Born Liars

by Ian Leslie

  Gazzaniga had fallen upon an insight he was to explore and develop for the rest of his career: we are not one, but two. The brain’s hemispheres, left and right, operate as separate intelligences housed in one body. The left side deals with analytical and logical thinking and has the gift of language; anything to do with speaking or writing is dealt with here. The right side is illiterate and mute, but has its own magical powers.14 It is much better at identifying patterns – at recognising categories, objects and faces, and enjoying music or art. The two systems work closely together, but are independent. With the messenger cut out, the inner division of the mind into two different entities was laid bare. Henry Jekyll had been on to something.

  Gazzaniga went on to discover much more about how the parts of a split brain relate to each other. For instance, when they are no longer joined up directly, they can find new ways to co-operate. In one of Gazzaniga’s experiments, a split-brain patient is asked to reach into a closed bag with his left hand, feel the object inside, and say what it is. The object is something easy to identify, like a pencil, but because the right brain is mute, the patient can’t say the answer. The right hemisphere hits upon a cunning plan. As we’ve seen, most tactile sensations are cross-wired. But there is an exception: pain stimuli go to both hemispheres. The patient holds the pencil in his left hand with the point pressed hard into his palm. This sends a pain signal shooting into both parts of the brain. So now the left knows something, at least – there is a sharp object in the bag. Using this hint, it begins to guess. The patient speaks: ‘A pin, a needle, a pen?’ The right hemisphere, which possesses the answer, helps out: it signals when these guesses are getting warmer by smiling or nodding. Very soon the patient announces the correct answer. It’s a stunning example of neural teamwork. Even with the internal connection cut, the two hemispheres find a way of communicating by going via the outside world.

  The brain’s hemispheres can also fall out with each other, and violently. Some split-brain patients suffer from a condition known as ‘alien hand syndrome’. One hand, usually the left, takes on a life of its own, and a bizarre Punch and Judy show ensues. The neurologist Victor Mark of the University of North Dakota interviewed one such patient. When asked how many seizures she had recently experienced, her right hand held up two fingers. Her left hand then reached over and forced the fingers on her right hand down. After some back and forth she gave up and let both have their say, displaying three fingers with her right hand and one with her left. When Mark pointed out the discrepancy, she commented that her left hand frequently did things on its own. A fight ensued between the two hands, at the end of which the woman burst into tears.

  Many similar cases have been recorded. The alien hand might pick up a ringing phone but then refuse to pass it to the other hand, or grab a shirt picked out by the other hand and place it firmly back on the rack. It often seems to be on a mission to disrupt the person’s conscious intentions, dumping a glass of water into a bowl of cereal, unbuttoning a shirt that the right hand is in the process of buttoning, removing a cigarette the person has placed in his mouth with his right hand. One man recalled seizing his wife with his left hand and shaking her violently, while with his right hand he tried to come to his wife’s aid. In several cases, the alien hand has reached for its owner’s neck and tried to strangle him.

  Hard as it is to conceive of, some scientists think it likely that left and right hemispheres, speaking and mute, are each conscious entities in their own right, with their own thoughts and moods.15 This central division is made up of further divisions into hundreds of independently functioning, non-conscious modules, all capable in different ways of initiating behaviour or generating an emotion. They aren’t necessarily designed to cohere. The brain wasn’t built to a master plan, but has picked up different functions over millions of years, yoking them together imperfectly as it goes, like a royal palace that has been added to, altered and extended in different architectural styles, with the result an imposing but untidy sprawl that somehow works as a single building. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the brain’s agents are sometimes at cross-purposes. Although the fully functioning brain does a pretty good job of maintaining the internal flows of information and keeping order, there is no all-seeing, all-powerful chief executive or president tasked with ruling over Jekyll’s society of ‘multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens’.

  We are familiar with the sense of internal conflict; most of us know the battle between desire and conscience all too well. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Medea describes herself as being torn apart, ‘desire and reason are pulling in opposite directions’. In his novel Solar, Ian McEwan describes a mind in decision-making mode as a parliament or debating chamber: ‘Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.’ But, most of the time at least, I don’t feel like an assembly of different selves (whatever that would feel like). I feel like me, and you feel like you, or at least I assume you do. Split-brain patients feel this way too. They have no sense of themselves as anything but whole. Even those suffering from alien hand syndrome only see the effects rather than sensing the cause. How is it that each of us feels like one person, with one mind, when in reality we are divided? More than ten years after his momentous encounter with William Jenkins, Michael Gazzaniga made another breakthrough that helps to explain how we keep it all together.

  Varying his original experiment, Gazzaniga started to flash two pictures up at a time, one on each side of the dot. To one patient, a fifteen-year-old boy, he flashed a picture of a chicken’s claw on the left, and on the right, a house and car covered in snow. He then showed the patient a card with various pictures on it and asked him to choose one to go with the pictures he’d just been shown on the screen. Each of the patient’s hands pointed to different images, as if sent out on competing missions by different sides of his brain. The patient’s left hand pointed to a shovel (which went with the snow scene) whilst his right hand pointed to a chicken (which went with the chicken claw). Gazzaniga asked the patient why he was pointing to these two pictures. He suspected that the patient would have some difficulty explaining what was going on with his left hand. After all, the only part of his brain able to issue a verbal response was the left hemisphere, responsible for the right hand, and his left hemisphere was oblivious to the earlier image of a snow-covered house. But the patient didn’t say, ‘I’ve no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel.’ He said, without any hesitation, ‘Oh that’s easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.’

