September 15, 2011 • 39 mins
Your life is filled with choices and first steps down - or is it? According to many neuroscientists, free will is a sham. In this episode, Julie and Robert have no choice but to take a sobering look at decision making and the unconscious brain.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglass. Julie,
what did you do this weekend? Oh? Well, I had
the privilege of going to see David Eagleman speak at
the Decatur Book Festival. And uh, I'm talking about science
(00:27):
hunky nous all rolled together in one package. He un No,
it's not really hunky, but you know, the media sort
of plays that image out as suppose yeah, I would.
You know, he's an attractive guy. He's up there with
like Brian Cox, not Brian Cox the old grizzly actor,
but Brian Cox, the young cosmologist in terms of like, yeah,
you're sort of if they had like a teen magazine
(00:48):
for science, two year old science geeks, Eagleman would be
on the cover every other month. Yeah, I'd be like
saber tooth tiger Beat, yeah or something like that. Definitely,
he he would fulfill that role. And he's got fancy jacket,
but more and more importantly, he's got fancy thoughts. Yes,
that's the most important part. And he's great at relating
these thoughts to a general audience, which we all love,
I mean, because that's that's the whole thing is, like
(01:10):
scientists can do their own their own thing in a
bubble all day and it's great, but somebody has to
bring that knowledge to the outside world. And it's great
when the scientists can do it themselves. Eagleman has also
been on Colbert Report. People probably seen him there. He's
all over the place to total media darling. Yeah, and
we've actually talked about him before in a podcast about
possibility andism. Oh yeah, yeah, which he is. He's actually
(01:32):
sort of founded this idea of Yeah, that's what I
actually yeah, I interviewed him about that. Yeah. Yeah, he
took a few minutes out of his time to talk
to me. But in this podcast, we're talking about a
little something called free will. What Yeah, free will, which
is which is like the one of the big ideas
of human culture and what it is to be human,
the idea that obviously we make choices in life and
(01:54):
those choices lead us where we need to be. And
we we recently recorded and published in an episode about
decision fatigue. So so this kind of plays nicely with
that or in a in a way kind of conflicts
with it at times at times, but sometimes they sort
of melt together because and that we were talking about
how we were we have so many choices in any
given day, little choices and big choices that it just
(02:15):
wears us out. But but there's a theme here. There's
finite mental energy, finite mental energy which plays into, as
we'll find out, free will or our perception that we
have free will. Yeah, and at hard here we have
a very old idea too, the idea very old philosophical
(02:37):
religious discussion of whether we are in charge of our
own destiny, if we're really the captains of our soul
or yeah, like Invictus, or if we're destined to do things,
if our fate is outside of our own control. Now,
the old days, it was kind of a question of
whether we were this self moving soul or it's the
gods or the fates or some of their force is
(02:59):
is writing the book and we're just carrying along with it.
But today the discussion is steeped in neuroscience with a
nice sprinkling of philosophy or a layer of Chico philosophy
on top. Well, you can't separate the philosophy from this, right,
This is just one of those subjects that, yeah, you can,
you can pour a bunch of neuroscience on, and you
should because it's pretty illuminating. But at the end of
the day, it's still is this. It's still a big
(03:20):
question mark. And that's what's really exciting about it too,
is that in some of these older philosophical arguments that
they've been around forever, but now we have these new
ideas and neuroscience, these new findings. It's forcing the philosophers
to like kind of rush in and make sense of things,
and they're kind of, uh, you know, I'm kind of
having fun with the idea here. But it's kind of
like if you have like a fire department and hasn't
been a fire in town in years and years and years,
(03:42):
and there's finally a little blaze and all these old
guys are like, yeah, let's get in there and do it.
In a way, it's kind of like fresh philosophical territory
and that they get to tackle old arguments but in
a light of new scientific discoveries. Yeah, and we're going
to talk about that, particularly in the context of David
Eagleman's Incognito. This is his new book, The Secret Lives
of the brain, and Eagleman claims that the brain is
(04:04):
running the show incognito, hence the title, and that this consciousness,
this I that we feel that I, Julie Um really
is just a bit player to the vast network of
our neural circuitry. Okay um, So this is a quote.
He says, we are not at the center of ourselves,
but instead like the Earth in the Milky Way and
(04:25):
the milky Way in the universe, far out on a
distant edge, hearing little of what's transpiring. So, in a
simple sense, instead of going with the idea I am
my brain or and it's more like I am a
character in the story that is told by my brain,
or something to that effect. Well, yeah, And he uses
the analogy of a newspaper, like your brain sort of
(04:45):
gathering all of this data and doing all the legwork. Um,
you know, the brain sort of like these localized population,
sort of like you you see in a newspaper, these
local communities, and all of a sudden that the headline
gets served up in your brain and you the reader,
I take all the credit for the headline, Like can
(05:07):
you read it and think, oh, yeah, I knew that,
But in fact, he's saying that these these ideas, these
um concepts, our choices are really just a result of
this activity, activity bubbling in our brains for sometimes years,
you know, sometimes months, hours, um coming up with these concepts.
(05:28):
It is not the eye saying, oh, yeah, I had
that idea, and we're going to talk about that how
because right now that sounds really abstract, but we're gonna
talk about some studies that bear this out at a
physical level. It also makes me think of The Daily
Show to a certain extent, because if you if you
just tune into The Daily Show, as I'm sure a
lot of a lot of you guys do, it's easy
to think, oh, man, that John Stewart is a really
(05:48):
funny guy. He's so clever. He is and he is,
he's a very clever guy, very funny guy. But that
show is coming at the end of the whole day
of writing, a team of writers cracking a out around
the table. Yeah, and you know, just working, working, putting
all this work into it, all for just a few
minutes of payoff. But if you're not privy to that information,
(06:10):
it's just like, well, look at that guy's that guy
is awesome. Yeah, and this analogy. Yeah that John John
Stewart is the eye of the brain. Yeah, and John
Stewart is an illusion. And that is so okay. What
do we do when we have consciousness or I as
a bit player on the sidelines, what do we do
with this information? Well, we could freak out, I guess
that's one way some people are yeh, because it's I mean,
(06:34):
it really turns everything we sort of believe on its head.
We really want to believe in this idea of the
self moving soul, and the idea that we're making choices
and getting stuff done, and the idea that we're just
this kind of surface illusion on a on a sea
of cognitive depth. It's it's really kind of hard to swallow,
and it makes you. I mean Daniel Dinnett, for instance,
(06:55):
he argues that we kind of have to tweak the
language a little to make sense of it all, taking
the stance that we need to redefine what free will is. Yeah, yeah,
interesting enough. Freud actually sort of to tap into this,
this idea or actually this problem a long time ago
when he was thinking about his own relationship to his
father and realizing that although he had he admired his
(07:16):
his father there were all the things that play sort
of shame and um also at times hatred and love,
all these different things bubbling underneath the surface of subconscious,
the subconscious, you know, our buddy Freud and the subconscious.
And that's when he decided to say to himself, well, okay,
if I've got all these hidden mental processes, then free
choice is either an illusion or at the very least
(07:38):
it's playing second fiddle to the unconscious. Wow, there you go.
So you know, of course he didn't have neuroscience to
back him up at that time, but he had an
inkling that this was the case. Although he got ladies
all wrong, I will say, yeah, unfortunate. So yeah, it
forces us to ask the question like how does an
idea even form? Because the way we feel it, the
way we experience it is eureka, right, that light bulb
(08:02):
going off above the head. Well, and that's why why
a lot of people say, yeah, we do have free will,
because I feel like I made that choice right. You
look look at some of these other ideas and it's
it maybe seems like it's a little more like a
like when you turn on the hot water, you know,
and the hot water comes out of the faucet, but
there's really a lot going on behind the wall and
under the house. There was this guy named Johann Frederick Herbart,
(08:25):
German philosopher and psychologists. He argued that ideas might best
be understand is a structured mathematical framework. So an idea
is opposed by an opposite idea. You know, it's kind
of like the to use a very simple analogy, Um,
like the devil and the angel on the shoulder. One
idea is opposed by an opposite is happening underneath us,
(08:45):
right that we're not aware of this. We're not conscious
of this. Yeah, so they're not maybe on your shoulder.
Maybe they're like hanging out in your armpits, you know,
as they should, and they're they're contrasting back and forth
at the devil and the angel, that guy, I think
we should do this, I think we should do that.
And eventually one of these guys is beaten down below
the threshold of awareness, and so the idea is sort
of discounted right when it runs contrary. But if there
(09:09):
is another idea that that has sort of a network
of support already some proof right of the pudding, then
it rises to the top and it becomes something that
we're aware of, which I think is really fascinating. Uh,
that you have these thoughts struggling at these deeper levels
and they kind of get kicked out sometimes. Yeah. Yeah.
