The Self Illusion

4

The Cost of Free Will

We must believe in free will – we have no choice.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

For ninety-six minutes on a hot summer’s day around noon in 1966, ex-marine Charles Whitman, positioned high up in the tower building of the University of Texas in Austin, fired 150 rounds killing fourteen people and injuring another thirty-two before he was finally shot dead by the police.¹ The University of Texas massacre was one of the first examples of a modern-day phenomenon of mass shootings. Dunblane, Columbine and Virginia Tech are just a few of the recent atrocities in a growing list of senseless killing sprees that beggar belief. Every time one of these horrors happens, we are left asking the same question – why? In the case of Charles Whitman, we have an answer. He probably wasn’t his usual self.

In his prospective suicide note, Whitman wrote about the impulsive violence and the mental turmoil he was experiencing. He had a history of aggressive outbursts and a troubled family life, but in the months leading up to the Austin rampage, Whitman thought things were getting worse. He wrote, ‘After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed to see if there is any visible physical disorder.’ He also asked that after his debts had been paid off, any money left over should go into research to find out if there was some explanation for his actions. He knew that something was not right. And he was unfortunately correct. Deep inside his brain was a sizeable tumour in the region of his amygdala.

The amygdala is part of the brain circuitry responsible for emotional behaviours: damage to this region can cause excessive swings in rage and anger. Overstimulation of the amygdala will cause both animals and humans to lash out violently. Whitman’s tumour could have been responsible for his impulsive aggression throughout his life. Together with the fact that his family life was troubled, he abused amphetamines and he had been under a lot of stress in the summer of 1966, having a tumour of his amygdala would have impaired his ability to remain calm. But now that we know he had a brain tumour, was Whitman responsible for his actions? Did Whitman murder those innocent people or did his tumour?

There is also the strange case of the forty-year-old man who developed an interest in child pornography.² He was aware that his paedophilia was wrong because he went to great lengths to conceal his activities, but eventually he was exposed by his stepdaughter and sent to a rehabilitation centre for treatment instead of prison. However, he could not avoid soliciting sexual favours from staff and other patients at the centre and was eventually expelled. The evening before his prison sentence was due to commence, he was taken into hospital complaining of severe headaches, where it was discovered that he had tumour in his prefrontal cortex – the same region related to suppressing and inhibiting drives and sexual urges. You need your prefrontal cortex in order to overcome the impulse to eat the marshmallows as a toddler, but as an adult you also need it to curtail the urge to fight, flee and fornicate.

Was the tumour responsible for the paedophile’s behaviour? In a way, it was. When his tumour was removed, his sexual urges declined and, after seven months, he was allowed to go back to his home where his stepdaughter lived. However, a year later he started collecting pornography again whereupon another brain scan revealed that his tumour had grown back, again requiring surgery to remove. But how can a lump of cancerous cells have sexual urges towards young children? There is something very wrong in the way that we tend to think about the link between brain, behaviour and mind.

My Brain Made Me Do It

Neuroscientist David Eagleman believes that we are entering a new era in which our understanding of how the brain works will force us to confront the difficulty of establishing when others are responsible for their actions.³ This is the emerging field of neuroethics – the brain basis of morality and how we should behave. He makes the point that there are few among us who would attribute blame to Whitman or the paedophile when there is a clear brain abnormality such as a cancerous tumour. As Eagleman points out, the problem is that, as our understanding of how the brain works improves, we will increasingly encounter arguments that those who commit crimes are not responsible for their actions due to some biological abnormality. As we understand more about the microcircuitry of the brain, we are going to discover more about the different imbalances and predispositions that are linked to criminal acts. Where will society eventually draw the line of culpability?

In fact, we have now reached a point at which there does not need to be any evidence of a biological abnormality – you just have to act out of character in such a way as to not be regarded as your usual self. This is what the Canadian jury decided in the case of Ken Parks who, in 1988, drove twenty-three kilometres to his in-laws’ house in Ontario, where he stabbed his wife’s parents, killing the mother-in-law. He then presented himself to the local police station where he said, ‘I think I have killed some people.’

Prior to the attack, Parks was said to have loved his in-laws who described him as a ‘gentle giant’. His defence team argued that as Parks did not remember the attack, he was sleepwalking; they entered a plea of ‘homicide during non-insane automatism as part of a presumed episode of somnambulism’. He had no prior history of such behaviour, but because the attack was so out of character, the jury accepted the defence and acquitted him.⁴

But what does it mean to be acting out of character? This statement assumes a sovereignty of self that is usurped by external forces. Where do these external forces exert their influence if not within us? Does it make any more sense to say that my background or environment is responsible for my actions than to say that my brain made me do it? I once discussed these issues of culpability over dinner with two adults who differed in their political leanings to the left and to the right. As you probably expected, the conservative was inclined to see fault in the individual whereas the liberal saw society to blame. Clearly these are questions that have no clear-cut answers and may reflect our personal belief systems.

Many legal systems operate on a version of the M’Naghten Rules, a precedent drawn up following the attempted assassination of the British Prime Minister Robert Peel by Daniel M’Naghten in 1843. This is known as the insanity defence and based on the criteria that:

at the time of committing of the act, the party accused was not labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

The problem is that many of us do things that we do not regard as wrong. We can always find ways of justifying our actions in retrospect to make sense of senseless acts – a point that is important when discussing decision-making. Also, we have all done things when we do not fully take into consideration the consequences of our actions. Are these exceptions, too? If so, how are we to decide what counts as being out of character? Is the one-off act worse than the repeat offender? After all, if someone repeatedly offends, then maybe they are unable to control their actions or do not think what they are doing is wrong. On the other hand, if an act is only done once, does this not mean that the offender should be punished more severely because they should have known better?

These are exactly the sorts of arguments that were raised in 2010 when the world was outraged by an impulsive act of cruelty perpetrated by forty-five-year-old British bank worker, Mary Bale, from Coventry. She was walking home one August evening when she encountered a cute four-year-old cat called Lola on a garden wall. She often stopped to stroke the cat on her visits to see her ill father who she would visit every day in hospital. On this occasion, she once again stopped to pet the tabby cat, but then glanced around twice before opening the lid of a nearby recycling bin, grabbing the cat by the scruff of its neck and then neatly dropping it inside before walking off briskly to her home three streets away.

Unfortunately for Mary, her dastardly deed was captured on the home surveillance system of the cat’s owners who posted the video on their Facebook page. The video went global and soon thousands of people from around the world were calling her ‘worse than Hitler’. When Mary was eventually identified from the video, she was arrested for cruelty but also put under police protection because of all the death threats she had received.