  Gazzaniga was quietly awestruck. He realised that the left-brain, though ignorant of why the left hand was pointing to the shovel, had simply invented a plausible reason after the fact. When Gazzaniga flashed the word WALK to the right hemisphere of another split-brain patient, the man got up from his seat and started walking away. When asked why, he (or at least, his left hemisphere) smartly replied that he was ‘just going to get a Coke’. Another was flashed the word LAUGH and started to laugh. Questioned, he replied, ‘You guys come up and test us each month. What a way to earn a living!’

  Of course, the examples above are drawn from case studies of people with rare brain conditions. But the startling suggestion made by Gazzaniga is that they simply reveal, in a particularly clear and dramatic way, the way our own minds hastily fabricate stories, or what he calls ‘confabulations’, to make our own choices intelligible to us. Earlier we met patients who had been diagnosed as chronic confabulators. The term is used more generally here, but the principle is the same. Confabulations spring from the language circuitry in the left hemisphere, which Gazzaniga goes so far as to call ‘the interpreter module’ because, as he sees it, its job is simply to interpret actions and emotions that have been generated from elsewhere in the brain. The interpr
eter module – which equates closely to the conscious mind – blithely concocts post hoc explanations for whatever we do or feel, even when it has no access to the causes or motives of that behaviour. The student on the bridge felt physiologically aroused; his interpreter module told him it was because he was attracted to the girl.

  If Freud anticipated the neuroscientific vision of a brain engaged in the ongoing work of self-deception, he himself was influenced by the Romantic poets, who were fascinated by the mind’s struggle to create and recreate the world, and the self, anew. Earlier I quoted Coleridge. Here is a fuller version of what he said:

  The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

  The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a contemporary of Coleridge and himself a great influence on Freud, argued that our sense of self is an artfully constructed fiction:

  We know, it is true, something more of the course of our life than of a novel we have formerly read, but not much more. The principal events, the interesting scenes, have been impressed upon us; for the rest, a thousand events have been forgotten for one that has been retained . . . It is true that, in consequence of our relation to the external world, we are accustomed to regard the subject of knowing, the knowing I, as our real self. This, however, is a mere function of the brain, and is not our real self. Our true self, the kernel of our inner nature, is that which is to be found behind this, and which really knows nothing but willing and not-willing.

  The modern philosopher Daniel Dennett, whose ideas have been shaped in part by the discoveries of cognitive neuroscience, echoes Schopenhauer when he suggests we think of our conscious self as a virtuoso novelist, engaged in drafting and redrafting a story in which we are the central protagonist – the ‘chief fictional character’.

  A novel, if it is to work, requires some kind of dramatic conflict. The interpreter’s job of providing a unified front for the mind’s jostling factions is not always easy, and our strongest emotions are generated by the struggle to do so. For Freud, the drama of the psyche arises from the labouring of the ego to repress the knowledge of the unconscious. For an American psychologist whose theory of self-deception was almost as influential in the second half of the twentieth century as Freud’s was in the first, it comes from the effort of persuading ourselves that we were right all along.

  Cognitive Dissonance; the Infinite I Am

  Leon Festinger used to pay people to lie. In one experiment, he asked participants to spend an hour performing a series of deliberately boring tasks, such as turning pegs in a pegboard. Unsurprisingly, nobody enjoyed the experience. The participants were then paid either one dollar or twenty dollars to tell a waiting participant that the tasks were fabulously interesting and fun. Almost all agreed to lie about their experience. Later on, they were interviewed. Those who had been paid one dollar to spin a story rated the tedious task much more enjoyable and satisfying than those who were paid twenty dollars. The less-highly paid subjects had come to believe their own lie.

  Festinger’s explanation was that it’s easier to justify lying for twenty dollars than it is for one. Most people like to think of themselves as decent and honest, and after telling their lie, the people who got paid one dollar were left with two incompatible beliefs in their heads: ‘I am a good person’, and ‘I just sold my integrity for a buck’. Unwilling to jettison the former belief, and unable to pretend that the new dollar bill in their wallet was a twenty, they smoothly manoeuvred their memories into alignment with their actions. The participants who got paid more experienced less of what Festinger called ‘cognitive dissonance’. They were simply able to say to themselves, ‘Yes, I lied, but twenty dollars is a lot of money. I did the right thing.’

  Festinger was born in New York in 1919 to Jewish parents who had emigrated to America from Russia. A short, bespectacled man possessed of an intense, prickly manner, he held a rather pessimistic view of human nature. He admired the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who observed that humans are creatures who spend their whole lives trying not to admit that their existence is absurd. In the late 1950s, Festinger developed his own ideas about how we manage to turn a blind eye to this unwelcome insight, the most famous of which was his theory of cognitive dissonance.

