The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

by Shankar Vedantam

  Suicide bombers belong to a very exclusive club, and the exclusivity of this club is one of its central appeals. The first step into the tunnel—the funnel that pulls ordinary people into the suicide bomber’s world—is the ego-stroking notion that access to the tunnel is limited, that it is a reward for the most dedicated people, for those with rare talent. To enter the tunnel is to set yourself off from your peers, to be recognized as special.

  ——

  Larry Layton did not start out wanting to be a suicide terrorist. If you had known him as he was growing up, you would have said he had precisely the opposite temperament of a suicide bomber. (Layton declined to be interviewed for this book, saying he did not wish to revisit painful memories. Details of his story were pieced together through interviews with his family and former members of Peoples Temple, records and documents seized by the FBI from Jonestown, accounts penned by survivors, court testimony, and a remarkable psychiatric evaluation of Layton that was conducted at the Guyana prison.)

  Larry was the third child of Lisa Layton and Laurence Layton, a scientist for the federal government. Larry was deeply interested in nonviolence. He was raised a Quaker and internalized Quaker approaches to personal and political conflicts. When he was eleven, he refused to hit back as a bully tormented him—he simply stood with his arms extended and his fists clenched as the bully charged him again and again.

  Larry “was perceived rather as a wimp,” his brother Thomas would later remember in an account penned by multiple members of the Layton family and published as a book titled In My Father’s House. He added, “Larry was always open, trusting, and obedient. Larry was the most Quakerly member of our family. His opinions and actions were based on moral and ethical principles. Perhaps being an underdog, he developed a sympathy for the downtrodden of the world.”

  Though he was not outgoing, Layton was interested in politics and became president of the Berkeley High School Young Democrats after the family moved to California from the Washington area. Layton wrote most of the articles for his high school student newspaper, The Liberal. He was passionate about the civil rights movement, and saw himself running for public office one day. “I was very shy around girls and had only one girlfriend in high school, she being a political nut like myself,” he later observed.

  The assassination of President John F. Kennedy prompted Layton to become disillusioned about the ability of politics to change the world. At the University of California, he started experimenting with drugs. Layton felt out of step with his peers, and his college years caused him to feel “further separated from straight society with its race for money, its power, and its lack of brotherhood.”

  In 1967, he married Carolyn Moore, a young woman who shared his sense of idealism. When he was called up by the draft to go to Vietnam, Layton declared himself a conscientious objector who opposed violence in principle. The draft board turned him down and told him to get ready for active duty. But Layton meant what he said about opposing violence in principle. In 1968, Larry and Carolyn Layton moved to Ukiah, California. They were, quite simply, “in search of utopia.”

  They did not know that an Indianapolis Bible-thumper had moved to nearby Redwood Valley in 1965. The Reverend Jim Jones picked the spot because he’d read a magazine article that said it would be among the nation’s safest places in the event of nuclear war, which Jones believed was imminent. Shortly after Larry and Carolyn Layton moved to Ukiah, Jones sent missionaries to distribute cakes to new teachers in the area; Carolyn Layton was a schoolteacher. The couple learned that Peoples Temple was a multiracial group opposed to the Vietnam War and fervently committed to the civil rights movement. It was just the thing the idealistic couple was looking for. When the Laytons visited Jones’s church, the preacher took Larry Layton aside and told him “intimate things about my life,” he later recalled in court testimony. Jones said his psychic powers had revealed that Carolyn Layton had been out picking berries the previous day. The preacher also told Layton he had been suffering from a serious illness, but that contact with Jones had cured him. The charismatic preacher lavished attention and praise on the young man. He made it clear that if Layton joined Peoples Temple, he would be doing something special for humanity. Jones stroked Layton’s ego, and told the young idealist that the cause needed his help. Layton, instantly under the spell of the leader he had long been seeking, believed it all.

