In an Unspoken Voice

by Peter A Levine

  In summary, Libet found that the “conscious” decision to perform a simple action (such as pushing a button) preceded the action. This conscious decision, however, occurred only after the “premotor” area in the brain first fired with a burst of electrical activity. In other words, people decide to act only after their brain unconsciously prepares them to do so.

  Daniel Wegner, at Harvard University, recently advanced and refined this proposition.148 In one of his studies, an illusion was created by a series of mirrors. Subjects, thinking that they were looking at their own arms, were actually seeing (in the mirror) the movements of an experimenter’s arm. When the experimenter’s arms moved (according to the instructions of another researcher), the subjects reported that they had made and therefore willed the movements (when, in fact, they had not even moved their arms)!

  Wilhelm Wundt (considered one of the founders of experimental psychology) expands on our attachment to the notion of free will: “Nothing seems to us to belong so closely to our personality, to be so completely our property as our will.” Yet, the results of Libet and Wegner, taken together, seriously challenge (if not put to rest) our common-sense understanding of consciousness and our love affair with free will. The annihilation of free will, suggested in Wegner’s book,149 goes against what we believe is the very core of our existence as autonomous human beings. It challenges such cherished beliefs as the capacity for planning, foresight and responsible action. Who or what are we without the power of free will? This dispute of free will, which has been revered in Western thought for three thousand years, is not just another philosopher’s opinion, but rather stems from a variety of dispassionate laboratory research. Einstein, in paraphrasing the philosopher Schopenhauer, restated the conundrum of free will with his characteristic understated wisdom: “A human can very well do what he wants but cannot will what he wants.”

  William James, a century ago, had argued that a person’s passing states of consciousness create a false sense that an ‘I’ or ego runs the show. Neuroscientist Wegner took this further, adding that the average people’s belief that they even have a self that consciously controls their actions is simply an illusion. Is this a farewell to Freud’s ego and Descartes’ cogito ergo sum? Although this new credo, “I think; therefore I am,” was an important start in freeing people from the rigidity of church doctrine, it’s in great need of revision.150 Today’s credo should be more like, “I prepare to move, I act, I sense, I feel, I perceive, I reflect, I think and therefore I am.” So what might actually be going on in consciousness? And can the idea of free will be somehow reformulated?

  Together, the studies of James, Libet and Wegner suggest that before a “voluntary” movement is made, there is an unconscious premovement. Because we are generally not conscious of this premovement impulse (analogous to our withdrawing of our hand from a hot object before we feel the pain), we falsely believe that we (our egos) are directly willing the movement. So where does movement originate from?

  Let us consider the following experiment provided by a capricious Mother Nature that will allow us to explore the blurred border between conscious and unconscious stimulus and response. It is now known that there are multiple visual (and other sensory) systems that register nerve impulses in areas of the brain that are primarily nonconscious. These brain stem areas are in addition to the conscious one in the back (occipital region) of our cerebral cortex—known dispassionately as area 17. There is a revealing condition called blindsight.151 This strange affliction is due to damage to a part of the visual cortex on one side of the brain. This causes a blind region on the opposite side of the visual field. If an object is presented in this part of the visual field, patients are unaware of seeing anything at all. Lights can be flashed, objects moved or even writing displayed, and these patients will insist, unequivocally, that they see absolutely nothing. Yet detailed experiments show that while denying all visual experience, they can nevertheless point to the location of a flashed light, or discriminate between upward and downward movement, between vertical or horizontal stripes and between various different objects. Oliver Sacks, from his many moving and wise vignettes about the tragic, yet compelling, consequences of neurological disorders, describes the case of Virgil.152 Virgil’s entire visual cortex was knocked out by oxygen deprivation, rendering him completely blind, yet Sacks describes Virgil’s wife’s inexplicable observations: “Virgil had told her that he was completely blind, yet she observed that he would reach for objects, avoid obstacles and behave as though he were seeing.” Such is the enigma of this type of “implicit” information processing.

  The explanation that is generally accepted for this phenomenon is that destruction of the visual cortex still leaves several other (primitive, subcortical) visual pathways intact. Sensory information to these somehow registers basic information that normally has the function of directing eye movements to garner more data. These data, however, also render a flimsy sketch of which we are largely unconscious. It is this unconscious information that evokes the readiness for movement (i.e., premovement). It is also this primitive circuitry that makes possible the reasonably accurate “guesses” that are observed in people with blindsight disorder. Hence, we are once again appreciative of the prompting to respond to events before we become overtly aware of them. Consider your response to the fleeting shadow, the subtle gesture of another person or a distant sound. Each of these events can evoke in us survival-bound responses without our ever being aware that something in our environment has triggered them. Notably, when we have been traumatized, we are particularly sensitized to (and hyperaroused by) these fleeting stimuli. Our senses of seeing, hearing and smell provide countless stimuli that cause us to overreact, even though we may be unaware of the presence of those subliminal stimuli and our premotor responses to them. As a result we may, and often do, attribute our actions to irrelevant or manufactured causes. This attribution of causation is like the subjects in Wegner’s experiments who falsely believed that they had willed the movement of the experimenter’s arms.