What possessed such a mundane, normal bank worker to commit such a senseless act of cruelty? Bale at first said she ‘suddenly thought it would be funny’ to put the cat in the bin. Later, she claimed her actions were ‘completely out of character’ and that she had no recollection of the event. Surely this was just a one-off lapse in morality. When she was tried in October 2010, the court accepted that she had been under stress. She had to leave her job at the bank. Her father had also just died, but the court was less understanding than those who judged Ken Parks. Bale was found guilty of animal cruelty, ordered to pay a large fine and banned from keeping animals for five years. Maybe that says more about the way the British feel about their pets than their willingness to absolve a momentary moment of madness.

The Trouble with Free Will

Most of us believe that unless we are under duress or suffering from some form of mental disorder, we all have the capacity to freely make decisions and choices. This is the common belief that our decisions are not preordained and that we can choose between alternatives. This is what most people mean by having free will – the belief that human behaviour is an expression of personal choice and is not determined by physical forces, fate or God. In other words, there is a self in control.

However, neuroscience tells us that we are mistaken and that free will is also part of the self illusion – it is not what it seems. We think we have freedom but, in fact, we do not. As such, we need to start rethinking how we apply the concept of free will or, rather, the lack of it as an excuse for our thoughts and behaviours. For example, I believe that the sentence that I have just typed was my choice. I thought about what I wanted to say and how to say it. Not only did I have the experience of my intention to begin this line of discussion at this point but I had the experience of agency, of actually writing it. I knew I was the one doing it. I felt the authorship of my actions.

It seems absurd to question my free will here but, as much as I hate to admit it, these experiences are not what they seem. This is because any choices that a person makes must be the culmination of the interaction of a multitude of hidden factors ranging from genetic inheritance, life experiences, current circumstances and planned goals. Some of these influences must also come from external sources, but they all play out as patterns of neuronal activity in the brain. This is the matrix of distributed networks of nerve cells firing across my neuronal architecture. My biases, my memories, my perceptions and my thoughts are the interacting patterns of excitation and inhibition in my brain, and when the checks and balances are finally done, the resulting sums of all of these complex interactions are the decisions and the choices that I make. We are not aware of these influences because they are unconscious and so we feel that the decision has been arrived at independently – a problem that was recognized by the philosopher, Spinoza, when he wrote, ‘Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.’⁵

Also, logically, there can be no free will. There is no King Solomon in our head weighing up the evidence. We already discussed why the little person inside our head making decisions, the homunculus, can’t exist because that solution simply creates the problem of an infinite regress – who is inside their head and so on, and so on. Nor are we going to allow for a ‘ghost in the machine’ – which introduces spiritual influences, that scientists have been unable to find – into our explanation.

If we remove free will from the equation, some have worried that the alternative is one of determinism – that everything is predetermined and that our lives are simply the playing out of a complicated game of set moves in which fate reigns over freedom. Most people find that notion just as scary, because it means we have no control in shaping the future. Surely the future is not already preordained?

Faced with such an existential crisis, some have sought a way of introducing randomness into the equation. If there are no spirits or gods and only physics governs us and the world we live in, then maybe the physics is less predictable than one would think? One seemingly attractive way of escaping the determinist view is to get rid of predictability at the smallest level of the brain. This is where we enter the mysterious and peculiar world of quantum physics, where the rules that govern the physical world we know no longer apply. And if these rules are gone, then so has the predictability of how our brain works, thereby leaving the door ajar for some freedom of choice.

Charming Quarks

The world of quantum physics is weird. It doesn’t obey the laws of the normal world. Elements can pop in and out of existence, be in two places at the same time and basically not conform to the sorts of rules of matter that operate in the Newtonian world. Put simply, quantum physics has revealed that the basic building blocks of matter, the elemental subatomic particles, behave in decidedly unpredictable ways. They are known as ‘indeterminate’ – as opposed to determined. They don’t behave like objects in the Newtonian world. These elementary particles of matter are known as ‘quarks’. Their unpredictability undermines determinism because it indicates that laws of cause and effect do not apply at the quantum level. Advocates of this position argue that if the fabric of the universe is inherently unpredictable, then choices are not determined and multiple potential futures are possible. This is why quantum indeterminacy is reassuring to those of us who want to retain the possibility that we are free to decide our own destiny.

One of the problems of applying quantum indeterminacy to explain free will is that the signalling between neuronal networks in the brain happens at a level much larger in scale than that observed at the subatomic particle level at which indeterminacy happens. It’s like saying the individual grains of sand that make up an individual brick could influence the structure of a cathedral made out of millions of bricks as well as the societies that spawn from such institutions. More importantly, even if randomness at the quantum level somehow translated up to the molecular level of brain activation and the macro-level of societies, then that would equally not be a satisfying account of what most of us experience as free will. Decisions would not be choices but rather the outcome of random events, which is not free will either. As I quipped in my last book, SuperSense, even if there were a ghost in the machine exercising free will, then we don’t want one flipping a coin when it comes to making a decision!

Our belief in free will not only reflects our personal subjective experience of control over our actions on a daily basis, but also our own ignorance of the mechanisms, both conscious and unconscious, that determine our decisions. Many people find such a conclusion deeply disturbing, as if their life is already predictable. Dan Dennett is quoted as saying, ‘when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.’⁶

But why should that be upsetting? Many things in life are not what they seem. Arguably all of our perceptions are illusions because we don’t have any privileged access to reality. Our minds are a matrix simulating reality. Even the physical world is not what it seems. Quantum physics reveals that a solid brick is made up of more space than matter. Does a deeper understanding of the nature of the brick undermine how we should behave when someone throws one at our head? Clearly not.

The pessimistic view of determinism is also unwarranted because we simply wouldn’t be able to comprehend the patterns of causality in any meaningful way. Aside from very simple actions that we consider next, the complexity of the underlying processes that make up our mental lives is going to be one that proves impossible to predict with any degree of certainty – it might as well be random and undecided. It’s like watching a soccer match. We appreciate that the laws of physics govern the movement of the players and ball but that does not mean you can predict with any certainty how the moves in the game will play out. At best, we may be able to get close to figuring out what will happen, but to use a term borrowed from engineering, there are simply too many degrees of freedom to make an accurate prediction of what the system will do. The problem of too many degrees of freedom means that, every time you add another factor that can exert an influence on your decision-making, you change the predictability of a system.

Let’s consider some numbers again. With just 500 neurons, the number of possible different patterns of connections you could have exceeds the estimated total number of atoms in the observable universe. With billions of neurons, each with up to 10,000 connections, that suggests an almost infinite number of possible brain states. So figuring out what each pattern of electrical activity does is simply not feasible. The other problem is that no two brains are identical. Even identical clones of a very simple organism such as the water flea, when raised in the same environment have different patterns of neural connections.⁷ So any mapping of one brain is not going to apply directly to that of another.