  Benjamin Franklin once described the cunning way he had won over a difficult political opponent. Having heard that this man had in his library a copy of a rare and fascinating book, Franklin wrote him a note asking if he might borrow it. He received the book immediately, and about a week later sent it back with a note expressing deep gratitude. When they next met, the man was full of civility and warmth, and expressed a readiness to help Franklin out in any way he could. The two remained friends until death. Franklin later observed, ‘He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.’ In Festinger’s terms, Franklin’s adversary had found himself with two cognitions after lending the book: he was an opponent of Franklin, and yet he had done him a favour. The way he resolved his dissonance was by telling himself he actually liked Franklin.

  In Festinger’s view, we constantly struggle to avoid cognitive dissonance in order to maintain our sense of who we are. Whenever we end up with contradictory ideas about the world, the anxiety generated gives us a strong hint that we need to change our behaviour, or our beliefs, to avoid the absurdity of thinking two different things at once. Usually, it’s easier to change our beliefs. Faced with information that suggests we are wrong about something, we will try everything else first – making up reasons, blaming others, denying there’s an issue at all – before changing our minds. If smokers want to quit but can’t, they’ll find justifications for continuing – it really won’t do me any harm, my life will be shorter but fuller. If you spend a lot of money on a ticket for a concert, you’ll make more effort to persuade yourself it was enjoyable afterwards, even if you were bored. The tougher the initiation into a group, like a university fraternity, the more committed you will subsequently be to that group.

  Festinger took a deep interest in the history of religion, and in particular the recurrence of sects or cults that prophesied a worldwide cataclysm on one particular date or another that would sweep away everyone except for the true believers. Only those who believed in the teachings of the group would then enjoy salvation and eternal happiness. Festinger noted that when the predictions of these groups proved false, as they invariably did, the group rarely disbanded or dispersed, at least not immediately. After the initial dismay, the cultists would strengthen in their conviction, defy the scorn of non-believers, and take to the streets to assert, with increased fervour, the righteousness of their cause.

  In 1954, when Festinger was thirty-five and working at the University of Minnesota, he came across a newspaper report of a doomsday cult that was prophesying the destruction of the human race at the hands of aliens. The cult was based not far away, in Lake City, a Chicago suburb. Festinger decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss. He and a few colleagues went to Chicago and joined the group incognito, pretending to be believers. Later, he published an account of his time with the Chicago cult that was refracted through his study of apocalyptic movements from history, including – strangest of them all – the cult of Sabbatai Zevi.

  * * *

  On 31 May 1665, an unhappy thirty-nine-year-old man knocked on the door of a house in Gaza, asking for help. The master of the house was Abraham Nathan ben Elisha Hayyim Ashkenazi, commonly known as Nathan of Gaza. Nathan was a young Jewish mystic – a kabbalist. At just twenty-two, he had gained a great reputation for the sophistication of his spiritual visions, the beauty of his divinely inspired prophecies, and the restorative power of his eloquence. When his visitor introduced himself, Nathan must have felt a shock of recognition – and excitement.

  Sabbatai Zevi was the deeply wayward th
ird son of a prosperous merchant from Smyrna. A more sensitive, bookish soul than his brothers, who became successful businessmen like their father, Zevi underwent a rabbinic training, before studying the kabbalah. It soon became clear, however, that no established school of religious thought could accommodate this bright but eccentric young man. Zevi had a temperament that would today be diagnosed as manic-depressive or bi-polar; after periods of wild exultation and hyperactivity he would sink into deep gloom and inaction. His mood swings became more frequent and more extreme as he grew older, and during his wild phases he committed terrible blasphemies and transgressions. He spoke the forbidden name of God, pronounced himself ‘married’ to a Torah scroll, committed unspeakable sex acts, and even declared himself the Messiah. For these and other crimes he was expelled successively from Smyrna, Salonika and Constantinople. When he was feeling placid-minded and normal, Zevi wondered if he wasn’t diabolically possessed. But then he would be seized by his dark exuberance once again.

  In the spring of 1665 Zevi’s wandering journey took him to Gaza, and to Nathan, whose help he sought in exorcising his demons. Nathan of Gaza was the son of a distinguished rabbinical scholar and kabbalist from Jerusalem. After completing the first stage of his religious education, he took up the study of kabbalah in Gaza, where he settled with his new wife. Nathan was a gifted student, possessed of a highly original and inventive mind; as one historian of the period puts it, he combined ‘intellectual power and capacity for profound thinking with imagination and strong emotional sensitivity’. Rather than being content with learning, Nathan developed his own ideas and ideology. By the time he met Zevi he was well on his way to developing a radical, all-encompassing system of thought, rooted in kabbalism but unique to him. It was the kind of worldview that explains everything, and accommodates anything. Nathan had first come across Zevi in Jerusalem, and had not thought much of his claim to messianic status. But in Gaza, during a fast, he had experienced an overpowering vision, lasting twenty-four hours, in which, as he later told it, he beheld the Messiah in the person of Sabbatai Zevi. And now here was Zevi, knocking at his door. What clearer sign could there be?