  It is specifically because we are unaware of our environmentally triggered premovement that we falsely believe we are consciously initiating and constructing the movement. Furthermore, when the (unacknowledged) premovement drive is strong, we may feel compelled to fully enact the entire movement sequence. Two confusions of causality occur for traumatized individuals. The first one is the unawareness of the premovement trigger. The second is the extent of the response. Imagine the consternation of an individual trapped in the full-blown, ferocious reenactment of a survival-bound response. Take for instance the Vietnam vet who wakes up to find himself strangling his terrified wife, unaware that it was the backfiring of a distant car, or even the light footsteps of their young child in the hallway, that provoked his freakish behavior and grossly exaggerated reaction. However, years earlier, when sleeping in a bamboo thicket, under fire from the Vietcong, his immediate kill-response was an essential, life-preserving action. It may only take a very mild stimulus to abruptly trigger the tightly coiled spring (the kill-or-be-killed survival reaction) into an intense, out-of-control, emotional eruption.

  I know of only one way to break compulsive cycles like this, and in the process expand consciousness toward greater freedom. It is to become aware of the premovement before it graduates into a full-blown movement sequence. It is to extinguish the spark before it ignites the tinder, as emphasized by Buddhist teachings.

  Many times in the past, I walked with my dog in the Colorado Mountains.

  Pouncer, a dingo mix, was imbued with a strong instinctual urge to chase deer and other swift creatures of the upland forests. Try as I might, it was not possible to neutralize this “habit” by reprimanding him. If I tried to call him back or foolishly admonished his behavior when he returned, breathless and panting from the chase, it was of no avail. However, if when we encountered deer up ahead, at the very moment his posture changed (just hinting at his readiness to leap forward), I would firmly but gently say, “N
o, Pouncer. Heel.” He would then calmly continue on our walk, striding enthusiastically by my side. Then there is the following story of a brash young samurai sword fighter and a venerated Zen master.

  Two Horns of the Dilemma

  The vital balancing act between expression and restraint requires that when we experience a strong emotional feeling, we need not necessarily act upon it, as this teaching story demonstrates.

  A young, brash samurai swordsman confronted a venerated Zen master with the following demand: “I want you to tell me the truth about the existence of heaven and hell.”

  The master replied gently and with delicate curiosity, “How is it that such an ugly and untalented man as you can become a samurai?”

  Immediately, the wrathful young samurai pulled out his sword and raised it above his head, ready to strike the old man and cut him in half. Without fear, and in complete calm, the Zen master gazed upward and spoke softly: “This is hell.” The samurai paused, sword held above his head. His arms fell like leaves to his side, while his face softened from its angry glare. He quietly reflected. Placing his sword back into its sheath, he bowed to the teacher in reverence. “And this,” the master replied again with equal calm, “is heaven.”

  Here the samurai, his sword held high at the peak of feeling full of rage (and at the moment before executing the prepared-for action), learned to hold back and restrain his rage instead of mindlessly expressing it. In refraining (with the master’s quick guidance) from making his habitual emotional expression of attack, he transformed his “hell” of rage to a “heaven” of peace.

  One could also speculate on what unconscious thoughts (and images) were stirred when the master provoked the swordsman’s ire. Perhaps the samurai was startled and at first even agreed with the characterization that he was ugly and untalented. This strong reaction to this insult (we might hypothesize) derived from his parents, teachers and others who humiliated him as a child. Perhaps he had a mental picture of being shamed in front of his school classmates. And then the other micro-fleeting “counter thought”—that no one would dare to call him that again and make him feel small and worthless. This thought and associated (internal) picture, coupled with a momentary physical sensation of startle, triggered the rage that led him down the compulsive, driven road to perdition. That was, at least, until his “Zen therapist,” precisely at the peak of rage, kept him from habitually expressing this “protective” emotion (really a defense against his feelings of smallness and helplessness) and forced him to the ownership of his real power and peaceful surrender.

  In the examples of Pouncer and the Zen master, choice occurred at the critical moment before executing attack. With the Zen master’s critical intervention, the samurai held back and felt the preparation to strike with his sword. In this highly charged state he paused and was able to restrain and transmute his violent rage into intense energy and a state of clarity, gratefulness, presence and grace. It is the ability to hold back, restrain and contain a powerful emotion that allows a person to creatively channel that energy. Containment (a somatic rooting of Freud’s “sublimation”) buys us time and, with self-awareness, enables us to separate out what we are imagining and thinking from our physical sensations. And this fraction of a second of restraint, as we just saw, is the difference between heaven and hell. When we can maintain this “creative neutrality,” we begin to dissolve the emotional compulsion to react as though our life depends on responses that are largely inappropriate. The uncoupling of sensation from image and thought is what diffuses the highly charged emotions and allows them to transform fluidly into sensation-based gradations of feelings. This is not at all the same as suppressing or repressing them. For all of us, and particularly for the traumatized individual, the capacity to transform the “negative” emotions of fear and rage is the difference between heaven and hell.

