Making up the Mind

In an interview on Lying

Why have you decided to focus on lying?

All of the books I have chosen here are about lying, and four of them are quoted in my book Why We Lie. In psychology and in therapy we spend a lot of time saying of a client, ‘He’s in denial.’ Of course what we mean is that he’s lying to himself. That sounds rather untherapeutic doesn’t it? But we are always really writing about our clients in terms of the lies they are telling themselves. And they don’t change until they face up to the truth, to the things that they have been lying to themselves about.

Then, of course, we had Bush and Blair, and Blair being so sincere [about Iraq] when there can only have been a handful of people in the country who believed him. That set me thinking about it, about why we lie. Then along came the recent global economic crisis, which was all about lying to other people and lying to yourself: as if house prices can rise for ever. What nonsense!

This first book is by Chris Frith, Making up the Mind, How the Brain Creates our Mental World. Everything that I have written has been based on the proposition that what determines our behaviour isn’t what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us. The basis of that is what neuroscientists have been showing over the last 20-odd years, which is that the way our brain operates means that we can’t see reality directly but only the pictures that our brain creates. Chris is an academic psychologist and emeritus professor at University College London. He wrote this not as an academic book but to help the ordinary layperson understand the way our brain works – it’s very readable, although you do have to pay attention. There are two quotes I use over and over again. Here is one: ‘Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world – it may feel as if we have direct access but this is an illusion.’

I had two cataract operations recently, and of course you can’t see anything. The eye they are operating on has a bright light shining into it; you only hear the voices of the surgeon and his team. During the operations, particularly the first one where I was paying really keen attention, my brain was actually just receiving random sensations but of those sensations my brain created something meaningful. On my right side I could seen rings which my brain was turning into Saturn’s rings, which I had seen in a television documentary. And on the other side, where I was seeing light shining through the blue cloth in patches, what my brain did was turn it into a framed picture of a blue sky with white fluffy clouds.

In an interview on The Mind and The Brain

Tell me about your next book.

It’s by Chris Frith, Uta Frith’s husband, and it’s about consciousness, and how we are conscious, and how our brains enable us to be conscious, and to have awareness of the world around us. The point he makes is that, in fact, our conscious perception of the world is very different from what the world is actually like. Some parts of the brain process everything in our environment, but we’re not conscious of that; if we were, we would be completely overloaded with information. His main thesis in this book is that our brain creates an impression of a coherent world that makes sense, that we’re in control of. There are some nice examples from neuroscience showing that. For example, the studies by Libet from the 1980s in which he measured electrical waves in the brain to show that it produces something called a ‘readiness potential’ – about half a second before you make a movement, the brain starts preparing the movement. But what’s really interesting is that if you get people to estimate when they had the intention to move, that intention occurs many hundreds of milliseconds after the readiness potential. In other words, what seems to happen – and this has been replicated by many different experiments – is that your brain starts to produce electrical signals which prepare the movement before you feel you have the conscious intention to move. That’s just a very nice example of how our brain is constantly making us do things, but our conscious experience is actually constructed afterwards. The idea is that our brains are just reacting to changes in the environment, and this feeling of free will is completely illusionary. That’s the most extreme argument, but the evidence from neuroscience suggests that that could be the case. Other examples in the book are things like visual illusions, which are all based on the same principle – even if you know it’s an illusion, you still perceive the illusion; your brain is constructing a story. Another example is whenever you move your eyes around, you have what’s called saccadic suppression – a ‘saccade’ is an eye movement. We know that the eye is effectively blind during the movement, but we don’t experience that blindness, because our brain fills in the gaps. 

It makes something like a google cache of the scene in front of us and then draws on it?

That’s quite a nice idea because there is a cache, based on previous experience, which the brain uses to predict what should be there. So the point is that we don’t just react to the world, our brains predict it way ahead of time. The other point about Chris’s idea is, if our construction of the world – our consciousness – goes wrong, then he argues that it can lead to delusions and hallucinations. The book is a real joy to read, because his style is quite chatty and he has a quite funny dialogue between himself and a fictional professor of English who’s highly intelligent, of course, but who knows little about the science of the brain.