(09:29):
He he coined the term appreciative mass to indicate that
an idea becomes conscious not in isolation, but only in
assimilation with a with a complex of other ideas already
in consciousness. And I was thinking about that. I was
thinking again that back to this idea that we have
a finite amount of mental energy, which we talked about
with decision fatigue, and it would make sense that you
would tamp down what seemed contrary to yourself because your
(09:52):
brain really has to sort of fold up in a sense.
Can you imagine being completely aware at every goal moment?
Like if if your brain flagged every stimuli that that
was floating past, I mean you would be you might
actually be mad, right yeah, because I mean, we'll we'll
discuss a little Morris. That's the podcast unrolls, and there's
(10:13):
a lot of stimuli because on one one level light
right now, we're just talking about the stuff going on
inside your brain. It's facing facing choices and weighing one
choice against the other. So it's all the hard mathematical programming,
if you will, beny the operating system that would be
actually perceive or are. But then there's also going to
be all this environmental stimuli coming at us and all
these influences that are taking hold of biological biological level.
(10:36):
So yeah, it's impossible for me to imagine like what
that would be like if you were actually conscious of
all these things, I mean to a certain extent. Uh,
you know, we've talked about people who are who engage
in meditation, Like a lot of that is trying to
become conscious of thought, becoming conscious of how the environment
is affecting you. But even that is only like if
if you know, if if we are experiencing this this
(10:58):
surface layer above an ocean and of cognitive wheels and
and and gears, and even even like deep practice meditation
is not going to take you all the way down
to the bottom. But with so paradox all about that
is that if you're going to get to that sort
of level of awareness, you have to tamp down so
much else, right, Like your your brain is still going
(11:19):
to have to batten down the hatches and say, Okay,
that's just a dog barking, if that's just this and
that in order to become very aware of what your own,
well your own not your own thoughts, but the important thoughts,
like on some level, you're still having a cherry pick
through the mind and figure out what's important and what's
(11:40):
not important. And so I think that's why I think
this is so interesting, because because Eagleman sort of pointed
to this too and um in the book and also
in his talk, that we're really the only animal that
has sort of like a computer, Like if you can
imagine a computer taking itself apart and taken the camera
(12:00):
and aimed at ourselves to figure out what in the
world is going on? You mean, you obviously don't see
this in the animal world, and if it were going on,
we wouldn't be privy to it, right, That sort of
part and parcel of why this is so fascinating and
mysterious that we are trying at the end of the
day to get to this question of who am I?
Who is this person in my head talking to me
and this consciousness and am I really making the decisions
(12:23):
in my life? And he talks again about our brains
again battening down the hatches with these predictive models. And
we've talked about this before that you know, this is
really important from an evolutionary standpoint that we would have
to come up with these predictive models of operating because
every time we came into a new situation, if every
(12:43):
single bit of information that was beamed toward us was
being judged, it would be really hard to react. Right,
So there are certain things that you have to model
blueprint for yourself. So you come into a room you
expected to, or you expect a window, you expect this,
so on and so forth. And she was actually talking
about how our visual cortex is the model generator for that.
(13:04):
For this, it receives data from the bretna and then
it sends its predictions based on past experience to the thalamus,
which runs a report on the differences of what came
in and what was expected. And this is really important
because our expectations certainly color our perceptions um and actually
(13:24):
what we think is going on. So then the thalamus
sends the report back to the visual cortex and it
updates its models. So it's constantly doing this and when
you think about it that way, it's really cool, right.
But on the other hand, what things are we missing,
what things are we tamping down that are going on
that that that don't fit into the model, That could
(13:45):
perhaps give us a little bit more information about choices
that we might or might not make if we had
more access to that information. Yeah, the I mean, the
whole visual realm of this alone is fascinating. Was reading
the articles to see You, sent by Susan Blackmark. There's
a whole section too, for she was going into the
way way sound is interpreted in the brain. But just
but there are like various theories about just how we see, uh,
(14:08):
not in terms of how the eyes work, but how
the brain makes sense of that data. Because our entire
field of vision is not a precision instrument. It's like
there's like a tiny area of precision site and the
rest is kind of vague. Side And Daniel Bennet, who
mentioned earlier, who's a philosopher, he's one of the old
fireman rushed in to extinguish the blazes or or at
least deal with the blazes that have risen up in
(14:30):
the way of all this New New York scientific data.
But he he makes a lot of arguments based on
the way our eyes work and I thought one of
the most interesting things that he pointed out was if
you go to a mirror and look, you look at
one eye and then you look at the other, and
if you try and see your eyes moving from one
eye to the next, you can't see it. The brain
(14:50):
doesn't read about this. I was like, this is such
a stonar moment. Did you do like I do when
you ran to the bathroom and tried it out for
about ten minutes? I didn't. I just had the moment
in my head. I was like, whoa, because you know
that your brain does that, right, but you you believe
that everything that your eyes are telling you or the truth. Yeah,
And so it creates this moment of wow, Okay again
(15:12):
here I am questioning reality around me, if if my
brain is has these blind spots, or if things just
aren't that important that it's not reporting things to me. Yeah, which,
of course that leads us right into change blindness, this
idea that um and then there are various studies along
this this line as well that that have shown that
you you make minute changes to say, picture between picture
(15:34):
A and picture BT, and people want will inevitably like,
they'll stare at it and will eventually get it and
they'll be like, oh, well, this is the difference. I
feel like there are numerous examples of this too, various.
Can you spot the difference between this picture and this
which I think Uffington Post or somebody does that. But yeah,
that the brain is just blind to it unless you
actually center your processing on it for for several seconds
in the case of some of these. Yeah, it's it's
(15:56):
very it's really fascinating. And right after this break, we're
going to talk about how all of this really serves EO.
This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors
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curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at
(16:16):
curiosity dot com and explore the answers to life's questions.
And we're back. So ego, Yeah, the ego and the
illusion of consciousness. That's right, Implicit egotism is what we're
talking about again. Eagleman is talking about this in the
context of why we may or may not have free Well.
(16:38):
He talks about psychologist John Jones, who was looking to
see if he could detect a pattern in a literative
romantic pairings. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love this.
He examined fifteen thousand public records from two counties in
Georgia and Florida, and he saw that there was a
pattern that emerged that was greater than chance that cutles
with the same first letter of their first names. We're
(17:00):
getting hitched to one another. I don't know about that,
I know, I know, yeah, yeah, Well, there was some
there was some information that was like, you've got to
be kidding. It doesn't it doesn't feel like we could
be so easily manipulated or self manipulated on that level.
But there are a ton of studies that are coming out,
like if your name is Dennis, then you're more likely
(17:22):
to be a dentist or Denise. Um. There's these associations,
and I think it the studies said that, like it
implied that I would have been more likely to run
a hardware store or something than become a writer. So
r it was something about like both both possibilities were
equally kind of dreadful to me. But but then also
(17:46):
it's yeah, the whole you're more likely to marry somebody
with the same letter of Well, now this isn't happening, like,
you know, this isn't a great occurrence, but it's significant
enough that it raises eyebrows and Eagleman say, in this idea,
this implicit egotism is a result of us being so
enamored with ourselves that we can't help but find reflections
(18:07):
of ourselves and others, and it could be behind they
need to align ourselves with that familiar feeling on some
unconscious level. Oh yes, and then this is also where
Resputin comes in, the idea that if you tell somebody
that they share a birthday with Resputin, they're more likely
to be sympathetic towards the Resputin or or to behave
(18:28):
more gregarious themselves. Right, yeah, Yeah, there's a university study.
They took a bunch of college kids. They had this
same essay. The only thing they fussed with is they
in the biographical data on the essay. They matched it
to each person's birthday. So the person reading it and
then you know, half the class it was it just
had a random birthday that didn't match theirs. So of
(18:48):
course the birthdays that match, those students were more likely
to say that Resputin was a stand up citizen or
something along those lines. Are report that on a biographical level,
this guy was pretty great, not necessarily like that the
content of the essay itself. So if one were to
be deceptive when applying for a job, and I'm not
arguing that one should, because you can get a lot
(19:09):
and do a lot of trouble for things like this,
but if you were to lie and say that you
had the same birthday as the person hiring you or
is your boss, that would theoretically be beneficial. Yeah, but
I mean all this points back to the fact that
we can't help but find commonalities with one another. Our
brain is sort of hard wired to for these sort
(19:30):
of confirmation biases, which we've talked about before. Yeah, it's
I mean we've talked before in the in the past,
we form these stories where the center of the story,
where the center of this world view. No matter what
other characters are involved, be it God or just the
neighbor across the street, it all ultimately comes down to
what am I getting out of it? How does it
relate to me. It's a story, there's a main character.