A final nail in the coffin of predictable determinism is that thousands of different brain states can produce the same output. This is known in philosophy as ‘multiple realizability’,⁸ although I prefer the more familiar phrase, ‘There is more than one way to skin a cat’! What this means simply is that many different patterns of brain activity can produce the same thoughts and behaviours. There is no unique one-to-one mapping between the brain’s activities and the output of the individual. For example, scientists looked at a much simpler nervous system than the human brain – the gut of a lobster – and carefully recorded as many different patterns of activity of the nerves that control the digestive movements. They found that thousands of different patterns produced the same behaviour.⁹ For any individual cell, there were multiple patterns of activity with other connecting cells that produced the same output.

Multiple realizability is likely to be true for the human brain as well. In other words, our thoughts and behaviours are realized in multiple pathways of activity, which is a good thing. Remember that the neural networks are massively parallel. This means that the same neurons can be triggered by a variety of spreading activations. This parallel structure explains the speed, the complexity and ultimately the richness of mental life but it also means that you are never going to be able to map it out precisely – even within the same individual brain,

Despite the complexity of the mathematics of brain activity, many are still deeply unsatisfied with a materialist account of the mind, even if it is not predictable. We want to believe that we are more than fleshy computing devices that have evolved to replicate. We are not simply meat machines. Maybe there is some as yet undiscovered force at work? After all, we are continually reminded that most of the universe is made up of stuff that we know is there but cannot measure. How can scientists rule out the non-material explanation for the mind and free will if they themselves admit that they do not know everything?

The answer is they can’t. Science can only investigate and evaluate different models of the world and those models are only going to be approximations of the true state of the universe – which, frankly, we may never know. But science is continually moving forward and progressing by refining the models to better fit the evidence. And the evidence comes from our observations. However, sometimes observations are wrong. The big trouble with free will is that it just feels so real. All of us think that our thoughts happen in advance of what we do. Time moves forward and we experience that our thoughts cause actions. It turns out that this is wrong and we know this from the simple press of a button.

Living in the Past

Imagine I ask you to push a button whenever you feel like it. Just wait until you feel good and ready. In other words, the choice of when you want to do it is entirely up to you. After some time you make the decision that you are going to push the button, and low and behold you do so. What could be more obvious as an example of free will? Nothing – except that you have just experienced one of the most compelling and bizarre illusions of the human mind.

In the 1980s, Californian physiologist Benjamin Libet was working on the neural impulses that generate movements and motor acts. Prior to most voluntary motor acts such as pushing a button with a finger, there is a spike of neural activity in the brain’s motor cortex region that is responsible for producing the eventual movement of the finger. This is known as the ‘readiness potential’ (RP) and it is the forerunner to the cascade of brain activation that actually makes the finger move. Of course, in making a decision, we also experience a conscious intention or free will to initiate the act of pushing the button about a fifth of a second before we actually begin to press the button. But here’s the spooky thing. Libet demonstrated that there was a mismatch between when the readiness potential began and the point when the individual experienced the conscious intention to push the button.¹⁰

By having adults watch a clock with a moving dot that made a full rotation every 2.65 seconds, Libet established that adults felt the urge to push the button a full half second after the readiness potential had already been triggered. In other words, the brain activity was already preparing to press the button before the subject was aware of their own conscious decision. This interval was at least twice as long as the time between consciously deciding to push the button and the actual movement of the finger. This means that when we think that we are consciously making a decision, it has already happened unconsciously. In effect, our consciousness is living in the past.

One might argue that half a second is hardly a long time but, more recently, researchers using brain imaging have been able to push this boundary back to seven seconds.¹¹ They can predict on the basis of brain activity which of two buttons a subject will eventually press. This is shocking. As you can imagine, these sorts of findings create havoc for most people. How can we be so out of touch with our bodies? Do we have no conscious control? The whole point about voluntary acts is that we feel both the intention to act and the effort of our agency. We feel there is a moment in time when we have decided to do something, which is followed by the execution of the act. Brain science tells us that in these experiments, the feeling of intention occurs after the fact.

However, Libet’s findings do not mean that intention cannot precede actions. We can all plan for the future and it would be ludicrous to say otherwise. For example, in the morning I made the decision to check the mailbox, at the end of the drive, in the afternoon, and I did just that – I made a plan of action and then enacted it. There was no readiness potential in my brain to visit the mailbox. Likewise, many other actions happen without conscious deliberation and thank goodness for that. Imagine if you had to think about jamming on the brakes in a vehicle pile-up: you would be a goner. Whether it is long-term goals or automatic behaviours triggered by external events, in both instances the experience of intention happens either well in advance or sometimes not all. Our actions don’t always follow our intentions as in the Libet demonstration.

What Libet’s findings really show is that in a situation where we are asked to both initiate a willed action and monitor when we think we have initiated the action, the preparation for the movement happens well before we become aware of our intention. Most people find this amazing. However, neuroscientists are less impressed because they know the brain generates both the movement and conscious awareness. This makes impartiality and objective evaluation impossible. Another problem for interpreting the time-course of events is that the brain activation that generates conscious awareness is not a single point in time but rather is distributed. In other words, although we can suddenly become aware of an instance when we have made a decision, that process must have been building up for some period. It may feel like it happened spontaneously just before we moved our finger, but it didn’t. We just thought so. Spinoza figured this out 350 years ago.

One big misinterpretation of Libet’s findings, and of appreciating the true nature of the self in general, is that one cannot passively wait for an urge to occur while at the same time monitoring when one becomes conscious of bringing it about. We cannot step outside of our mind and say, ‘Yes, that’s when I felt the urge to move, and that’s when I actually started to do so.’ You cannot have your mental cake and eat it. As the philosopher Gilbert Ryle¹² pointed out, in searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted. Such reasoning reflects our inherent dualist belief that our mind is separate from our body.

We may think that our mind controls our body but that is an illusion of free will and control. This illusion arises when our subjective conscious intention precedes the actual execution of the movement with little delay. We know this timing is critical because, if you disrupt the link between when you experience the intention to act and the execution of the act, we experience a loss of willed action. This is when we feel that we are not in control of our bodies.

