A Mind of Its Own Read online




  Praise for the first edition of A Mind of Its Own

  ‘We are all vain bigots, thanks to the foibles of the human brain, so argues Fine in her witty survey of psychology experiments … An ideal gift for anyone interested in psychology’ Focus

  ‘Clear, accessible writing makes her a science writer to watch.’ Metro

  ‘Filled with quotable stories and interactive ways of how our brain has a buoyant ego of its own and is not the objective tool we might like to believe’ Bookseller

  ‘A light and amusing introduction to the brain and how it works on our perceptions and actions’ Publishing News

  ‘Consistently well-written and meticulously researched’ Alain de Botton, Sunday Times

  ‘In breezy demotic, Fine offers an entertaining tour of current thinking … [she] is especially fascinating on the blurring of the line between pathological delusions and the normal deluded brain’ Telegraph

  ‘Fine with a sharp sense of humour and an intelligent sense of reality, slaps an Asbo on the hundred billion grey cells that – literally – have shifty, ruthless, self-serving minds of their own.’ The Times

  ‘Fine’s style is chirpy … [with] many affectionately amusing scenes’ Guardian

  ‘Engaging, intelligent’ Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Fine’s flair for the humorous and anecdotal makes this a delightful read.’ Irish Times

  ‘Fine sets out to demonstrate that the human brain is vainglorious and stubborn. She succeeds brilliantly.’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘This is one of the most interesting and amusing accounts of how we think we think – I think.’ Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘A fascinating, funny, disconcerting and lucid book. By the end you’ll realise that your brain can (and does) run rings around you.’ Helen Dunmore

  ‘Witty and informative’ Philip Pullman

  ‘Excellent … Fine’s very engaging and chatty style … will delight many readers … Fine has got it just right. Although she is an academic, she writes like a human being … All in all this short and enjoyable book is a must for anyone who wants to get a better understanding of what their brain gets up to when they aren’t watching it. First class.’ Brian Clegg, www.popularscience.co.uk

  ‘A fun introduction to some of the factors that can distort our reasoning. I’d recommend it to anyone who is just getting interested in the topic, or as a gift for anyone you know who still thinks that their personal point of view is unprejudiced and reliable.’ Psychologist

  ‘Fine is that rare academic who’s also an excellent writer. Highly recommended for all public and undergraduate libraries.’ Library Journal

  ‘Remarkably entertaining’ Los Angeles Times

  A Mind of Its Own

  How your brain distorts and deceives

  Cordelia Fine

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Vain Brain

  For a softer, kinder reality

  Chapter 2: The Emotional Brain

  Sweaty fingers in all the pies

  Chapter 3: The Immoral Brain

  The terrible toddler within

  Chapter 4: The Deluded Brain

  A slapdash approach to the truth

  Chapter 5: The Pigheaded Brain

  Loyalty a step too far

  Chapter 6: The Secretive Brain

  Exposing the guile of the mental butler

  Chapter 7: The Weak-willed Brain

  The prima donna within

  Chapter 8: The Bigoted Brain

  ‘Thug … tart … slob … nerd … airhead’

  Epilogue: The Vulnerable Brain

  Index

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  My sincere thanks go to Simon Flynn and his colleagues at Icon Books for their assistance, in so many ways, with this book. Their contribution is greatly appreciated. I am also most grateful to my agent Barbara Lowenstein and her colleagues, for their advice and support on so many matters. Thanks, too, go to my editors at W.W. Norton for all they did for the US version of the book. For my mother, who always said just the right thing when I needed encouragement, I have the deepest gratitude. And finally, without my husband’s very practical support, I would still be working on Chapter 1. Thank you.

  Dr Cordelia Fine studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, followed by an M.Phil in Criminology at Cambridge University and a Ph.D in Psychology at University College London. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University.

  Introduction

  Do you feel that you can trust your own brain? So maybe it falters for a moment, faced with the thirteen times table. It may occasionally send you into a room in search of something, only to abandon you entirely. And, if yours is anything like mine, it may stubbornly refuse to master the parallel park. Yet these are petty and ungrateful gripes when we consider all that our brains actually do for us. Never before have we been made so aware of the extraordinary complexity and sophistication of those one hundred billion brain cells that make up the engine of the mind. And barely a day goes by when these gathered neurons aren’t exalted in a newspaper article highlighting a newly discovered wonder of their teamwork.

  From day to day, we take our brains somewhat for granted, but (particularly with this book in hand) it’s likely that you’re feeling a little quiet pride on behalf of your own. And, reading books on the subject of its own self aside, what else can’t the thing do? After all, it tells you who you are, and what to think, and what’s out there in the world around you. Its ruminations, sensations and conclusions are confided to you and you alone. For absolutely everything you know about anything, it is the part of yourself you have to thank. You might think that, if there’s one thing in this world you can trust, it’s your own brain. You are, after all, as intimate as it is possible to be.

  But the truth of the matter – as revealed by the quite extraordinary and fascinating research described in this book – is that your unscrupulous brain is entirely undeserving of your confidence. It has some shifty habits that leave the truth distorted and disguised. Your brain is vainglorious. It’s emotional and immoral. It deludes you. It is pigheaded, secretive and weak-willed. Oh, and it’s also a bigot. This is more than a minor inconvenience. That fleshy walnut inside your skull is all you have in order to know yourself and to know the world. Yet, thanks to the masquerading of an untrustworthy brain with a mind of its own, much of what you think you know is not quite as it seems.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Vain Brain

  For a softer, kinder reality

  A week after Icon commissioned this book, I discovered that I was pregnant with my second child. The manuscript was due three days before the baby. My husband, a project manager both by temperament and employ, drew up a project plan for me. To my eye, it entirely failed to reflect the complexity, subtlety, and unpredictability of the process of writing a book. It was little more than a chart showing the number of words I had to write per week, and when I was going to write them. It also had me scheduled to work every weekend until the baby was born.