I'm the main character. If there's another character in it,
(19:52):
I need to know what the relationship is. And Yeah,
it's funny because we can't. We try to inhabit someone
else's perspective, but we can't help coloring that with our
perspective all the time, and on the unconscious level. Right,
So if I'm like, oh, Wow, I really love that
blue and gray shirt that you're wear right now, that's
that's one of my favorite colors, and all of a sudden,
I feel like, man, I'm really connecting with Robert today. He's,
(20:14):
you know, maybe not even understanding it because you've got
my favorite colors on. So all these things are, these
these underpinnings are holding together these ideas that rise to
the top without us even knowing. So though it may
feel sort of ridiculous that these couples are getting married
on because they have the first initials they share that
in their first names, there may be something to it
(20:35):
in other instances, right, I mean, we we'd like to
believe that our romantic relationships are deeper than that. Yeah,
well I didn't. I didn't marry somebody just because she
had the same first letter on her first name as me.
I did it because her pupils were dilated. Oh yes, yes,
um nice, that's giving ahead with that. But we'll we'll
explain that. Well, and Egan then I also talked about
(20:56):
this too, and in an instance, what's called priming, which
sort of creates this atmosphere in which is more favorable
to get the results that you want. And he talked
about this, uh the Decater Book Festival and saying that
there was an experiment in which people were asked to
talk about their mothers. They were given either like a
warm beverage to drink or a cold beverage. And again,
(21:18):
you would not think that we could be so easily manipulated.
Those with warm beverages, they had warm memories of their mothers.
Those with cold beverages, Uh, it was it was it
was snow cold. Yeah, it was cold. Breezeville. Prime to
to remind everybody, We've we've discussed it in some previous
podcasts because it is one of the forms of memory
at work in the human mind. There's not just one
(21:40):
gear of memory, of there there are multiple gears. Memory
is a is a chorus of different cognitive elements, and
priming is one of those that There's been cases where
an individual's brain has been damaged and one form of memories,
say remembering facts or or something spatial or what have
you will be disabled, but the priming will still be active.
So that's what we're talking about here. Yeah, your brains
(22:02):
are tagging certain things that you've seen this over and
over again. Political ads we've talked about before, and Engleman
talks about a political ad from when Bush and we're
running against each other and the Bush campaign had a
really kind of funny commercial, well not funny depending on
your sense of humor there, But basically what goes across
(22:22):
the screen with flashes is rats. But what you find
out as is the word kind of zooms back around,
is that it's bureaucrats. It's actually being broadcast on the television,
but of course your mind is already thinking rats negative.
Eagleman also talked a little bit about face blindness, which,
of face blindness is one of those things it's like
(22:43):
trust any neuroscientists to bring it out in a conversation
at least once, because it's pretty fascinating when area of
the brain that deals with visual perception or facial features
ends up not working. You see faces that you don't
identify those with the people. There have been experiments that
show that even individuals with facial blindness there's some sort
of priming memory is there. They can they can see
it in like facial tips. Yeah, they see it activated, right,
(23:03):
So they can't necessarily recognize the person, but they see
activity going on where the brain is saying, okay, there's
something for something there. This ties in with the recent
episode we did about false memories, where you can have
a memory that is false. I think it is true,
but somewhere in the cognitive depths, your brain knows it's
not true. So this is an example of at the
surface level, we don't know whose face that is, but
(23:26):
deep down inside us the brain knows. And all this
I keep coming back to a quote that I'm taking
out of context from the Mahaparata where Christians Christians says
there is another intelligence beyond the mind, where he's not
talking about the illusion of free will exactly, but I
keep coming back to that, the idea that that our mind,
as we experience it, is this thin layer, and beyond
(23:46):
that there's this whole other system, this sort of shadow
mind that's running the show. Well, it's funny you say
that because in the book Incognato, Eagleman talks about Samuel
Taylor College's poem Kubla con and Kubla insanity to Kubla
on a stately pleasure dome decree, that's the one. Yes,
I know that's still that's that's nice. Um. But he
(24:06):
talks about as an example of us losing the center
of ourselves and who is really the person who is
creating or making decisions, because he says, who exactly wrote
the poem? And he says, and he brings us up
because obviously we know that College did. But he says,
since College wrote it primarily under the influence of opium,
which allowed College to access his subconscious it wasn't the
(24:29):
college that was aware. That was the sober eye Collorridge.
So who wrote it? College or the opium? I'd say
a little both. Alright, fair enough, author, I'll go with that.
Let's talk about dilating pupils. Yes, this is where we're
really getting into the biological roots of things. The rat
like hind brain backing up the brain that we experienced.
(24:50):
There's this one study that Equalman mentions where people were
nine particularly we're given, uh, we're given all these different
photos of women and judge them on attractiveness, and the
women was dilated. Pupils were the ones that they overwhelmingly liked.
Like half of the photos contained women with dilated pupils.
And when we say dilated pupil, say, we're not huge,
and we're talking about a couple of millimeters, right, It's
(25:11):
not something that you would be like, ah, dilated pupils
that one so not like full on. I just came
from the optometrist office and concert just took off my
granny and glasses from my dilated eyes. So his point
was that these men were scanning these faces within seconds
and making these choices, and on some level they were
detecting what that she was really into the situation right
(25:36):
that she was, she was rare to go. This is
apparently a sign of sexual readiness, this dilated eyes. So
tuck that in the back of your your brains, folks. Um. Now,
we're not advocating, ladies that you dilate your eyes before
a big date, because disaster will want sue when you
try and try. Yeah yeah, Belladonna opium. Dilated eye is
(26:00):
never any classes. It's not really necessary. But that's just
one aspect of why we do the things we do,
or we make the choices that we do. And Eagleman
is talking about this again from an evolutionary perspective or
biological perspective. We've seen this over and over again. Oh,
there was the study we have with the strippers, yeah,
laptop dances. Yeah, from the was this the University of Nevada,
(26:21):
I believe, and they found that the strippers who are
ovulating received higher tips than those who are not, which
which meant that on on a on a very basic
biological level, and the men liked the women who were
better potential biological mates at any given moment. And we're
talking about like an average of sixty eight dollars and
tips right as opposed to non ovulating women whose averages
(26:42):
around like thirty five bucks. So there's quite a difference.
So both of these really point of the idea that,
especially when it comes to choices regarding mating and survival
and these very primal biological things, there's somebody else calling
the shots. I mean, it's kind of a an overstatement
of the obvious to a certain extent, because they're shortage
of jokes about that. You know about like men don't
(27:02):
think with their brain, they think with their well and
they they talked. They also talk about in the book
Um David Ggelman talks about how women will select a
partner when they are ovulating based on how much facial
hair and how broad their shoulders are, because they want
somebody who's husky and protective and strong. Yeah, yeah, they
(27:22):
want the incredible hulk. Well when when is it? Then
they want somebody who is kind and delicate when they're
not ovulating. There they look for people who have softer features,
and having a broadcast just doesn't matter as much. The
idea is that they're looking for someone who can nurture,
learn more his words, not mine, Because when I read
stuff like this sometimes I have to raise my eyebrow
in a big question mark because sometimes I think this
(27:44):
is overstated to a certain degree. Yeah, yeah, none of
these are the hard and fast rule by which to live.
But but again it chose that that again their stuff
going on at a biological level, that if it's not
robbing us of our free will completely, it's at least
limiting the number of options. It's steering us towards certain choices,
if not choosing them outright. For the surface, and it
(28:07):
begs the question, so does free will really exist? And
Eagleman says the argument for these the existence of free
will is essentially that it's a direct subjective experience. And
I talked about this earlier. I feel like I just
made a choice to scratch my arms, so therefore I
feel like I made a choice the objective forward being feel.
But Eagleman brings up a really interesting study by I
(28:28):
believe he's a neuroscientist Labette, who had a finger raising experiment.
And in the nineteen sixties, Benjamin Labette put electrodes on
his test subject's head and asked them to lift their
finger whenever they got the urged to do so, okay,
and it seems pretty straightforward, right. They were given a
timer and asked to note the exact movement that they
felt the urge. People reported the urge about a quarter
(28:51):
of a second before they actually move their fingers. The
curious part is that the E E G read out
from the electrodes reported the activity in their brain rose
out one full second before they actually felt the urge
to move. So why is this important? I mean because
it's basically saying that there are parts of the brain
that are making decisions well before you become conscious of it. Wow.
(29:12):
So it's like John Stewart just made a funny joke.
Know that joke was written six hours ago by like
four dudes, and it was already determined funny and served
up right, approved by a committee, stamped, typed up, signed,
handed over, and delivered yeah yeah, which all flies in
the face of the argument that, well, I feel like
I just made a choice to scratch my arm. Yeah,
(29:34):
well you were kind of served up the information to
do it. You know, this other, this other part of
your brain that's working under the covers, is not necessarily
giving a direct subjective experience, and it raises all sorts
of interesting questions about then, then what do we do
with this information? How does it change the world we
live in? I was checking out the author or Scott
Baker's blog, re Pound Brain. He was talking about going
to see a talk by Daniel Dennett, who mentioned earlier
(29:58):
the Philosopher, and then was discussing two recent studies by UM.