  The third time Rebecca Moore and Fielding McGehee visited Larry Layton in the Guyana prison, Layton seemed cheerful as he walked across the prison yard, but “nervous and agitated” once he arrived at the mesh partition. Layton told his visitors that “he couldn’t wait to get away from this shit” and asked them to deposit some money in his prison account for essential supplies. He talked a little about the future.

  Rebecca Moore listened politely as Larry Layton talked about his dreams of a life beyond prison. The would-be suicide bomber longed to be outdoors in a forest, by a stream, or on the beach. Moore was not sure her former brother-in-law could really function in the outside world. She did not have fears he was violent—if anything, she worried he was too much of a pushover. “He is definitely strange, although very sweet,” she wrote in a letter to her parents after the meeting. “The police commissioner called him a crank.”

  Moore and McGehee still did not have their fundamental questions answered. Larry Layton had had so much to live for when he’d decided to go out and kill himself. Among other things, his beautiful wife had been five months pregnant. Why had he signed up to die?

  From the beginning, Jim Jones railed against disloyalty. Shadowy groups were always supposedly plotting to undermine Peoples Temple because of its high ideals, and Jones was ever vigilant for traitors. The preacher’s fulminations made sense to his rainbow congregation. Political idealists Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were being assassinated. The FBI was bugging the phones of the president’s political enemies. Police had infiltrated counterculture groups and killed antiwar protestors.

  But Jones’s message also resonated with the individual experiences of his congregants. Larry and Carolyn Layton had always felt out of step with society, and it did not take much to convince them that mainstream society was now trying to undermine their newfound friends. Larry Layton’s sister Debbie was struggling with the recent discovery that her mother was Jewish. She had become hypersensitive to anti-Semitism, and it came as a relief to join the egalitarian world of Peoples Temple. Vern Gosney, another member, had not been able to rent an apartment because his girlfriend was black. Wherever the interracial couple went, they were turned down. Gosney finally snagged an apartment by taking his sister along. Shortly afterward, Gosney’s girlfriend died while giving birth—a doctor miscalculated the amount of anesthesia she was given. In a lawsuit that followed, the doctor said the patient’s dark skin had made it difficult to see she was being starved of oxygen—had she been white, it would have been obvious she was turning purple. The jury agreed with the doctor. Stories like this enraged Gosney and the other members of Peoples Temple. Larry, Carolyn, and Debbie Layton came to accept that if they were not part of the solution, they were part of the problem. Larry Layton began working multiple jobs and turning over much of his salary to Peoples Temple.

  “Being in Peoples Temple wasn’t always pleasant, but one had the feeling he was really doing something to advance society,” Layton would later write. “And there was a strong feeling of community—people of all races who really cared about each other.”

  For the first time in his life, Layton found himself surrounded by a small group of like-minded people—every member of Peoples Temple shared and validated his worldview. Layton had entered a tunnel—except it did not feel that way. It felt like he was among friends.

  The same kind of tunnel vision that afflicted the members of Peoples Temple afflicts many other groups. After Layton’s sister Debbie defected from Peoples Temple, for example, she found a new life in corporate America. As she developed the insanely busy habits of those
on fast-track careers to financial success, she reflected that her business colleagues had a lot in common with the young friends she’d met when she first joined Peoples Temple. “Whether it is to treat the poor or to get a million dollars when you go public, the end goal is the same,” she said in an interview. “All of your pain will be rewarded with something. That is why people become so myopic.”

  Like many groups that produce suicide bombers today, Peoples Temple provided humanitarian services for people that the rest of society had abandoned. Minus the endemic racism and disparities in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Peoples Temple would never have drawn so many recruits. Corruption, poverty, and hopelessness similarly fuel the supply of young idealists to terrorist groups today. Desperation makes small groups, cliques, and cults very attractive to people who have big dreams—but little hope of achieving them.