Being in Two Minds

Most of the time we feel we have control over our actions. There are exceptions such as reflexes that do not involve conscious control and, as discussed, some behaviours are surprisingly infectious such as laughing and yawning when in a crowd, but for the most part our normal daily actions seem under our control. However, brain damage can change all of that. When we damage our brain, we can lose control over our bodies. Paralysis is the most common example. Our limbs may be perfectly fine but if we damage the brain centres for movement then, irrespective of our strongest will, our paralysed limbs cannot move. Sometimes, though, parts of our body can move by themselves. For example, ‘alien hand syndrome’ is a condition in which patients are not in control of one of their hands and experience the actions as controlled by someone else or that the hand has a will of its own.¹³ This is also known as the ‘Dr Strangelove syndrome’, a nod to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie in which Peter Sellers plays a wheelchair-bound nuclear war expert and former Nazi whose uncontrollable hand makes Nazi salutes and attempts to strangle him. Strange as Dr Strangelove syndrome might seem, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation based on the discovery that each hand is under relatively independent control from the opposite side of the brain.

For reasons that Mother Nature knows best, much of processing and output in the brain is lateralized to the opposite hemisphere. If you were to draw an imaginary line down the centre of the human body then all the information coming from the left side of the world goes to the right hemisphere. Likewise, all the information from the right side is processed in the left hemisphere. The same is true for actions. The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body and the right hemisphere controls the left. If you severely damage the left hemisphere then you can be left paralysed down the right side of the body and vice versa.

Some skills tend to be lateralized. For example, the left hemisphere controls language whereas the right hemisphere is better at the visual processing of the space around us. That’s why brain damage to the left hemisphere disrupts language and patients become aphasic (unable to produce speech) whereas damage to the right hemisphere leaves language intact but often disrupts the patient’s awareness of objects especially if they are in the left side of space.

We are not aware of these divisions of labour as the two hemispheres work together to produce joined-up thoughts and behaviours. This is because the two sides of the brain are connected together through the large bundle of fibres of the corpus callosum that enables the exchange of information. This exchange also enables the abnormal electrical activity of epilepsy, which can originate in one hemisphere, and spread to both sides of the brain causing major seizures. Epilepsy can be extremely debilitating but by severing the corpus callosum fibres that connect the two hemispheres, the electrical brainstorm can be contained and prevented from transferring from the original site to the rest of the brain. This containment alleviates the worst of the symptoms.

The consequence of this operation is to produce a ‘split brain’ patient. The two halves of the brain continue to work independently of each other but you would be hard pressed to notice any difference. Spilt-brain patients look and behave perfectly normally. This begs the question of why we need the two halves of the brain connected in the first place. In fact, it turns out that split-brain patients are not normal. They are just very good at compensating for the loss of the exchange of brain activity that is normally passed backwards and forwards between the two hemispheres of the intact brain.

Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has shown that these split-brain patients can effectively have each half of the body thinking and acting in a different way. One of his most dramatic observations sounds very similar to the Dr Strangelove syndrome.¹⁴ He gave one of his split-brain patients a puzzle to solve using only his right hand (controlled by the language-dominate left hemisphere). However, this was a spatial puzzle in which where the blocks had to be put in the correct position (something that requires the activity of the right hemisphere). The right hand was hopeless, turning the blocks over and over until, as if frustrated, the left hand, which the patient had been sitting on, jumped in and tried to take the blocks away from the patient’s right hand. It was if the hand had a different personality.

Sometimes this lack of control takes over the whole body. French neurologist François Lhermitte reported a bizarre condition that he called ‘environmental dependency syndrome’ in which patients slavishly copied the doctor’s behaviour.¹⁵ Like the Tourette’s patient who had to mimic every other person’s behaviour, Lhermitte’s patients were similarly compelled to copy every action the doctor made. At one point, the French neurologist got down on his knees in his office as if to pray, whereupon the patient copied him with her head bowed and hands clasped in prayer. Other patients exhibited a related behaviour known as ‘utilization’ in which the sight of an object triggered an involuntary associated response.¹⁶ Such patients will pick up cups in their vicinity and start drinking from them, even when the cup is empty or not theirs. They will feel the compulsion to flick light switches and pull handles. In all of these examples, the patients’ actions are triggered by external events and not their own voluntary action, although some may reinterpret their unusual behaviour as if it arose of their own free will. They will justify their actions as if they willed them when, in fact, it was something in the environment that had taken control over their actions.

‘The Great Selfini’

When not bedevilled by strange neurological disorders, most of us feel we are in control because the coupling between the mental state of consciousness and initiated actions in everyday experience confirms our belief that we have willed our actions freely and in advance of their initiation. But if the reality of free will is an illusion, then why do we experience it so strongly? Why do we need the experience of free will? Why did it evolve?

Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner has written one of the best accounts of why we evolved the vivid experience of free will.¹⁷ Wegner argues that we have a brain that interprets actions in terms of a ‘we think we did it’ experience as a very useful way of keeping track of our decisions and actions. This is because the multiple conscious or unconscious influences and processes that lead to these choices are too complicated or hidden to monitor, but we can keep track of the outcome as a feeling that we have made the decision. For example, we may be at a party and want to impress some of the guests. Think of all the reasons why we might feel the need to do this – social anxiety, fear of rejection, the need to be at the centre of attention and so on. What do we do? We rely on our experience of past situations to come up with a strategy: we decide to tell a joke. We monitor the outcome and then store this for reference for future parties. We told a joke but were we free to do otherwise? Of course, we feel we made the decision but there were a multitude of previous experiences as well as current social norms and rules that influenced our choice. When our behaviours go wrong or we make a faux pas, we feel self-conscious and embarrassed and privately ask our selves, ‘What was I thinking?’

Having an experience of free will over our thoughts and actions binds us to these as the instigator of these decisions, even when that may not be the case. In this way, a sense of free will could help us keep track of what we have done, what we have not done and what we may, or may not, do in the future. As long as our conscious intention appears to precede our actions, then it is natural to assume that we willed them.

This authorship of actions requires the illusion of a unified sense of self. After all, it is useful to know who is responsible. Wegner¹⁸ has called this master illusionist ‘The Great Selfini’. As we act on the world, we interpret the consequences of actions from the privileged prospective of our singular self. This has some interesting consequences. For example, we remember our actions much better than those belonging to others. Whether the actions are walking, throwing darts or clapping hands, people are better at recognizing their own movements compared to those of others. In fact, we seem to be biased to remember those that pertain to us simply by acting on the world. In one study,¹⁹ individuals either selected slips of paper from a bowl or had them handed to them by the experimenter. The experimenter then read out the words associated with the code on each slip. In comparison to those individuals who had the slip given to them, those who chose their own slip remembered more of the words, even though they were never aware of the purpose of the study. It was a consequence of inconsequential actions, but because most of us are trip-wired to pay attention to our self, we tend to give special effort to anything we do.