It's a cooperation between the University of Minnesota and the
University of British Columbia, and they found that college students,
when exposed to arguments that were not completely in charge
of our choices, that free will is either an illusion
or not near as big a factor in our choices
(30:20):
as we think it is they were more likely to
cheat first on a mathematics test, then on a on
another form of tests. But that that raises an interesting question.
If we were to live in a world where everyone
is thinking, well, we're not really in charge, there's no
such thing as free will, I'm just privy to all
these other forces beneath the surface of things. Then am
I more likely to make bad choices just because I
(30:41):
don't feel like they're my choices? Well, and that's what
Jennet and others argue, right, Like, you can't blame your
brain or or your lack of awareness for bad choices. Yeah,
you can't be on trial for murder and say my
brain made me do it. To a certain extent, you can,
but but but not not across the board. We can't
blame our brains because is we still are our brains,
(31:01):
even if there's a lot more going on on underneath,
even if we're at the periphery. Really, Yeah, Eagleman was
talking about this, and he was he brought up actually
Turetts and parasomnias as an example of what he calls automatism,
And he's saying that someone with Touretts could be said
to have no free will since the neural circuit trees
making decisions for him or her right and decisions that
(31:23):
they're consciously aware of, they can't do anything to stop it.
And of course when you've got a parasomnia though you're
not quite aware. This is for people who didn't hear
the parasomnia episode, this is crazy sleep. This is sleep
eating sleep. Um. Some people who have r b D
when actually act out their dreams, which you can be
quite frightening. Sleep sleep. Karate is pretty much from yeah,
(31:43):
that's that's the shorthand for that, um, But it's really
sort of redefining again what free will is. And what
he says is that we should come up with something
called the principle of sufficient automatism. So he says, in
legal parlance, automatism is is basically someone doing something and
the root cause for it is a biological process for
which the person has little or no control over. His
(32:05):
example would be, for instance, like a person isn't culpable
for an accident if they had a seizure right and
they caused a traffic accident. Interesting story, I know somebody
who was in a traffic accident, uh, and it was
caused by an individual who had a seizure, and the
insurance company involved claimed act of God active God. It's
(32:27):
got to be like a state by state thing in
the US, because, Yeah, I wonder if they all call it,
call it active God or or in this case, that's
supposed to be called automatism. M hmm, there you go.
We'll see. That's a whole another podcast for psycholinguism, right
and how we described meaning to language? So Egoman though
he takes this example and he says, Okay, the person
(32:48):
didn't have a choice in the matter, right, the perion
that had the seizure, they didn't want to have a
seizure and they didn't want to cause an accident. So
he wonders if this biological process quote describe most or
some would argue all of what's going on in our
rains given the steering power of our genetics, childhood experiences,
environmental talks and hormones, neurotransmitters, and neurocircuitry, enough of our
(33:08):
decisions are beyond our explicit control that we arguably are
not the ones in charge. In other words, free will
may exist, but if it does, it has a very
little room in which to operate. So he says we
should reframe it as this principle of sufficient automatism. Basically,
the principle arises naturally from the understanding that free will,
if it is, if it does exist, is only a
(33:31):
small factor writing on top of enormous automated machinery, so
small that we may be able to think about bad
decisions being made in the same way that we think
about any other physical process, like diabetes or lung disease.
I don't know, is he is he letting us off
too easily? You think? I don't think. I mean he
he out you know, in his Bookie outright came out
(33:51):
and said, I'm not making the argument, and I don't
think it. There's a risk that we're going to unlock
the doors in the prisons and say, oh, you guys
go free. There's no sich thing as free will, so
carry on. No, I agree, but I think he's still
posing that question do we have free will? And he's
sort of saying, no, we don't, but possibly we could
act on it within seconds. Well, this is me, not
(34:13):
him freere Perhaps all zen meditation experts right, and we
could monitor every thought, because when we get down to it,
the experience is that we have free will unless we
really work on ourselves to change the way we experienced
the world. It's this weird paradox in the in the
way we are the experience, you know, we are this,
(34:34):
uh like like, how do you change that? How how
do we do that? Could you become the brain without
this subsurface of perceived free will? I don't know, I
don't know. I think that's why neuroscience is so fascinating,
and I think that's that's why he leaves the door open,
even though he says I pretty much side with other
neuroscientists and saying that we don't necessarily have the free will,
(34:54):
or at least it's not what we think it is.
It's it's definitely a different creature than what we've been discussing.
But he says that he feels like neuroscience is too
young and in a field right now to really definitively
answer this question. And it does make me think back
to the Blue Brain project, which we've talked about. This
(35:14):
building the computer or the digital model of the brain,
right trying to re engineer like our billion neurons and
see this detail at a cellular level and see if
it can tell us and the answer to these questions
about who we are. If this consciousness this I does
it really exist in this brain floating around? Yeah, As
we've mentioned before, I think it's it's like I'm one extreme.
You can look at such revelations as um terrifying, and
(35:37):
on the other side you can look at it as enlightenment.
And I think ultimately it's going to be ideally somewhere
in between where to see the enlightening aspects of it
but also see the sobering aspects of it as well.
So on one level you can say, well, I'm not
really completely in charge of all my choices and look
at that in so far as it keeps you from
beating yourself up too much, but also don't cling to
it so much that you just run around doing whatever
(35:58):
the heck entered your mind and didn't bang every impulse. Personally,
I think that it's it's actually pretty liberating because I
think that it gives us another way to think about
our actions and perhaps even sort of back up a
little bit and rethink them in a way that we
make better choices, if at all possible. If that little
middle second window does exist where we can make decisions
that I the consciousness that we that are aware. Then hey, okay,
(36:22):
even even better to know that that exists and take
hold of it. Yeah, well, it's kind of like to
come back to John Stewart. When John Stewart reads a joke,
he knows that that this was written hours ago by
a team of riders. We still have to add to
deliver it. So there you go. Maybe there's a model there.
I think there's a unifying theory of mine right there,
and have to do with John Stewart. Yeah, yeah, I'm
gonna I'm gonna patent that. Speaking of free will, some
(36:43):
of our listeners had the free will to send us
in some emails. Maybe maybe there were suggestions in this
creepy voice. But if you got there, you got one.
Oh yeah, I've got one. Well normally I read them,
but I know you had one that wasn't need to
do to your heart. Yeah. This is from Spencer and
he was talking about the podcast that we recently did
(37:06):
about cycolinguistics and our treatment of animals and eating animals.
Believe it was called Don't Eat the Pandada. And he writes, um,
and I'll skip around this a little bit because it's longer.
Was very thoughtful email, says I myself am a metatarian
who has always struggled with the idea of not having
to participate or even think about the process by which
(37:28):
the animal went from breathing and living to sitting on
my plate, all seasoned and delicious for me personally, The
internal struggle began when I was invited on a hunt
with my cousin when I was sixteen. Um. I agreed
enthusiastically and was taken to a farmer's field. Will re
drove most of the way and we just uh for
(37:48):
this a little bit. We spotted a group of deer
who must have been suitable for shooting us. My cousin
directed me to take any because like farmers field. Now,
I'm sorry, yeah, Manby's coming into this, dude. My cousin
directing me and take aim Adam matured dough, which I did.
Upon firing the shot and seeing that my actions had
directly resulted in the struggle an imminent death of a
(38:09):
beautiful animal, immediately started crying. Since that day, I've always
had an issue with the death of other animals for
our enjoyment, until that first pie of a juicy burger
or other savory meat concoction that I mysteriously and suddenly
forget I ever took issue with how I got how
it got to my mouth. And then he talks about
his wife who was in the four h Beef Club
for many years, and how when you're in the club,
(38:32):
you basically raise a calf and you get to show
it off and it's like this great experience and you've
bonded with this animal. And he said that of course,
when the young for hrs are showing their calves at
the auction, many inevitably start crying as their animals are
lead away for slaughter, whereupon everyone takes a few minutes
to calm down and get ready for delicious beefs upper
after the event. Thanks so much for the podcast. It
(38:52):
always as promise, has blewn my mind, So I thought
that was just really interesting too. Again, we're talking about
the things that we do and the things that we
think in how sometimes they're not quite squared together. So
thank you very much Fance for for sending that to us.
If you have any thoughts you'd like to share with us.