  Tommy Washington was only seven or eight years old when family members drew him into Jones’s fold. It was a wonderful community for a young black boy. Jones gave out nice gifts at Christmas, and Washington felt loved and accepted. The group’s growing numbers gave Jones political clout, and he used his connections to help his flock. Jones encouraged Larry Layton to reapply to the Vietnam War draft board as a conscientious objector. The application was approved.

  The preacher had different messages for different members. For those like Layton, who were interested in politics and ideas, the message was about socialism. For people who preferred their religion more theatrical, Jones would hurl the Bible onto the floor during sermons. After a stunned silence, he would offer himself to the heavens to be struck dead for his act of desecration. When no lightning bolt appeared, Jones would say that the reason God had not killed him was because … Jones himself was God.

  The preacher conducted a stream of faith healings, and the testimonies of those he had “cured” were endlessly publicized. Jones would reach into people and pull out tumors; only a handful of his inner circle knew the tumors were prearranged pieces of boiled chicken liver. When the faith healings did not work, Jones would tell members that it was because they were insufficiently devoted—his power to help them depended entirely on how much faith they had in him. When people left his fold, bad things seemed to happen to them. Vern Gosney quit Peoples Temple right before his girlfriend died. Desperate and disconsolate, with a small baby he could not care for on his own, Gosney reached out to Jones. Peoples Temple welcomed him back, but Gosney still recalls the message he received: “This is what happens to you when you leave.”

  In 2004, a small group of men coordinated a series of bomb blasts in Spain, days ahead of national elections in that country. When police surrounded some of the perpetrators in a Madrid apartment a few weeks later, the men blew themselves up. Al-Qaeda hailed the bombings, and investigators quickly began piecing together connections between the Spanish bombers and international terrorist organizations.

  For Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan who also studies terrorist groups at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, the idea that al-Qaeda recruiters had picked and trained the men, and coordinated the blasts, was ludicrous—although that was the story line that was getting circulated. In detailed field studies, Atran has seen that the pattern through which young Muslim men join the international jihad is exactly the opposite of the conventional narrative that suggests shadowy recruiters from al-Qaeda are spread out around the world in search of suicide bombers. The conventional explanation follows the telemarketer model—you aggressively reach out to as many people as possible in the hope that some tiny number will buy your product. Since one of the products al-Qaeda sells is suicide, the conventional narrative has intuitive appeal, since most people do not want to commit suicide. It makes sense that you would need an aggressive effort to recruit people for such unpalatable work. It also makes intuitive sense that most people who sign up for such missions would be poor and desperate—people with few options—or those with personal scores to settle. Or perhaps they are dim-witted young men ready to buy some fanciful story about virgins in the afterlife.

  Let’s take a closer look at these theories. A quick way to check the veracity of the virgins claim is to put the question to yourself. Imagine you could have the most mind-blowing sex possible—with sixty-four virgins, if that is your fancy—the only proviso being that afterward, you would be strapped tightly to a live bomb and exploded. Would you sign up for such a deal?

  “I ask people, ‘Would you die for sex?’” said Marc Sageman, another terrorism researcher who relies on empirical evidence. “Women laugh at that faster than men.”

  Sageman has built a database of hundreds of profiles of confirmed al-Qaeda terrorists. Three-fourths are married, and two-thirds have kids, plenty of kids—these are not sex-starved adolescents.

  What about religious fanaticism? The group that brought suicide bombings into fashion in the modern era was the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, a predominantly Hindu group that fought for a separate homeland in Sri Lanka. But the group’s central identity was built not around religion but around the Tamil language. It was Tamil culture and Tamil pride that LTTE cadres seemed willing to die for.

  “Two-thirds of [suicide] attacks in Lebanon were carried out by secular organizations,” added Ariel Merari, the Israeli psychologist at Tel Aviv University. “Religion is neither necessary nor a sufficient cause.”