However, just like false memories, sometimes our authorship of action can be mistaken. For example, when we make a plan to do something, we can forget whether we actually did it or not. If you ask subjects to imagine breaking a toothpick a number of times, and then a week later ask them to recall their actions, they have difficulty deciding whether or not they actually did break a toothpick.²⁰ It’s like trying to remember whether you actually posted a letter or simply imagined that you did – did you or did you not? And the irony is that, by forming a mental picture of the action, we become more confused. Simply watching someone perform an action such as shaking a bottle can also lead to the false memory that we were the one who did it.²¹ Whether we imagine an action or observe others, we can mistakenly attribute our self as the actor. The reason gets back to the builtin mirroring system in our brain that responds to actual movements, imagined movements and the movements of others. If there is an author of actions, then sometimes they may make stories up or plagiarize the work of others.

Wegner thinks that the authorship of actions is like the mind’s compass that helps us navigate through the complexity of our daily lives. Like an autopilot, it steers the ship depending on the heading, conditions and the direction of magnetic north. There is no captain at the helm reading the compass because that would steer us straight back to the illusory self in control.

You Are Feeling Very Sleepy

‘If you focus on my watch, you will feel sleepy. You will find that your eyelids are getting heavy. You will want to keep your eyes open but you are unable to do so. The more you try to keep them open, the more you want to sleep.’ This routine should sound familiar as the commanding instructions of the hypnotist who uses them to make people relinquish control of their actions. Hypnotism is probably one of the best examples where people seem to abdicate their personal sense of free will.

Why is this? Hypnotism seems like some magical power that others have to exert control over us – like some external energy emanating from the eyes or the beckoning fingers of the hypnotist with the piercing stare and goatee beard. It is usually portrayed in popular culture as a paranormal power that the hypnotist possesses to overcome the will of others. However, this is the myth of hypnotism. Hypnotism works because not only do we instinctively mimic others, but we also tend to do what they ask of us in the right situation. If you couple that with induction techniques that place us in a state of relaxation, giving us the sense that we are not in control our bodies, then it is fairly easy to hypnotize someone. Even when we know we are being manipulated, we still give in. There’s nothing paranormal about it.

Imagine the typical dinner party scene where we have eaten too much, but the host urges us to have a bit more cake, ‘Go on, just one little piece won’t hurt.’ Most of us have encountered such social coercion and most of us give in, as the pressure to comply is so great. The same coercion would not really work in a restaurant and we would be mighty suspicious of the waiter who insisted that we eat more. In most restaurants (aside from the very expensive ones where many of us feel intimidated and comply to the authority of the maître d’) we are the ones in charge and do not capitulate to others. The dinner-party scenario is different because it is primarily a social event where we submit to the will of the group or the person in charge. We become susceptible to the influence of others we wish to please. This is because we are naturally inclined to be compliant towards others.

In hypnosis, we are similarly asked to submit to the authority of others to the extent that we end up engaging in behaviours that we would not necessarily think we would freely do. Also, we are willing victims. Many seek out a hypnotist for treatment or to help them stop smoking or lose weight. Others pay good money to go see a stage hypnotism show where we expect to see normal people doing daft things out of their control. In both of these situations there is an expectation that hypnosis will work and therefore we are willing to comply.

Techniques vary, but most hypnotic states are induced by a sequence of progressive compliance. For stage shows, the hypnotist works fairly rapidly to select the most suggestible members of the audience by getting them to engage in some motor act, such as clasping their hands tightly. He then tells them that their hands are stuck together with glue such that they cannot unclasp them no matter how hard they try. This simple technique will identify those who are willing to accept the suggestion of the hypnotist. Other induction techniques rely on various motor illusions such as trying to keep one’s palms separate when held at arm’s length. Our arms will naturally move together in such circumstances as our muscles fatigue, but by simply telling the individual that they have no control and allowing them to witness the involuntary actions of their bodies, it is a simple next step for many to begin to give up their sense of personal control. From then on, the hypnotist can focus on these individuals and manipulate them. Around one in ten of us²² is highly suggestible, which means that any decent sized audience will have more than enough suitable volunteers who can be made to bark like dogs or eat onions that taste like apples.

Contrary to common wisdom, hypnotized individuals are not mindless. Most of them report that they are aware of their actions but that they no longer feel as if they have control over them. Some report a dream state. Many say that they felt hypnotized, which probably says more about their expectations about what they should say. It is worth noting that those who think that they would be easily hypnotizable tend to be the ones who actually are.²³

There are many different accounts about how hypnotism actually works. Various measures of brain activity indicate that those who are hypnotized are in an altered state of consciousness.²⁴ However, another school of thought is that hypnosis is simply exaggerated role-playing.²⁵ Because humans are so obliging, some of us are inclined to adopt roles expected of the group. The academic debates over what is actually going on during hypnosis are still raging, but it is fair to conclude that hypnotism is a real phenomenon in which individuals behave and think that they are no longer in control. Their sense of free will has been temporarily hijacked by the hypnotist and the social situation they find themselves in.

Superstitious Rituals

Superstitious behaviour also makes some of us feel compelled to do things beyond our control.²⁶ Do you avoid stepping on cracks in the pavement? How about throwing salt over your shoulder if you accidentally spill some? Do you have a lucky charm? These are just some of the superstitious rituals that many of us have. Although we may be aware that these superstitions cannot influence outcomes, many of us feel the need to act them out just in case. Some of these superstitions come from culture, handed down over the years to the extent that we lose the original context in which they first appeared. Most of the important events that punctuate our lives such as births, religious festivals, marriages and times of important change are peppered with old superstitions that have become traditions. In such instances we act them out because that is what is expected.

There is also a whole host of personal superstitious behaviours that many of us entertain. They can take on a degree of compulsiveness that undermines our ability to rein them in with reason. This is because of two mechanisms that operate in our brains. First, our brains have evolved to seek out patterns in the world and attempt to generate explanations for why things happen. Second, in situations where outcomes are important, we get stressed by uncertainty and feel the need to do something so that we have the illusion that we can control events.

We naturally see the world in terms of causes and consequences, so when something happens, we assume that some causal event preceded it and start looking around for suitable candidates. The problem is that we often identify causes that are not responsible. This generates a cognitive illusion known as ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’, which translates from the Latin as ‘after this, therefore because of this’. It is particularly obvious in superstitious behaviours. In one experiment, participants were presented with a machine that had levers and lights.²⁷ The most important thing about the machine was that it delivered rewards at random intervals. The people taking part in the experiment thought that the machine could be operated to pay out rewards if the correct sequence was discovered. Very soon, individuals were performing elaborate sequences, believing that their actions determined whether the machine paid out or not. One woman thought that jumping up and down on the spot was what triggered the reward. In fact, there was no causal link between their actions and the outcomes.

