The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (30 page)

Gazzaniga theorises that the verbal left hemisphere of our brain contains an ‘interpreter’ that is
driven to constantly narrate our actions
, explaining them even though it has no access to the reasons why we are behaving as we are. Recalling a test where a visual stimulus was used to put a patient in a bad mood, only for her to blame her bad feeling on the experimenter,
Gazzaniga writes, ‘Ah, lack of knowledge is of no importance
, the left brain will find a solution! Order must be made. The experimenter did it! The left-brain interpreter takes all the input coming in and puts it together in a story that makes sense, even though it may be completely wrong.’ In his book
Human
he adds that the right hemisphere bases its judgements on ‘sample frequency information, whereas the left uses the formation of elaborate hypotheses … [but] the left’s tendency to create nonsensical theories about random sequences is detrimental to performance. This is what happens when you build a theory on a single anecdotal situation.’ You could also say that this is what happens when you take a homeopathic remedy, begin to feel better and conclude that the remedy worked. Your interpreter module has told an invented story about cause and effect that you believe. Your surely held belief is a confabulation.

There appears to be a lack of consensus on exactly how much of our conscious reasoning is confabulation.
Opinions range from those of Professor David Eagleman
, who says that ‘the brain’s storytelling powers kick into gear only when things are conflicting or difficult to understand,’ to those of Harvard
Professor of Psychology Daniel Wegner, who argues
that even our sense of having free will is a confabulation – a story that seeks to reassure us by giving a sense of agency and purpose. Eagleman, meanwhile, writes that if we do possess free will, it
‘can at best be a small factor
, riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.’

When I ask Professor Jonathan Haidt what he believes, he tells me that his position is ‘nuanced. We don’t have free will in the strictest sense of “I am the uncaused causer of my behaviour.” That’s a kind of craziness. Our behaviour is caused largely by forces we’re not aware of. On the other hand, we’re not puppets that are just dancing around to external causes. Our actions are shaped by forces that we would endorse as legitimate, such as our values.’ I wonder what he thinks of the narrower question, of whether or not we have free will over the things that we believe. Using the example of climate change, I put it to Professor Haidt that our opinion on whether or not it is man-made could actually have an entirely emotional source and be nothing to do with reason. ‘That’s true for partisans,’ he says. ‘If you come to the question already on the left or the right, then that’s correct. But there are surely some people who are not part of any team who have looked at the evidence and come to their conclusion – I don’t doubt that.’

But regardless of whether or not we have free will (and the arguments for it seem – to me, at least – to be distressingly thin), neuroscientists and psychologists widely agree that confabulation is real and universal. To ever
really
know ourselves is simply not possible. We tend to generate stories to explain the mysteries of what we do and believe. When called upon to justify our beliefs we automatically become confabulators – innocent liars defending unconscious decisions that we were not even aware of making.

The principles of confabulation – if not its narrowest academic definition – can be found lurking in other crucial areas of the human condition, too. The shapes of its engineering can be found in the mechanisms of memory, in morality and in dreaming.

A 1962 study by Professor Daniel Offer
demonstrated how vulnerable
our autobiographical memories are to being rewritten. Offer’s team interviewed more than seventy male teenagers about their lives, before revisiting them thirty-four years later to check how accurate their recollections were. What were they like back then? Confident? Shy? Curious? Academic? What were their beliefs about the world? ‘Remarkably,’ concluded the team, ‘the men’s ability to guess what they had said about themselves in adolescence was no better than chance.’

Social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson believe
that we use ‘confabulations of memory’ to ‘justify and explain our own lives.’ In
Mistakes Were Made
they write that our sense of personal autobiography only seems coherent as a result of ‘years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villains, an account of how we came to be the way we are … the problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service.’

Warped indeed, and invented. Whether they are generated in ordinarily healthy individuals or psychotic patients, completely false memories are easily formed and can be dreadful to those whom they haunt.

In further unwelcome developments, Professor Haidt has demonstrated that our explanations of our own moral beliefs are also mostly confabulations. To test this, he wrote a series of quick stories that involve ‘harmless taboo violations.’
One, for example, involves a man buying a chicken from a supermarket
, and having sex with it before cooking and eating it. In another, a woman cuts up an American flag and uses it to clean her house. When Haidt told these tales, people generally experienced disgust for the man’s actions and felt that the woman had been disrespectful. Their emotions had formed powerful responses. The models in their unconscious minds had given their verdict – now they had to confabulate their reasons for it. But these were victimless offences. How did people justify their negative feelings? Many simply invented victims.
After 1,620 harmless offence stories
were read out, 38 per cent of people insisted that someone actually
had been
harmed. In his book
The Righteous Mind
Haidt recalls that
when he and his colleagues would politely remind them that there
were
no victims, they would ‘say things like,
“I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t think of a reason why
.” They seemed to be morally dumbfounded – rendered speechless by their inability to explain verbally what they knew intuitively.’

Professor Haidt is perhaps
the
foremost expert on the psychology of moral reasoning. He writes that, rather than it being a process that we use in order to discover truth,
‘moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle
to win friends and influence people …
Don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value
. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly …
We are selfish hypocrites
so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.’

The brain’s powers of confabulation can be experienced vividly when we are asleep. Sometimes, an area of the brain stem causes a
‘myoclonic jerk’
– thought to be a release of muscle tension. Your brain will likely weave a dream to explain this sudden spasm, and you will find yourself falling – down stairs, off a tabletop, on black ice.

