ill, by biasing the brain's internal calculations. In a benign society, the stories work in and on the brain to temper flaring passions and selfish impulses, for the general good. In a corrupt regime, the myths serve only to further the interests of the temporarily lucky few. Most societies are a messy mixture of the two. The scientific view of the unconscious leaves you up this complicated creek without a compass or a paddle. The supernatural views can open you to oppression and exploitation. Maybe we do need both, to mitigate the excesses of the other.
But maybe also the tangle of views we have inherited about the wayward mind does not give us the best possible balance. My argument does not quite legitimise the messy status quo. We do not want to eliminate our cultural stories - our gods and devils, our angels and ancestors - entirely. Their magic is valuable and enriching of cultural life, even though their potential for abuse is not. I want the poetry of the mind, as well as the science, and those who think that the latter will overwhelm the former, and the sooner the better, do not understand that cultures need to regulate and enrich themselves, just as much as nerve cells do.
But the Enlightenment view of the mind is in urgent need of moderation. Its lopsided adherence to explicit, deliberate, conscious reason as the acme of intelligence is flawed. It leads to a contempt for symbols - for language that resonates in the intricate depth of the brain - and an overestimation of dull, literal prose. It leads to students being taught to pull poetry and dreams apart; to plunder them impatiently for their `meaning', and to a neglect of Keats's art of `negative capability - the ability to dwell in 'uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'.
It leads to schools and universities losing sight of wisdom in their pursuit of mere cleverness, or, worse, mere knowledgeability.
It leads to art becoming didactic, rather than layered and allusive. It leads, in business, to an inability to wait and ponder, and to an epidemic of `premature articulation'. It leads to transient, fruitful states of confusion, in which the brain is slowly crystallising complexity into comprehension, being woefully misinterpreted as stupidity or indecision. In other words, it leads to minds that have no time for perplexity, and thus shoot their own creativity in the foot.
It leads to doctors and midwives being taught to distrust their intuition, because the official doctrine cannot understand intuition as anything other than sloppy and second-class thinking.
It leads, in the law courts, to the dangerous assumption that the truth will reliably emerge from two teams of clever people trying, with a host of unacknowledged wiles, to win an argument.
It leads to the sonorous symbolic prose of the Bible being super seded by something thin and pale that can be merely understood, and to a profound mistrust by religion of the mysterious and the mystical.
And it leads to a kind of flimsy political culture in which no one ever has the time or the inclination not to know, and so buying and selling jumped-to conclusions becomes a substitute for thinking. No wonder so many people disengage from a discourse that has such a transparent lack of depth.
All these and many other social ills stem from a cultural view of the mind that is not at ease with its own unconscious depth: with its own inherent waywardness. It is time for a little rebalancing. It is not that we need to allow our minds to be more wayward. It is simply that we need to realise that we were never as much in control as we thought.
This and more is covered in my latest book The Wayward Mind; An Intimate History of the Unconscious.
Guy Claxton Februari 8, 2005