In real life, the most common examples of superstitious behaviours come from sports and gambling, two activities associated with a lot of random chance and luck. You might have a particularly successful time at the blackjack table. This leads you to try and work out what was unusual about the events leading up to that success so that you can repeat the winning formula. Maybe it was a particular shirt you wore or something that you ate. The next time round you try out the same behaviour again and, if successful, you have the beginnings of a superstitious ritual. When David Beckham played for AC Milan, his fellow teammates developed a superstitious ritual of always patting the England striker on his bottom after scoring a goal for good luck.²⁸ Well, at least that was the reason they gave.

The second reason superstitions form is that they are a means of coping with uncertainty. Superstitions are typically found in situations where there is an element of risk.²⁹ Rituals provide the individual with an illusion of control that they are doing something to influence outcomes when in fact they have no control whatsoever. If you remove an individual’s perception of control, then they experience uncertain situations as stressful, thereby generating anxiety that impairs both the immune system and the capacity to think clearly.³⁰ Enacting superstitious rituals inoculates us from the negative excesses of stress. This is why you often find superstitious behaviour in dangerous occupations.³¹

Firemen, pilots, sailors and soldiers hold just some of the jobs that are associated with risk and superstitious rituals. My favourite is the Russian cosmonauts and their pre-launch ritual. Before Charles Simonyi, the billionaire who oversaw the creation of Microsoft Office, hitched a ride on the Soviet rockets that rendezvous with the orbiting international space station, he joined in with his companions’ ritual of urinating on the back wheels of the bus that takes them to the launch pad.³² This superstition originated when Yuri Gagarin was caught short on the first manned space flight and has now become a ritual for all who travel on Russian rockets.

The problem is that, if you consider outcomes as both things that do or do not happen because of some action you did or did not take, then just about everything becomes a candidate for rituals. When these rituals start to rule your life, so that they control your actions, you are entering territory where there is no freedom to choose because your emotions have got the better of your free will.

The Cleaning Lady

Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is a loss of self-control and free will that is more disturbing and debilitating than harmless superstitions. I used to drive past an elderly lady on the daily commute to my office in Bristol from my home in the country. Occasionally, I saw her chatting to neighbours but most of the time she was bent over at an alarming angle with her face as close to the ground as possible. At first, I thought she must have dropped something valuable or spotted an extraordinary insect on the sidewalk. What was she looking for I wondered? One day, I slowed the car down enough to discover what she was up to. With delicate precision, she was picking minute particles of debris off the pavement and gathering them into her other free hand. She was cleaning the street outside her house. Sometimes she resorted to using a hand brush and pan, but most of the time she seemed to prefer the meticulous and laborious hand technique.

This old lady had an obsession with dirt. I never talked to her or visited her but I bet my bottom dollar that her house was immaculate. There would not be one thing out of place. Everything would be spotless and in exactly the right place. The towels would be neatly folded, and brand-new soap would be at the side of the hand basin. The toilet paper would be folded at the end and everything would smell of disinfectant. I expect that having achieved a level of unearthly cleanliness within her own domain, she had taken to the street around her house, where the wind and daily passers-by conveniently dropped fragments of debris for her to focus on.

This cleaning lady had the telltale signs of OCD which affects about one in fifty members of the general public. In many instances OCD reflects concerns about the consequences of failing to do something – lock doors or turn off power switches. The most common one that most of us experience is the checking and then rechecking that we have taken our passport when travelling. No matter how many times we confirm that we have it, for reassurance we still feel compelled to check.³³ Many of us also have routines that punctuate our daily lives and we prefer not to deviate from them. It might be the way you read the sections of the morning paper in a specific order or how you typically start off your workday. Sometimes these routines become rituals that control and dominate our lives. In one notable case, a British boy with Tourette’s had OCD that compelled him to step correctly on a white road marking. On the morning of 11 September 2001, he neglected to fulfil his compulsion and ended up traumatized because he believed that he was personally responsible for the attacks.³⁴

The OCD Circuit

The symptoms of OCD are the obsessions (the relentless intrusive thoughts, usually about something bad happening) and the compulsions (the repetitive, ritualistic behaviours often enacted to alleviate the obsessions).³⁵ Karen, a thirty-four-year-old mother of four, used to obsess that some harm would befall her children unless she carried out certain counting rituals. For example, when she smoked and drank coffee, she had to smoke four cigarettes in a row and drink four cups of coffee, otherwise something bad would happen to her children. She knew this was irrational, but if she didn’t perform her counting ritual, she experienced extreme anxiety.³⁶ This sets up a feedback loop in behaviour whereby performing the ritual alleviates the mental anguish and strengthens the grip OCD has over its sufferer.

What starts this cycle of ritual off in the first place? The obsessions that plague sufferers typically derive from concerns that could pose a real threat such as contamination fears. What appears to go wrong is the evaluation of the perceived threat and the proportional balance of engaging in behaviours to address those concerns. This must be due to a brain disorder that is as yet not fully understood but may be linked to Tourette’s syndrome. There is certainly a heritability factor with OCD, running higher in families, and more common in identical than non-identical twins.

One current theory³⁷ is that there is an imbalance of activity of the PFC, the ACC and the caudate nucleus (CN) of the basal ganglia – the so-called ‘OCD circuit’. Functional imaging reveals that activity within this corticobasal ganglia network is higher in OCD sufferers compared to normal individuals, and increases during provocation of symptoms, but that it is attenuated following successful treatment.

The PFC supports the executive functions for planning and suppressing thoughts and behaviours while the ACC interconnects the frontal lobes with the limbic system of the midbrain and is related to motivation. Together, the PFC and ACC may signal the perceived importance of stimuli that trigger ritualistic behaviours. The CN is involved with initiating intentional behaviours. For example, disruption of this region can result in the inability to start movements (as in Parkinson’s disease) or an inability to stop movements (as in Huntington’s disease). Drugs that increase activity of the serotonin neurotransmitter, which decreases the activity of the CN, have been found to alleviate the symptoms of OCD. But that does not mean that the disorder is caused by overactivity of the CN. Rather, it may simply be a consequence of the behaviour, which is why therapies that work to limit the compulsions seem to produce a reduction in caudate nucleus activity as well.

The work on the brain circuitry of compulsions and ritualistic behaviour is another clear line of evidence to support the proposition that the self most of us experience is an illusion. This work reveals that we are in constant conflict with competing goals and drives and for some unfortunate individuals, pathological behaviours reveal when the competition gets out of balance. This is the web metaphor again. You might argue that these victims have a self that is not in control and would prefer not to have to engage in rituals in the same way that an addict would prefer not to be addicted. However, evoking an idealized notion of what we would want to be does not mean that this individual, the Great Selfini, necessarily exists.