Of course, it should not be a surprise that we confabulate when we are asleep. As we have already discovered, one of the most disturbing revelations of neuroscience is that our sense of being ‘out there’ in the world is an illusion. We are stuck inside our skulls and the rich sensory landscape of sights and sounds and colours and smells that we think we are moving about in is actually a reconstruction.
As neuroscientist and sleep expert Dr Stephen LaBerge has said
, ‘Asking why we dream is like asking why we are conscious. We dream because the brain is designed to make a model of the world whenever it is functioning.’

In
The Ego Tunnel
,
neuroscientist and philosopher Thomas Metzinger notes
that ‘the dream ego does not know that it is dreaming … The dream ego is delusional, lacking insight into the nature of the state it is itself generating.’ In this sense, the ‘dream ego’ is little different from its daytime version. Whether awake or asleep, we are deluded into believing that we are ‘the invisible actor at the centre of the world’.

Our brains create the world in which we exist – they also create us. Perhaps the greatest model that the brain creates is that of
you
– the
‘I’, the coherent individual, the soul who inhabits the body.

Starting with its basic lessons of cause and effect, the brain builds its models and uses them to create a virtual reality for us to exist in. This virtual reality is, in important respects, highly accurate. But it is narrow: our limited senses mean that we are unaware of most of the sounds and sights around us. It is biased: our intellectual worlds are skewed, primed to see and favour ‘pre-approved’ information. It is emotional: our feelings largely define our thinking. It is prejudiced: we remain a tribal species. It is selfish and egotistical: we are fooled into believing that we are wiser, more moral, more capable, better looking and with more hopeful futures than is true.

Our brain generates a model of a simply experienced, physical body that is moving through space. It imbues that body with a thinking mind that believes it is a single, coherent whole, but is actually a conglomeration of warring parts. It suspends that ‘self’ in a world that is simultaneously physical and emotional. It gives it memories and hopes – a place in time, in past and future. It covers many of the cracks with confabulation – innocent lies that we tell ourselves to keep the illusion steady, and ourselves happy.

We confabulate tales that make us believe that the ‘I’, and not all those frighteningly uncontrollable external causes, are the commanders of our behaviour. We confabulate tales that explain how pranayama made us better; to account for the transformative effects of meditation. We confabulate tales to justify our emotional conviction that there really
are
satanic baby-eating cults. When he was in his psychotic state, Rufus May confabulated a tale about being recruited as a spy that made sense of the extra dopamine in his brain. Dopamine is a neurochemical that is implicated in the identification of ‘prediction errors’, or surprises. When we experience something that conflicts with our neural models we need to explain it by grafting it into the narrative that we tell of the world.
Dopamine helps to tell us when our models need updating
. Rufus’s excess dopamine resulted in his attending to lots of extra-vibrant, vital, salient detail. He had become too sensitive to stories.

The benefits of story-making have been explored by Professor of Psychology Timothy Wilson. In
Redirect
, he considers how disturbing
it has been for the human species to have gained the unique ability to ponder concepts such as hopelessness and death.
‘It is so unsettling to think such thoughts
,’ he writes, ‘that we have developed narratives that provide comforting answers … worldviews that explain creation, the purpose of life, and what happens after we die, thereby helping us deal with the terror of gazing into the sky and seeing ourselves as insignificant specks … many studies show that religious people are happier than nonreligious people.’

Analysis of one hundred such papers
by researchers at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina concluded that religious believers have more positive emotions and show a greater satisfaction with their lives than others.
Anthropologists at the University of Connecticut
found that Israeli women who recited psalms during the second intifada experienced less anxiety and an increased sense of control compared with those who did not.

Professor Wilson believes that a central benefit of story-making is the sense of certainty it offers.
He tells of an examination of a group of people
who had a 50 per cent chance of developing fatal Huntingdon’s disease. They were given the opportunity to discover their fate using a simple test. Some participants took the test, while others chose to remain in ignorance. Those who tested positive were devastated: they would likely die in middle age. When they were seen again, though, six months later, their happiness levels had lifted back to normal. After a year, they remained stable. But the group who had chosen not to find out were significantly more depressed.

Surprisingly, the individuals who knew that they would die young were happier than those who were not sure.
Says Professor Wilson, ‘Those who had learned
that they had inherited the Huntingdon’s gene found a way to come to terms with it, by incorporating this news into their narratives and finding some meaning in it … those who remained uncertain about their health status could not undergo this restorative process of narrative change.’

We create stories because they make us happy. They are how we learn about the world. They are how we predict the future. They provide certainty. They are a source of power and motivation. They tell us why good things happen and bad things happen and why we are better
than most. They are arks of meaning, the method by which we navigate our lives through a dangerous and confusing world. At every moment, night and day, we are acting in our own first-person narrative dramas. Not only do our brains make a world for our story to play out in, they also create its hero. Us.

I cannot work out what it is with that shirt – but it is
beautiful
. Its top button is unfastened and its pristine cotton is firm and yet soft. It is behaving in all the right ways – in all of its angles, in the soaring confidence of its collar’s upright points, in the inviting shadows that it is painting on its owner’s skin. How does a simple white shirt come to look so elegant? What, exactly, is it that makes it so different from any of mine? Probably, I think, it is expensive. The young man who is wearing it certainly
looks
expensive. He sounds it, too. The whole carriage can hear him. Whereas everybody else has spent this journey looking softly out of windows or quietly reading, he has spent it on his phone, cufflinks flashing, talking volubly about his many and important activities at university at Oxford, which is where this train terminates. ‘I really don’t know what his problem is with me,’ he says, at one point, and I think, ‘I bet I could tell you. I bet I could give you a fucking
list
.’