  Many groups that produce suicide bombers do say that systematic humiliation is the root cause of their anger, but this does not mean that suicide bombers themselves have suffered such humiliation. “Lots of people have gut feelings that humiliation is important [in motivating suicide bombers], and we test things and we find most people’s gut feelings are wrong,” said Atran. “We find humiliation is inversely proportional to the willingness to commit violence. Humiliated people don’t commit violence, but people do act in the name of others who are humiliated.”

  When Spanish authorities put some of the 2004 conspirators on trial, it turned out that most of the plotters were from a small neighborhood in northern Morocco. When Atran tracked down biographical information about the men, he learned that their favorite hangout was not the local mosque but the local café. Had al-Qaeda recruiters come looking for the Spanish bombers? No. It was the bombers who had gone looking for al-Qaeda.

  “Bunches of guys get together and create a parallel universe,” said Atran, who found the same pattern after interviewing the neighbors of Mohammed Atta, leader of the 9/11 attacks, and 9/11 organizer Ramzi bin al-Shibh. “They brought in twenty mattresses and stayed together. They were living in another world.”

  Atran went to Morocco, to understand the world from which the terrorists who attacked Spain had sprung. “I was in a barrio called El Principe in Morocco. I was sitting in this plaza and talking to kids about who their heroes are. They say Ronaldinho [the soccer star] and the Terminator and Osama bin Laden. The kids are weighing the pros and cons of becoming bin Laden or Ronaldinho. There are two cafés. I go to both of these cafés. The young men invite me over for tea, and Al Jazeera is on 24–7. The news is ten minutes on Iraq, five minutes on Palestine, and five minutes for the rest of the world. They are talking about gory images and how Islam is being attacked. One guy brings over his six-year-old son and says, ‘If I can be a martyr, I swear I would.’ They see this injustice and they have confirmatory biases, and anything else is blocked out. The kids listen to it. This is the way it is done, storytelling, war stories, schmoozing in the barbershop or café. There are no recruiters. No one says, ‘Come join the jihad. I will give you money.’”

  Atran discovered communities in Morocco that have produced dozens of young men who have volunteered to become suicide bombers in faraway places. He found the best predictor of whether a young man became a suicide bomber was not his religiosity, but whether he belonged to a small group where others had decided to become suicide terrorists. Within these small groups, becoming a suicide terrorist had become so
mething of a group norm. Small “bands of brothers,” Atran told me, hung out together, dreamed together, lived together. They married one another’s sisters. They became one another’s universe.

  Among members of the Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah, Atran has traced forty-five weddings where members of the group intermarried into one another’s families. Small-group dynamics explain why investigators regularly find that the wedding videos of terrorists provide excellent information about potential collaborators.

  The central feature of a tunnel is that it seals off the outside world. In our everyday lives, we are pulled in multiple directions. Conflicting responsibilities, clashing opinions, and the cacophony of a polyglot culture create stress in our lives, but they also keep us from seeing things in unidimensional terms. When people enter the suicide bombers’ tunnel, they are deprived—either by design or by accident—of the usual tugs of the outside world. For people inside, the tunnel becomes the entire world. Small bands of brothers and sisters, who are intensely loyal to one another, can be brought together by different things—a political cause, a sports team, a shared history. We see examples of tunnel behavior all the time—when someone tattoos a sports team’s logo on his forehead, for example. But like religion or history, sports only provides a vocabulary and an outlet to activate an underlying psychological process. Some tunnels direct people toward self-abnegation and public service, others toward violence; some tunnels lead people to workaholism, others to hedonism. The Chicago Bears fan who tattoos his team’s logo on his cheek seems crazy to the rest of us. But the Bears fan is not technically crazy. The tunnel in which he lives has just taken him so far away from our definitions of normal behavior that the only way we can wrap our minds around what he has done is to call him crazy—but it doesn’t get us closer to understanding the man or his motivations. When we think of suicide bombers as crazed and evil fanatics, we are applying our norms to their behavior. But inside the tunnel, the world has been turned upside down. Our norms no longer apply.