Ego-Depletion

The young Japanese actress is a quietly spoken, twenty-four-year-old former ballerina, with a perfectly symmetrical angular face and long dark hair – so typical of Asian beauties. Aoyoma has large almond eyes and an enchanting smile. She is the director’s on-screen visualization of vulnerability and innocence. But her performance in the infamous torture scene in Takashi Miike’s cult horror, Audition (1999), is so shocking and indelible that it instantaneously propelled this movie into cinematic notoriety. Believing that all men lie, the beautiful but psychotic Aoyoma tells her lover that, ‘Pain never lies,’ as she proceeds to stick needles into his eyes, chirping sweetly, ‘Kiri … Kiri … Kiri’ (‘Deeper … Deeper … Deeper’). She then amputates his left foot with a wire saw, laughing gleefully, like an innocent child as we watch the bloody gore, hear the sound of serrating bone and the ‘ping’ as the wire recoils through the stump. It is so cinematically graphic that most people in the audience squirm in their seats, cover their eyes or simply walk out of the cinema.

Most people, that is, except for those taking part in psychologist Matt Field’s experiments at Liverpool University. Field was showing them the infamous Audition torture scene for a study on self-control. Half of the student volunteers were told not to turn away and that they must not show any emotion. They had to resist the nausea and overwhelming feelings of disgust. They had to watch the violence through gritted teeth. They had to control themselves. The other half of the group simply watched the torture scene but were allowed to respond naturally. They were nauseated. They were disgusted. Many closed their eyes. One student fainted. Their mirroring system had gone into empathetic meltdown.

What kind of sadist is Matt Field? How did this study ever get through the university ethics committee? Actually, he is a very likeable chap who is trying to understand some of modern society’s worst scourges – alcoholism and drug addiction. It turns out that after being forced to sit through an extreme Japanese horror movie, those participants who were instructed to control their emotions needed a stiff drink.³⁸ After filling out some bogus questionnaires, both groups were allowed to have as many beers as they liked as part of the reward for taking part in the study. The group that was forced to suppress their emotions drank half as much again as the group that was allowed to wear their hearts on their sleeves. The effect was massive. And it doesn’t have to be extreme horror. Tearjerkers, like Terms of Endearment, also compel us to respond emotionally, but if we try to suppress our feelings this makes us vulnerable to temptations.

Field, along with a growing body of addiction experts, believe that self-control or willpower is a key component to understanding why some of us succumb to substance abuse after enduring stress. Whenever we exert self-control, it comes at a cost – a cost that makes us more susceptible to temptation later. This may be one of the reasons why so many of us give into behaviours that are potentially self-defeating. Most of us drink too much, eat too much or engage in activities that we would prefer to avoid or at best limit.³⁹ And yet, most of us fail, despite our best intentions to control our behaviour.

Roy Baumeister is a psychologist who believes in the concept of willpower and the reality of the self.⁴⁰ He does not think it is an illusion. Moreover, he thinks the self has three different components: the self as subjective awareness (‘I’), the self as defined by relationships with others (‘me’) and the self with the mental muscle power to make decisions and avoid temptation (executive functions). Whenever we succumb to the temptations we would rather avoid, Baumeister calls this ‘ego-depletion’ as if the self has some kind of mental muscle that can become fatigued.⁴¹ With self-control, there is only so much effort you can allocate, and when this becomes depleted you become vulnerable to behaviours and thoughts that want to take over.

Ego-depletion can be induced in a number of different ways. It doesn’t have to be by sitting through movies of extreme emotional or violent content. All sorts of experiences can deplete our ego strength, from enduring bad smells, tackling difficult puzzles, putting up with others in crowded situations or even being electrocuted with an unpredictable mild shock.⁴² The need to control and the possibility that our willpower is limited, mean that we find it difficult to resist our urges afterward. We eat more junk food, drink more alcohol, spend more time looking at scantily clad members of the opposite sex⁴³ (especially if we are in a stable relationship and usually have to resist this temptation) and generally fail to control our self as much as we think we can or would like to.

Even when we do things that we think make us look more acceptable to others in the group, such as presenting oneself as competent and likeable to a hostile audience, we are still draining our egos of willpower.⁴⁴ That’s why we always feel like a stiff drink after a job interview. If we were just to act our selves, we are less stressed by these experiences. Even bosses feel it. Having to reprimand others or ostracize others when it is not in your nature to do so is ego-depleting.⁴⁵ In an attempt to fit in with others’ expectations by changing how we present our self, we are creating unnecessary distortions of control that will come back to haunt us in moments of temptation. Adopting public personas that are at odds with our true emotional profiles may come at a cost. Individuals engage in behaviours that are the antithesis to their reputation, precisely because they are a rebound against the extreme positions that they are expected to maintain in public. Is this why politicians and judges seem to be routinely arrested for cruising for prostitutes?

Much of this sounds so obvious that one has to question whether you need to argue for some form of special mental muscle. Is it just another metaphor? Actually, Baumeister thinks not. He has shown that the brain needs to work out, to exert willpower, and this requires energy. Glucose is one of the brain’s vital fuels, and Baumeister and his colleagues have shown that glucose levels are lowered during ego-depleting tasks.⁴⁶ In one experiment, adults had to have a discussion with a Hispanic interviewer about equal opportunities in which they had to avoid displaying any prejudice. Those who scored highly on questionnaire-based measures of racism had lower blood sugar than those who had no problem with interracial interactions. The good news is that you can reduce your ego-depletion. After drinking one of those sugary energy drinks, the glucose is absorbed into the bloodstream at a rate of thirty calories per minute and, after about ten minutes, can be metabolized to feed the brain. Compared to those who had been given an artificially sweetened drink, those who had a sugary drink were much more able to deal with stress. In one of their experiments, adults were asked read words about death. This is usually ego-depleting as it has a negative effect on adults’ subsequent ability to solve a later word puzzle task. However, not for those hyped up on a sugary drink. Reading about death did not affect their performance at all. Maybe that’s why we should order the extra large sugary Coke at the cinema if we are going to see horror movies like Audition.

All of this means that much of our efforts of self-control may be misguided. Most of us want to diet but what do we do? We resist the temptation of that first chocolate only to find that the craving is even greater. Reducing our caloric intake with the initial chocolate reduces our blood sugar and makes us more susceptible to ego-depletion later. It’s a vicious circle. Even if you manage to skip a meal, you may find your self gorging on alcohol or cigarettes or some other vice. Even moderation must be done in moderation.