You've got some some cool study you ran across, some
(39:13):
idea that you think would make for a cool episode
of this podcast, you should share it with us and
with the other listeners. You can log on a Facebook
and find us on there as below the Mind, and
we're also on Twitter as below the Mind, and we
update those regularly with all sorts of cool stuff, and
you can always send us an email at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to
(39:36):
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglass. Julie,
what did you do this weekend? Oh? Well, I had
the privilege of going to see David Eagleman speak at
the Decatur Book Festival. And uh, I'm talking about science
(00:27):
hunky nous all rolled together in one package. He un No,
it's not really hunky, but you know, the media sort
of plays that image out as suppose yeah, I would.
You know, he's an attractive guy. He's up there with
like Brian Cox, not Brian Cox the old grizzly actor,
but Brian Cox, the young cosmologist in terms of like, yeah,
you're sort of if they had like a teen magazine
(00:48):
for science, two year old science geeks, Eagleman would be
on the cover every other month. Yeah, I'd be like
saber tooth tiger Beat, yeah or something like that. Definitely,
he he would fulfill that role. And he's got fancy jacket,
but more and more importantly, he's got fancy thoughts. Yes,
that's the most important part. And he's great at relating
these thoughts to a general audience, which we all love,
I mean, because that's that's the whole thing is, like
(01:10):
scientists can do their own their own thing in a
bubble all day and it's great, but somebody has to
bring that knowledge to the outside world. And it's great
when the scientists can do it themselves. Eagleman has also
been on Colbert Report. People probably seen him there. He's
all over the place to total media darling. Yeah, and
we've actually talked about him before in a podcast about
possibility andism. Oh yeah, yeah, which he is. He's actually
(01:32):
sort of founded this idea of Yeah, that's what I
actually yeah, I interviewed him about that. Yeah. Yeah, he
took a few minutes out of his time to talk
to me. But in this podcast, we're talking about a
little something called free will. What Yeah, free will, which
is which is like the one of the big ideas
of human culture and what it is to be human,
the idea that obviously we make choices in life and
(01:54):
those choices lead us where we need to be. And
we we recently recorded and published in an episode about
decision fatigue. So so this kind of plays nicely with
that or in a in a way kind of conflicts
with it at times at times, but sometimes they sort
of melt together because and that we were talking about
how we were we have so many choices in any
given day, little choices and big choices that it just
(02:15):
wears us out. But but there's a theme here. There's
finite mental energy, finite mental energy which plays into, as
we'll find out, free will or our perception that we
have free will. Yeah, and at hard here we have
a very old idea too, the idea very old philosophical
(02:37):
religious discussion of whether we are in charge of our
own destiny, if we're really the captains of our soul
or yeah, like Invictus, or if we're destined to do things,
if our fate is outside of our own control. Now,
the old days, it was kind of a question of
whether we were this self moving soul or it's the
gods or the fates or some of their force is
(02:59):
is writing the book and we're just carrying along with it.
But today the discussion is steeped in neuroscience with a
nice sprinkling of philosophy or a layer of Chico philosophy
on top. Well, you can't separate the philosophy from this, right,
This is just one of those subjects that, yeah, you can,
you can pour a bunch of neuroscience on, and you
should because it's pretty illuminating. But at the end of
the day, it's still is this. It's still a big
(03:20):
question mark. And that's what's really exciting about it too,
is that in some of these older philosophical arguments that
they've been around forever, but now we have these new
ideas and neuroscience, these new findings. It's forcing the philosophers
to like kind of rush in and make sense of things,
and they're kind of, uh, you know, I'm kind of
having fun with the idea here. But it's kind of
like if you have like a fire department and hasn't
been a fire in town in years and years and years,
(03:42):
and there's finally a little blaze and all these old
guys are like, yeah, let's get in there and do it.
In a way, it's kind of like fresh philosophical territory
and that they get to tackle old arguments but in
a light of new scientific discoveries. Yeah, and we're going
to talk about that, particularly in the context of David
Eagleman's Incognito. This is his new book, The Secret Lives
of the brain, and Eagleman claims that the brain is
(04:04):
running the show incognito, hence the title, and that this consciousness,
this I that we feel that I, Julie Um really
is just a bit player to the vast network of
our neural circuitry. Okay um, So this is a quote.
He says, we are not at the center of ourselves,
but instead like the Earth in the Milky Way and
(04:25):
the milky Way in the universe, far out on a
distant edge, hearing little of what's transpiring. So, in a
simple sense, instead of going with the idea I am
my brain or and it's more like I am a
character in the story that is told by my brain,
or something to that effect. Well, yeah, And he uses
the analogy of a newspaper, like your brain sort of
(04:45):
gathering all of this data and doing all the legwork. Um,
you know, the brain sort of like these localized population,
sort of like you you see in a newspaper, these
local communities, and all of a sudden that the headline
gets served up in your brain and you the reader,
I take all the credit for the headline, Like can
(05:07):
you read it and think, oh, yeah, I knew that,
But in fact, he's saying that these these ideas, these
um concepts, our choices are really just a result of
this activity, activity bubbling in our brains for sometimes years,
you know, sometimes months, hours, um coming up with these concepts.
(05:28):
It is not the eye saying, oh, yeah, I had
that idea, and we're going to talk about that how
because right now that sounds really abstract, but we're gonna
talk about some studies that bear this out at a
physical level. It also makes me think of The Daily
Show to a certain extent, because if you if you
just tune into The Daily Show, as I'm sure a
lot of a lot of you guys do, it's easy
to think, oh, man, that John Stewart is a really
(05:48):
funny guy. He's so clever. He is and he is,
he's a very clever guy, very funny guy. But that
show is coming at the end of the whole day
of writing, a team of writers cracking a out around
the table. Yeah, and you know, just working, working, putting
all this work into it, all for just a few
minutes of payoff. But if you're not privy to that information,
(06:10):
it's just like, well, look at that guy's that guy
is awesome. Yeah, and this analogy. Yeah that John John
Stewart is the eye of the brain. Yeah, and John
Stewart is an illusion. And that is so okay. What
do we do when we have consciousness or I as
a bit player on the sidelines, what do we do
with this information? Well, we could freak out, I guess
that's one way some people are yeh, because it's I mean,
(06:34):
it really turns everything we sort of believe on its head.
We really want to believe in this idea of the
self moving soul, and the idea that we're making choices
and getting stuff done, and the idea that we're just
this kind of surface illusion on a on a sea
of cognitive depth. It's it's really kind of hard to swallow,
and it makes you. I mean Daniel Dinnett, for instance,
(06:55):
he argues that we kind of have to tweak the
language a little to make sense of it all, taking
the stance that we need to redefine what free will is. Yeah, yeah,
interesting enough. Freud actually sort of to tap into this,
this idea or actually this problem a long time ago
when he was thinking about his own relationship to his
father and realizing that although he had he admired his
(07:16):
his father there were all the things that play sort
of shame and um also at times hatred and love,
all these different things bubbling underneath the surface of subconscious,
the subconscious, you know, our buddy Freud and the subconscious.
And that's when he decided to say to himself, well, okay,
if I've got all these hidden mental processes, then free
choice is either an illusion or at the very least
(07:38):
it's playing second fiddle to the unconscious. Wow, there you go.
So you know, of course he didn't have neuroscience to
back him up at that time, but he had an
inkling that this was the case. Although he got ladies
all wrong, I will say, yeah, unfortunate. So yeah, it
forces us to ask the question like how does an
idea even form? Because the way we feel it, the
way we experience it is eureka, right, that light bulb
(08:02):
going off above the head. Well, and that's why why
a lot of people say, yeah, we do have free will,
because I feel like I made that choice right. You
look look at some of these other ideas and it's
it maybe seems like it's a little more like a
like when you turn on the hot water, you know,
and the hot water comes out of the faucet, but
there's really a lot going on behind the wall and
under the house. There was this guy named Johann Frederick Herbart,
(08:25):
German philosopher and psychologists. He argued that ideas might best
be understand is a structured mathematical framework. So an idea
is opposed by an opposite idea. You know, it's kind
of like the to use a very simple analogy, Um,
like the devil and the angel on the shoulder. One
idea is opposed by an opposite is happening underneath us,
(08:45):
right that we're not aware of this. We're not conscious
of this. Yeah, so they're not maybe on your shoulder.
Maybe they're like hanging out in your armpits, you know,
as they should, and they're they're contrasting back and forth
at the devil and the angel, that guy, I think
we should do this, I think we should do that.
And eventually one of these guys is beaten down below
the threshold of awareness, and so the idea is sort
of discounted right when it runs contrary. But if there
(09:09):
is another idea that that has sort of a network
of support already some proof right of the pudding, then
it rises to the top and it becomes something that
we're aware of, which I think is really fascinating. Uh,
that you have these thoughts struggling at these deeper levels
and they kind of get kicked out sometimes. Yeah. Yeah.