  The power and tenacity of emotional compulsions (the acting out of rage, fear, shame and sorrow) are not to be underestimated. Fortunately, there are practical antidotes to this cascade of misery. With body awareness, it is possible to “deconstruct” these emotional fixations. As an aside, let’s take a peak at the inner working of our brains and minds as we free ourselves from the tyranny of driven emotions such as fear and rage. The thin sliver of brain tissue that makes us conscious is found in the prefrontal cortex, the forward part of our frontal lobes. In particular there are two loci. The one toward the side is called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This part makes conscious our relationship to the outside world. The second part, located toward the middle, is called the medial prefrontal cortex. This is the only part of the cerebral cortex that apparently can modify the response of the limbic or emotional brain—particularly the amygdala, which is responsible for intense survival emotions. The medial prefrontal cortex (particularly the insular cingulate cortex) receives direct input from muscles, joints and visceral organs and registers them into consciousness.153 Through awareness of these interoceptive sensations (i.e., through the process of tracking bodily sensations), we are able to access and modify our emotional responses and attain our core sense of self.

  A first step in this ongoing process is refusing to be seduced into (the content of) our negative thoughts or swept away by the potent or galvanized drive of an emotion, and instead returning to the underlying physical sensations. At first this can seem unsettling, even frightening. This is mostly because it is unfamiliar—we have become accustomed to the (secondary) habitual emotions of distress and to our (negative) repetitive thoughts. We have also become used to searching for the source of our discomfort outside of ourselves. We simply are unfamiliar with experiencing something as it is, without the encumbrance of analysis and judgment. As the sensation-thought-emotion complex is uncoupled, experiencing moves forward toward subtler, freer contours of feeling. Eugene Gendlin, the originator of the term felt sense,154 conveys this with simplicity when he says, “Nothing that feels bad is ever the last step.” This experiential process involves the capacity to hold the emotion in abeyance, without allowing it to execute in its habitual way. This holding back is not an act of suppression but is rather one of forming a bigger container, a larger experiential vessel, to hold and differentiate the sensations and feelings. “Going into” the emotional expression is frequently a way of trying to “release” the tension we are feeling, while avoiding deeper feelings. It is akin to a whistling teakettle letting off steam but really making no lasting change in its capacity to hold charge (as steam). If, on the other hand, one imagines a strong rubber balloon or bladder being filled with steam, you would see the size of the bladder expanding to contain this increasing “charge.” With containment, emotion shifts into a different sensation-based “contour” with softer feelings that morph into deepening, sensate awareness of “OK-ness.” This is the essence of emotional self-regulation, self-acceptance, goodness and change.

  Let’s take the example of anger. The feeling of anger is derived from the (postural) attitude of wanting to strike out and hit. However, if one begins to attack—hitting, kicking, tearing, biting—the feeling of anger then shifts rapidly to that of hitting, kicking, and so on. In other words, and contrary to common belief, as you execute the preparation for action, the underlying feelings are diminished if not lost.155 When we cry, for example, our sadness often “magically disappears.” However, this may be more like the teakettle just letting off steam, without changing the underlying sadness. Some of the fundamental “expressive” therapies may fall into the trap of trying to drain the emotional swamp through undue emphasis on habitual venting. Yet, what may be visible when the very deepest wells of sadness are touched is a single, trickling tear. As for anger, recall a time when you shook your fist in anger at another person or were the recipient of such behavior. Was this a time when you really needed to defend yourself, or was it rather a way to let off steam and to bully the other person? This kind of intimidation is commonly seen in domestic violence. What was the effect of your action on their behaviors and theirs
on yours? In any case, when we allow ourselves to be swept away into uncontained emotional expression, we may actually split off from what we are feeling. We are held hostage by these habitual emotions, unaware that they can only be transformed if we consciously restrain and resist being triggered into the expressive phase. The samurai lost his false self and found salvation by such a momentary interruption.

  Containment promotes choice between a number of possible responses where previously there were only those of fear, rage, defensiveness and helplessness. In primitive life we needed to rapidly assess whether an individual we met in the forest was friend or foe, safe or dangerous. Would he attack? Should we attack first to protect ourselves, or would it be better to move quietly away? However, in modern times we are more apt to need our social skills to differentiate: do we like this person or dislike them, and what do they mean to us? Rather than coming to fisticuffs, we might first try to socially engage by conversing with the person; we might try to “disarm” him with an authentic smile. We are not acting out of emotion but rather are guided by sensate feelings—like or dislike? And most importantly we need to do this before we actually act—before we strike out with angry words. This way we enhance the capacity to prioritize possible motoric (and moment-to-moment) actions; we are able to choose which would be the most appropriate action.156