Bladder Control

In an extension of his muscle metaphor, Baumeister believes you can exercise your willpower to improve your self-control. For example, he found that by getting students to monitor and control their posture over two weeks, they were much better on experiments that measured self-control compared to those allowed to lounge around. Or you might consider the power stance. Simply puffing out your shoulders and clenching your fists gives you more willpower ⁴⁷ and increases testosterone levels in both men and women.⁴⁸ Like the effects of forcing a smile, merely simulating body postures and actions can elicit the corresponding biological changes and mental states that usually trigger them in the first place.⁴⁹

Another important key to success appears to depend on changing routines. Much of the problem of temptation stems from the habitual behaviours that we develop. It is much easier to give in to a set of behaviours than to create a new set. We are literally creatures of habit and so we easily fall into cycles of behaviour that seem difficult to break. If you really want to change your behaviour, then don’t try to make your self stop. This strategy will only rebound and make you more vulnerable. Instead, find an alternative to replace the activity. Not only does this provide a different scenario to occupy your activity, but it avoids the curse of ego-depletion.

Otherwise, you could simply practice holding your bladder and not going to the toilet. Mirjam Tuk found that after she drank several cups of coffee to stay awake during a long lecture, toward the end she was bursting to go but had to wait. She wondered if all the mental effort she recruited to avoid an embarrassing accident could be used to suppress other urges. In one of her studies,⁵⁰ participants drank five cups of water (about 750 millilitres) and then, after about forty minutes, the time it takes the water to reach the bladder, gave them an adult delay-of-gratification task. They could choose a cash reward of $16, which would be given to them on the following day, or $30 in thirty-five days. In comparison to those who had not drunk the water, more of the participants who were bursting to go held out for the larger reward. Tuk even suggests that any type of financial decision-making might benefit from increased bladder control. While these findings seem to go against the ego-depletion account, Tuk thinks the difference might be explained by the fact that bladder control is largely under automatic unconscious processes, whereas ego-depletion is more cognitive. It remains to be seen how this story plays out in children, but I think it is very unlikely that we will be attempting such studies with children in our laboratory – I mean can you imagine the mess to clean up?

A Kid in the Candy Store

Remarkable though the ego-depletion research is, one does not need to evoke a core self at the helm of our decision processes and behaviours. Each of the experiments and findings can equally be described not so much as the ego under pressure but rather the shift in balance between all the external things that compete for activity. It certainly helps to evoke the self illusion in these situations because it provides us with a protagonist who fails to live up to expectations and ideals. Like a kid in a candy store, we see temptation all around us but maintain that the self is the one being tempted into making the decisions and choices. What if it is the other way around? What if there is a kid who likes different types of candy but each different candy competes for his attention? Each candy that pulls the kid closer is offset by yet another more delicious one that looms into view. Now the decisions and choices are not within the kid but reflect the relative strengths of everything out there that jostle for attention. Certainly, there is a kid being tempted in this candy store metaphor, but we are mistaken in locating decisions within the child. The same goes for free will.

Ego-depletion sounds like it involves some form of self, does it not? So does the self-control when avoiding eating the marshmallow. Who is making decisions and avoiding temptation if not the self? In his book, The Ego Trick, philosopher Julian Baggini points out that it is impossible to talk about the mental processes and behaviours of a person without invoking the ego approach.⁵¹ We find it difficult to imagine how decisions and behaviours could equally arise without a self. For example, we often hear that addicts cannot control themselves, but is that really true? Are they totally at the mercy of the drugs and behaviours that ruin their lives? No one is denying that addiction is a really difficult problem to overcome but even the addict can avoid drugs if some immediate consequence looms larger. Few addicts would take that next drink or inject that drug if a gun was placed to their forehead. Clearly, in these situations the imminent threat of death trumps so-called uncontrollable urges. They are only uncontrollable in some contexts in which the competing influences do not match up to the allure of intoxication. The problem for addicts then is that the negative consequences of their behaviours do not match up to the immediate gratification that their addictions provide.⁵² They would prefer to not be addicted but that requires prolonged abstention, which is more difficult. When we talk about choices made by individuals, there are multiple influences and drives that compete for those decisions. Many of these arise from external circumstances.

Even if the self and our ability to exercise free will is an illusion, not all is lost. In fact, beliefs seem to produce consequences in our behaviour. The ego-depletion we have just described appears to only work in those individuals who believe that willpower is a limited resource.⁵³ In other words, if we think that our self-control is limited, then we show ego-depletion. If we don’t believe in limited self-control, we don’t show ego-depletion.

Beliefs about self-control, from wherever they may derive, are powerful motivators of human behaviour. For example, consider ten-year-old children who were told that their performance on a test was either due to their natural intelligence or their ability to work hard.⁵⁴ Both sets were then given a really difficult second task that was well beyond their capability, which no one could complete. However, in a third test, the children who thought their initial successes on the first task were due to their intelligence also gave up more easily because they attributed their failure on the second task to their limited natural ability, which made them less likely to persevere on the last task. In contrast, children who thought their performance was all down to hard work not only stuck longer on the third task, but also enjoyed it more. So it’s better to tell your kids that they are hard workers rather than simply smart.

The same can be said for free will. When we believe that we are the masters of our own destiny, we behave differently than those who deny the existence of free will and believe everything is determined. This has been studied experimentally using priming. Priming is a way of changing our mindset by manipulating the sorts of information we are made to focus on. (Again, this is a strong indicator that our self is influenced by what we are exposed to!) Half the adults were primed to think in a determinist way by reading stories that refuted the existence of free will such as, ‘Ultimately, we are biological computers – designed by evolution, built through genetics, and programmed by the environment.’ The remaining adults read free-will-endorsing statements such as, ‘I am able to override the genetic and environmental factors that sometimes influence my behaviour.’ Adults who were primed to reject free will were much more likely to cheat on an arithmetic exam and overpaid themselves with greater rewards than adults who read the free will endorsements.⁵⁵

To most of us, the absence of free will is tantamount to a determinism that sounds pretty much like fatalism – no matter what you do, you can’t change things. That’s a pretty demoralizing outlook on life that is bound to undermine any motivation to do anything. Maybe that’s why belief in free will predicts not only better job performance but also expected career success.⁵⁶ Workers who believe in free will outperform their colleagues, and this is recognized and rewarded by their supervisors. So when we believe in free will, we enjoy life more.

The moral of the tale is that, even if free will doesn’t exist, then maybe it is best to ignore what the neuroscientists or philosophers say. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. The very act of believing means that you change the way you behave in ways that will benefit you. And the main reason this is true is that not only is it important for our self-motivation, but also for how others view us. We like people who are decisive because we believe they are positive and driven, and that makes most of us feel more comfortable than someone who can’t seem to reach a decision.

Finally, just because something doesn’t really exist doesn’t mean that believing that it does is pointless. Fantasy doesn’t really exist but the world would be a much more impoverished place without storytelling. Also, you cannot readily abandon the belief. As the one who has done the most to identify the Great Selfini, Wegner wrote, ‘If the illusion could be dispelled by explanation, I should be some kind of robot by now.’ You cannot escape the self illusion.