(09:29):
He he coined the term appreciative mass to indicate that
an idea becomes conscious not in isolation, but only in
assimilation with a with a complex of other ideas already
in consciousness. And I was thinking about that. I was
thinking again that back to this idea that we have
a finite amount of mental energy, which we talked about
with decision fatigue, and it would make sense that you
would tamp down what seemed contrary to yourself because your
(09:52):
brain really has to sort of fold up in a sense.
Can you imagine being completely aware at every goal moment?
Like if if your brain flagged every stimuli that that
was floating past, I mean you would be you might
actually be mad, right yeah, because I mean, we'll we'll
discuss a little Morris. That's the podcast unrolls, and there's
(10:13):
a lot of stimuli because on one one level light
right now, we're just talking about the stuff going on
inside your brain. It's facing facing choices and weighing one
choice against the other. So it's all the hard mathematical programming,
if you will, beny the operating system that would be
actually perceive or are. But then there's also going to
be all this environmental stimuli coming at us and all
these influences that are taking hold of biological biological level.
(10:36):
So yeah, it's impossible for me to imagine like what
that would be like if you were actually conscious of
all these things, I mean to a certain extent. Uh,
you know, we've talked about people who are who engage
in meditation, Like a lot of that is trying to
become conscious of thought, becoming conscious of how the environment
is affecting you. But even that is only like if
if you know, if if we are experiencing this this
(10:58):
surface layer above an ocean and of cognitive wheels and
and and gears, and even even like deep practice meditation
is not going to take you all the way down
to the bottom. But with so paradox all about that
is that if you're going to get to that sort
of level of awareness, you have to tamp down so
much else, right, Like your your brain is still going
(11:19):
to have to batten down the hatches and say, Okay,
that's just a dog barking, if that's just this and
that in order to become very aware of what your own,
well your own not your own thoughts, but the important thoughts,
like on some level, you're still having a cherry pick
through the mind and figure out what's important and what's
(11:40):
not important. And so I think that's why I think
this is so interesting, because because Eagleman sort of pointed
to this too and um in the book and also
in his talk, that we're really the only animal that
has sort of like a computer, Like if you can
imagine a computer taking itself apart and taken the camera
(12:00):
and aimed at ourselves to figure out what in the
world is going on? You mean, you obviously don't see
this in the animal world, and if it were going on,
we wouldn't be privy to it, right, That sort of
part and parcel of why this is so fascinating and
mysterious that we are trying at the end of the
day to get to this question of who am I?
Who is this person in my head talking to me
and this consciousness and am I really making the decisions
(12:23):
in my life? And he talks again about our brains
again battening down the hatches with these predictive models. And
we've talked about this before that you know, this is
really important from an evolutionary standpoint that we would have
to come up with these predictive models of operating because
every time we came into a new situation, if every
(12:43):
single bit of information that was beamed toward us was
being judged, it would be really hard to react. Right,
So there are certain things that you have to model
blueprint for yourself. So you come into a room you
expected to, or you expect a window, you expect this,
so on and so forth. And she was actually talking
about how our visual cortex is the model generator for that.
(13:04):
For this, it receives data from the bretna and then
it sends its predictions based on past experience to the thalamus,
which runs a report on the differences of what came
in and what was expected. And this is really important
because our expectations certainly color our perceptions um and actually
(13:24):
what we think is going on. So then the thalamus
sends the report back to the visual cortex and it
updates its models. So it's constantly doing this and when
you think about it that way, it's really cool, right.
But on the other hand, what things are we missing,
what things are we tamping down that are going on
that that that don't fit into the model, That could
(13:45):
perhaps give us a little bit more information about choices
that we might or might not make if we had
more access to that information. Yeah, the I mean, the
whole visual realm of this alone is fascinating. Was reading
the articles to see You, sent by Susan Blackmark. There's
a whole section too, for she was going into the
way way sound is interpreted in the brain. But just
but there are like various theories about just how we see, uh,
(14:08):
not in terms of how the eyes work, but how
the brain makes sense of that data. Because our entire
field of vision is not a precision instrument. It's like
there's like a tiny area of precision site and the
rest is kind of vague. Side And Daniel Bennet, who
mentioned earlier, who's a philosopher, he's one of the old
fireman rushed in to extinguish the blazes or or at
least deal with the blazes that have risen up in
(14:30):
the way of all this New New York scientific data.
But he he makes a lot of arguments based on
the way our eyes work and I thought one of
the most interesting things that he pointed out was if
you go to a mirror and look, you look at
one eye and then you look at the other, and
if you try and see your eyes moving from one
eye to the next, you can't see it. The brain
(14:50):
doesn't read about this. I was like, this is such
a stonar moment. Did you do like I do when
you ran to the bathroom and tried it out for
about ten minutes? I didn't. I just had the moment
in my head. I was like, whoa, because you know
that your brain does that, right, but you you believe
that everything that your eyes are telling you or the truth. Yeah,
And so it creates this moment of wow, Okay again
(15:12):
here I am questioning reality around me, if if my
brain is has these blind spots, or if things just
aren't that important that it's not reporting things to me. Yeah, which,
of course that leads us right into change blindness, this
idea that um and then there are various studies along
this this line as well that that have shown that
you you make minute changes to say, picture between picture
(15:34):
A and picture BT, and people want will inevitably like,
they'll stare at it and will eventually get it and
they'll be like, oh, well, this is the difference. I
feel like there are numerous examples of this too, various.
Can you spot the difference between this picture and this
which I think Uffington Post or somebody does that. But yeah,
that the brain is just blind to it unless you
actually center your processing on it for for several seconds
in the case of some of these. Yeah, it's it's
(15:56):
very it's really fascinating. And right after this break, we're
going to talk about how all of this really serves EO.
This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors
of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe
curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at
(16:16):
curiosity dot com and explore the answers to life's questions.
And we're back. So ego, Yeah, the ego and the
illusion of consciousness. That's right, Implicit egotism is what we're
talking about again. Eagleman is talking about this in the
context of why we may or may not have free Well.
(16:38):
He talks about psychologist John Jones, who was looking to
see if he could detect a pattern in a literative
romantic pairings. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love this.
He examined fifteen thousand public records from two counties in
Georgia and Florida, and he saw that there was a
pattern that emerged that was greater than chance that cutles
with the same first letter of their first names. We're
(17:00):
getting hitched to one another. I don't know about that,
I know, I know, yeah, yeah, Well, there was some
there was some information that was like, you've got to
be kidding. It doesn't it doesn't feel like we could
be so easily manipulated or self manipulated on that level.
But there are a ton of studies that are coming out,
like if your name is Dennis, then you're more likely
(17:22):
to be a dentist or Denise. Um. There's these associations,
and I think it the studies said that, like it
implied that I would have been more likely to run
a hardware store or something than become a writer. So
r it was something about like both both possibilities were
equally kind of dreadful to me. But but then also
(17:46):
it's yeah, the whole you're more likely to marry somebody
with the same letter of Well, now this isn't happening, like,
you know, this isn't a great occurrence, but it's significant
enough that it raises eyebrows and Eagleman say, in this idea,
this implicit egotism is a result of us being so
enamored with ourselves that we can't help but find reflections
(18:07):
of ourselves and others, and it could be behind they
need to align ourselves with that familiar feeling on some
unconscious level. Oh yes, and then this is also where
Resputin comes in, the idea that if you tell somebody
that they share a birthday with Resputin, they're more likely
to be sympathetic towards the Resputin or or to behave
(18:28):
more gregarious themselves. Right, yeah, Yeah, there's a university study.
They took a bunch of college kids. They had this
same essay. The only thing they fussed with is they
in the biographical data on the essay. They matched it
to each person's birthday. So the person reading it and
then you know, half the class it was it just
had a random birthday that didn't match theirs. So of
(18:48):
course the birthdays that match, those students were more likely
to say that Resputin was a stand up citizen or
something along those lines. Are report that on a biographical level,
this guy was pretty great, not necessarily like that the
content of the essay itself. So if one were to
be deceptive when applying for a job, and I'm not
arguing that one should, because you can get a lot
(19:09):
and do a lot of trouble for things like this,
but if you were to lie and say that you
had the same birthday as the person hiring you or
is your boss, that would theoretically be beneficial. Yeah, but
I mean all this points back to the fact that
we can't help but find commonalities with one another. Our
brain is sort of hard wired to for these sort
(19:30):
of confirmation biases, which we've talked about before. Yeah, it's
I mean we've talked before in the in the past,
we form these stories where the center of the story,
where the center of this world view. No matter what
other characters are involved, be it God or just the
neighbor across the street, it all ultimately comes down to
what am I getting out of it? How does it
relate to me. It's a story, there's a main character.
I'm the main character. If there's another character in it,
(19:52):
I need to know what the relationship is. And Yeah,
it's funny because we can't. We try to inhabit someone
else's perspective, but we can't help coloring that with our
perspective all the time, and on the unconscious level. Right,
So if I'm like, oh, Wow, I really love that
blue and gray shirt that you're wear right now, that's
that's one of my favorite colors, and all of a sudden,
I feel like, man, I'm really connecting with Robert today. He's,
(20:14):
you know, maybe not even understanding it because you've got
my favorite colors on. So all these things are, these
these underpinnings are holding together these ideas that rise to
the top without us even knowing. So though it may
feel sort of ridiculous that these couples are getting married
on because they have the first initials they share that
in their first names, there may be something to it
(20:35):
in other instances, right, I mean, we we'd like to
believe that our romantic relationships are deeper than that. Yeah,
well I didn't. I didn't marry somebody just because she
had the same first letter on her first name as me.
I did it because her pupils were dilated. Oh yes, yes,
um nice, that's giving ahead with that. But we'll we'll
explain that. Well, and Egan then I also talked about
(20:56):
this too, and in an instance, what's called priming, which
sort of creates this atmosphere in which is more favorable
to get the results that you want. And he talked
about this, uh the Decater Book Festival and saying that
there was an experiment in which people were asked to
talk about their mothers. They were given either like a
warm beverage to drink or a cold beverage. And again,
(21:18):
you would not think that we could be so easily manipulated.
Those with warm beverages, they had warm memories of their mothers.
Those with cold beverages, Uh, it was it was it
was snow cold. Yeah, it was cold. Breezeville. Prime to
to remind everybody, We've we've discussed it in some previous
podcasts because it is one of the forms of memory
at work in the human mind. There's not just one
(21:40):
gear of memory, of there there are multiple gears. Memory
is a is a chorus of different cognitive elements, and
priming is one of those that There's been cases where
an individual's brain has been damaged and one form of memories,
say remembering facts or or something spatial or what have
you will be disabled, but the priming will still be active.
So that's what we're talking about here. Yeah, your brains
(22:02):
are tagging certain things that you've seen this over and
over again. Political ads we've talked about before, and Engleman
talks about a political ad from when Bush and we're
running against each other and the Bush campaign had a
really kind of funny commercial, well not funny depending on
your sense of humor there, But basically what goes across
(22:22):
the screen with flashes is rats. But what you find
out as is the word kind of zooms back around,
is that it's bureaucrats. It's actually being broadcast on the television,
but of course your mind is already thinking rats negative.
Eagleman also talked a little bit about face blindness, which,
of face blindness is one of those things it's like
(22:43):
trust any neuroscientists to bring it out in a conversation
at least once, because it's pretty fascinating when area of
the brain that deals with visual perception or facial features
ends up not working. You see faces that you don't
identify those with the people. There have been experiments that
show that even individuals with facial blindness there's some sort
of priming memory is there. They can they can see
it in like facial tips. Yeah, they see it activated, right,
(23:03):
So they can't necessarily recognize the person, but they see
activity going on where the brain is saying, okay, there's
something for something there. This ties in with the recent
episode we did about false memories, where you can have
a memory that is false. I think it is true,
but somewhere in the cognitive depths, your brain knows it's
not true. So this is an example of at the
surface level, we don't know whose face that is, but
(23:26):
deep down inside us the brain knows. And all this
I keep coming back to a quote that I'm taking
out of context from the Mahaparata where Christians Christians says
there is another intelligence beyond the mind, where he's not
talking about the illusion of free will exactly, but I
keep coming back to that, the idea that that our mind,
as we experience it, is this thin layer, and beyond
(23:46):
that there's this whole other system, this sort of shadow
mind that's running the show. Well, it's funny you say
that because in the book Incognato, Eagleman talks about Samuel
Taylor College's poem Kubla con and Kubla insanity to Kubla
on a stately pleasure dome decree, that's the one. Yes,
I know that's still that's that's nice. Um. But he
(24:06):
talks about as an example of us losing the center
of ourselves and who is really the person who is
creating or making decisions, because he says, who exactly wrote
the poem? And he says, and he brings us up
because obviously we know that College did. But he says,
since College wrote it primarily under the influence of opium,
which allowed College to access his subconscious it wasn't the
(24:29):
college that was aware. That was the sober eye Collorridge.
So who wrote it? College or the opium? I'd say
a little both. Alright, fair enough, author, I'll go with that.
Let's talk about dilating pupils. Yes, this is where we're
really getting into the biological roots of things. The rat
like hind brain backing up the brain that we experienced.
(24:50):
There's this one study that Equalman mentions where people were
nine particularly we're given, uh, we're given all these different
photos of women and judge them on attractiveness, and the
women was dilated. Pupils were the ones that they overwhelmingly liked.
Like half of the photos contained women with dilated pupils.
And when we say dilated pupil, say, we're not huge,
and we're talking about a couple of millimeters, right, It's
(25:11):
not something that you would be like, ah, dilated pupils
that one so not like full on. I just came
from the optometrist office and concert just took off my
granny and glasses from my dilated eyes. So his point
was that these men were scanning these faces within seconds
and making these choices, and on some level they were
detecting what that she was really into the situation right
(25:36):
that she was, she was rare to go. This is
apparently a sign of sexual readiness, this dilated eyes. So
tuck that in the back of your your brains, folks. Um. Now,
we're not advocating, ladies that you dilate your eyes before
a big date, because disaster will want sue when you
try and try. Yeah yeah, Belladonna opium. Dilated eye is
(26:00):
never any classes. It's not really necessary. But that's just
one aspect of why we do the things we do,
or we make the choices that we do. And Eagleman
is talking about this again from an evolutionary perspective or
biological perspective. We've seen this over and over again. Oh,
there was the study we have with the strippers, yeah,
laptop dances. Yeah, from the was this the University of Nevada,
(26:21):
I believe, and they found that the strippers who are
ovulating received higher tips than those who are not, which
which meant that on on a on a very basic
biological level, and the men liked the women who were
better potential biological mates at any given moment. And we're
talking about like an average of sixty eight dollars and
tips right as opposed to non ovulating women whose averages
(26:42):
around like thirty five bucks. So there's quite a difference.
So both of these really point of the idea that,
especially when it comes to choices regarding mating and survival
and these very primal biological things, there's somebody else calling
the shots. I mean, it's kind of a an overstatement
of the obvious to a certain extent, because they're shortage
of jokes about that. You know about like men don't
(27:02):
think with their brain, they think with their well and
they they talked. They also talk about in the book
Um David Ggelman talks about how women will select a
partner when they are ovulating based on how much facial
hair and how broad their shoulders are, because they want
somebody who's husky and protective and strong. Yeah, yeah, they
(27:22):
want the incredible hulk. Well when when is it? Then
they want somebody who is kind and delicate when they're
not ovulating. There they look for people who have softer features,
and having a broadcast just doesn't matter as much. The
idea is that they're looking for someone who can nurture,
learn more his words, not mine, Because when I read
stuff like this sometimes I have to raise my eyebrow
in a big question mark because sometimes I think this
(27:44):
is overstated to a certain degree. Yeah, yeah, none of
these are the hard and fast rule by which to live.
But but again it chose that that again their stuff
going on at a biological level, that if it's not
robbing us of our free will completely, it's at least
limiting the number of options. It's steering us towards certain choices,
if not choosing them outright. For the surface, and it
(28:07):
begs the question, so does free will really exist? And
Eagleman says the argument for these the existence of free
will is essentially that it's a direct subjective experience. And
I talked about this earlier. I feel like I just
made a choice to scratch my arms, so therefore I
feel like I made a choice the objective forward being feel.
But Eagleman brings up a really interesting study by I
(28:28):
believe he's a neuroscientist Labette, who had a finger raising experiment.
And in the nineteen sixties, Benjamin Labette put electrodes on
his test subject's head and asked them to lift their
finger whenever they got the urged to do so, okay,
and it seems pretty straightforward, right. They were given a
timer and asked to note the exact movement that they
felt the urge. People reported the urge about a quarter
(28:51):
of a second before they actually move their fingers. The
curious part is that the E E G read out
from the electrodes reported the activity in their brain rose
out one full second before they actually felt the urge
to move. So why is this important? I mean because
it's basically saying that there are parts of the brain
that are making decisions well before you become conscious of it. Wow.
(29:12):
So it's like John Stewart just made a funny joke.
Know that joke was written six hours ago by like
four dudes, and it was already determined funny and served
up right, approved by a committee, stamped, typed up, signed,
handed over, and delivered yeah yeah, which all flies in
the face of the argument that, well, I feel like
I just made a choice to scratch my arm. Yeah,
(29:34):
well you were kind of served up the information to
do it. You know, this other, this other part of
your brain that's working under the covers, is not necessarily
giving a direct subjective experience, and it raises all sorts
of interesting questions about then, then what do we do
with this information? How does it change the world we
live in? I was checking out the author or Scott
Baker's blog, re Pound Brain. He was talking about going
to see a talk by Daniel Dennett, who mentioned earlier
(29:58):
the Philosopher, and then was discussing two recent studies by UM.
It's a cooperation between the University of Minnesota and the
University of British Columbia, and they found that college students,
when exposed to arguments that were not completely in charge
of our choices, that free will is either an illusion
or not near as big a factor in our choices
(30:20):
as we think it is they were more likely to
cheat first on a mathematics test, then on a on
another form of tests. But that that raises an interesting question.
If we were to live in a world where everyone
is thinking, well, we're not really in charge, there's no
such thing as free will, I'm just privy to all
these other forces beneath the surface of things. Then am
I more likely to make bad choices just because I
(30:41):
don't feel like they're my choices? Well, and that's what
Jennet and others argue, right, Like, you can't blame your
brain or or your lack of awareness for bad choices. Yeah,
you can't be on trial for murder and say my
brain made me do it. To a certain extent, you can,
but but but not not across the board. We can't
blame our brains because is we still are our brains,
(31:01):
even if there's a lot more going on on underneath,
even if we're at the periphery. Really, Yeah, Eagleman was
talking about this, and he was he brought up actually
Turetts and parasomnias as an example of what he calls automatism,
And he's saying that someone with Touretts could be said
to have no free will since the neural circuit trees
making decisions for him or her right and decisions that
(31:23):
they're consciously aware of, they can't do anything to stop it.
And of course when you've got a parasomnia though you're
not quite aware. This is for people who didn't hear
the parasomnia episode, this is crazy sleep. This is sleep
eating sleep. Um. Some people who have r b D
when actually act out their dreams, which you can be
quite frightening. Sleep sleep. Karate is pretty much from yeah,
(31:43):
that's that's the shorthand for that, um, But it's really
sort of redefining again what free will is. And what
he says is that we should come up with something
called the principle of sufficient automatism. So he says, in
legal parlance, automatism is is basically someone doing something and
the root cause for it is a biological process for
which the person has little or no control over. His
(32:05):
example would be, for instance, like a person isn't culpable
for an accident if they had a seizure right and
they caused a traffic accident. Interesting story, I know somebody
who was in a traffic accident, uh, and it was
caused by an individual who had a seizure, and the
insurance company involved claimed act of God active God. It's
(32:27):
got to be like a state by state thing in
the US, because, Yeah, I wonder if they all call it,
call it active God or or in this case, that's
supposed to be called automatism. M hmm, there you go.
We'll see. That's a whole another podcast for psycholinguism, right
and how we described meaning to language? So Egoman though
he takes this example and he says, Okay, the person
(32:48):
didn't have a choice in the matter, right, the perion
that had the seizure, they didn't want to have a
seizure and they didn't want to cause an accident. So
he wonders if this biological process quote describe most or
some would argue all of what's going on in our
rains given the steering power of our genetics, childhood experiences,
environmental talks and hormones, neurotransmitters, and neurocircuitry, enough of our
(33:08):
decisions are beyond our explicit control that we arguably are
not the ones in charge. In other words, free will
may exist, but if it does, it has a very
little room in which to operate. So he says we
should reframe it as this principle of sufficient automatism. Basically,
the principle arises naturally from the understanding that free will,
if it is, if it does exist, is only a
(33:31):
small factor writing on top of enormous automated machinery, so
small that we may be able to think about bad
decisions being made in the same way that we think
about any other physical process, like diabetes or lung disease.
I don't know, is he is he letting us off
too easily? You think? I don't think. I mean he
he out you know, in his Bookie outright came out
(33:51):
and said, I'm not making the argument, and I don't
think it. There's a risk that we're going to unlock
the doors in the prisons and say, oh, you guys
go free. There's no sich thing as free will, so
carry on. No, I agree, but I think he's still
posing that question do we have free will? And he's
sort of saying, no, we don't, but possibly we could
act on it within seconds. Well, this is me, not
(34:13):
him freere Perhaps all zen meditation experts right, and we
could monitor every thought, because when we get down to it,
the experience is that we have free will unless we
really work on ourselves to change the way we experienced
the world. It's this weird paradox in the in the
way we are the experience, you know, we are this,
(34:34):
uh like like, how do you change that? How how
do we do that? Could you become the brain without
this subsurface of perceived free will? I don't know, I
don't know. I think that's why neuroscience is so fascinating,
and I think that's that's why he leaves the door open,
even though he says I pretty much side with other
neuroscientists and saying that we don't necessarily have the free will,
(34:54):
or at least it's not what we think it is.
It's it's definitely a different creature than what we've been discussing.
But he says that he feels like neuroscience is too
young and in a field right now to really definitively
answer this question. And it does make me think back
to the Blue Brain project, which we've talked about. This
(35:14):
building the computer or the digital model of the brain,
right trying to re engineer like our billion neurons and
see this detail at a cellular level and see if
it can tell us and the answer to these questions
about who we are. If this consciousness this I does
it really exist in this brain floating around? Yeah, As
we've mentioned before, I think it's it's like I'm one extreme.
You can look at such revelations as um terrifying, and
(35:37):
on the other side you can look at it as enlightenment.
And I think ultimately it's going to be ideally somewhere
in between where to see the enlightening aspects of it
but also see the sobering aspects of it as well.
So on one level you can say, well, I'm not
really completely in charge of all my choices and look
at that in so far as it keeps you from
beating yourself up too much, but also don't cling to
it so much that you just run around doing whatever
(35:58):
the heck entered your mind and didn't bang every impulse. Personally,
I think that it's it's actually pretty liberating because I
think that it gives us another way to think about
our actions and perhaps even sort of back up a
little bit and rethink them in a way that we
make better choices, if at all possible. If that little
middle second window does exist where we can make decisions
that I the consciousness that we that are aware. Then hey, okay,
(36:22):
even even better to know that that exists and take
hold of it. Yeah, well, it's kind of like to
come back to John Stewart. When John Stewart reads a joke,
he knows that that this was written hours ago by
a team of riders. We still have to add to
deliver it. So there you go. Maybe there's a model there.
I think there's a unifying theory of mine right there,
and have to do with John Stewart. Yeah, yeah, I'm
gonna I'm gonna patent that. Speaking of free will, some
(36:43):
of our listeners had the free will to send us
in some emails. Maybe maybe there were suggestions in this
creepy voice. But if you got there, you got one.
Oh yeah, I've got one. Well normally I read them,
but I know you had one that wasn't need to
do to your heart. Yeah. This is from Spencer and
he was talking about the podcast that we recently did
(37:06):
about cycolinguistics and our treatment of animals and eating animals.
Believe it was called Don't Eat the Pandada. And he writes, um,
and I'll skip around this a little bit because it's longer.
Was very thoughtful email, says I myself am a metatarian
who has always struggled with the idea of not having
to participate or even think about the process by which
(37:28):
the animal went from breathing and living to sitting on
my plate, all seasoned and delicious for me personally, The
internal struggle began when I was invited on a hunt
with my cousin when I was sixteen. Um. I agreed
enthusiastically and was taken to a farmer's field. Will re
drove most of the way and we just uh for
(37:48):
this a little bit. We spotted a group of deer
who must have been suitable for shooting us. My cousin
directed me to take any because like farmers field. Now,
I'm sorry, yeah, Manby's coming into this, dude. My cousin
directing me and take aim Adam matured dough, which I did.
Upon firing the shot and seeing that my actions had
directly resulted in the struggle an imminent death of a
(38:09):
beautiful animal, immediately started crying. Since that day, I've always
had an issue with the death of other animals for
our enjoyment, until that first pie of a juicy burger
or other savory meat concoction that I mysteriously and suddenly
forget I ever took issue with how I got how
it got to my mouth. And then he talks about
his wife who was in the four h Beef Club
for many years, and how when you're in the club,
(38:32):
you basically raise a calf and you get to show
it off and it's like this great experience and you've
bonded with this animal. And he said that of course,
when the young for hrs are showing their calves at
the auction, many inevitably start crying as their animals are
lead away for slaughter, whereupon everyone takes a few minutes
to calm down and get ready for delicious beefs upper
after the event. Thanks so much for the podcast. It
(38:52):
always as promise, has blewn my mind, So I thought
that was just really interesting too. Again, we're talking about
the things that we do and the things that we
think in how sometimes they're not quite squared together. So
thank you very much Fance for for sending that to us.
If you have any thoughts you'd like to share with us.
You've got some some cool study you ran across, some
(39:13):
idea that you think would make for a cool episode
of this podcast, you should share it with us and
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and find us on there as below the Mind, and
we're also on Twitter as below the Mind, and we
update those regularly with all sorts of cool stuff, and
you can always send us an email at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to
(39:36):
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