  ‘This plan has me scheduled to work every weekend until the baby is born’, I said.

  ‘Plus all the annual leave from your job’, my husband added.

  I felt that he had missed the point. ‘But when do I rest?’

  ‘Rest?’ My husband pretended to examine the plan. ‘As I see it, you rest for two days after you finish the manuscript, shortly before going into labour, giving birth and having your life entirely taken over by the nutritional demands of a newborn.’

  I had a brief image of myself in labour, tell
ing the midwife between gasps of gas what a treat it was to have some time to myself.

  ‘What if I can’t do it?’ I asked.

  My husband gave me a ‘this really isn’t difficult’ look. ‘This is how you do it’, he said, stabbing the plan. ‘You write this many words a week.’

  He was right, I told myself. Of course I could do it. It was irrelevant that I was pregnant. After all, growing a baby is easy – no project plan required. My first trimester nausea and exhaustion would soon pass. The brains of other, weaker women might be taken hostage by pregnancy hormones, but not my brain. My bump would remain well enough contained to enable me to reach the computer keyboard. And absolutely, definitely, without a doubt, the baby would not come inconveniently early. Of course I could write the book.

  I then did something very foolish. I began research on this chapter – the vain brain. The vain brain that embellishes, enhances and aggrandises you. The vain brain that excuses your faults and failures, or simply rewrites them out of history. The vain brain that sets you up on a pedestal above your peers. The vain brain that misguidedly thinks you invincible, invulnerable and omnipotent. The brain so very vain that it even considers the letters that appear in your name to be more attractive than those that don’t.1

  I didn’t want to know any of this. But then it got worse. I went on to read just how essential these positive illusions are. They keep your head high and your heart out of your boots. They keep you from standing atop railway bridges gazing contemplatively at approaching trains. Without a little deluded optimism, your immune system begins to wonder whether it’s worth the effort of keeping you alive. And, most extraordinary, it seems that sometimes your vain brain manages to transform its grandiose beliefs into reality. Buoyed by a brain that loves you like a mother, you struggle and persevere – happily blind to your own inadequacies, arrogantly dismissive of likely obstacles – and actually achieve your goals.

  I needed my vain brain back. Immediately.

  Luckily, I managed to regain my optimism, and the manuscript was delivered a few days before the baby. About three months later, however, my agent contacted me with the news that the US publisher W.W. Norton was interested in the book. In fact, they liked it so much that they wanted another hundred pages of it. (My husband didn’t know which to open first – the champagne, or the spreadsheet.) This was a daunting prospect: just writing a shopping list can take all day when there is a small baby in the house. Thankfully, though, my positive illusions triumphed once again. Pushing aside all dispiriting thoughts of the difficulties ahead, I began to sharpen the pencils. And, as the existence of this new, longer version of the book proves, again, it worked for me. But now it’s time for me to attempt to spoil your chances of happiness, health and success by disillusioning you.

  While it troubles philosophers, for the rest of us it is vastly more comfortable that we can only know ourselves and the world through the distorting lens of our brains. Freud suggested that the ego ‘rejects the unbearable idea’, and since then experimental psychologists have been peeling back the protective layers encasing our self-esteem to reveal the multitude of strategies our brains use to keep our egos plump and self-satisfied. Let’s start with some basic facts. When asked, people will modestly and reluctantly confess that they are, for example, more ethical, more nobly motivated employees, and better drivers than the average person.2 In the latter case, this even includes people interviewed in hospital shortly after extraction from the mangled wrecks that were once their cars. No one considers themselves to fall in the bottom half of the heap, and statistically, that’s not possible. But in a sample of vain brains, it’s inevitable.

  For one thing, if it’s at all possible then your brain will interpret the question in the way that suits you best. If I were asked how my driving compares with others, I would rate myself better than average without hesitation. My driving record at speeds above one mile per hour is flawless. Yet below this speed my paintwork, and any stationary object I am attempting to park near, are in constant peril. These expensive unions between the stationary and the near-stationary are so frequent that at one point I actually considered enveloping the vulnerable portions of my car in bubble-wrap. My mother, in contrast, can reverse with exquisite precision into a parking spot at whiplash speeds. On the other hand, she regularly rams into the back of cars that ‘should have gone’ at roundabouts. She, too, considers her driving to be superb. You begin to see how everyone is able to stake their claim to be in the superior half of the driving population. If the trait or skill that you’re being asked about is helpfully ambiguous, you interpret the question to suit your own idiosyncratic strengths.3

  Even if you are unambiguously hopeless in an area of life, your brain gets round this by simply diminishing the importance of that skill. I, for example, cannot draw. I am the artistic equivalent of being tone deaf. However, this doesn’t bother me in the slightest because to my brain, drawing is an unnecessary extra. I can see that it would be useful if one were an artist, but in the same way that it’s useful for a contortionist to be able to wrap his legs behind his head. Essential for a small minority, but nothing more than a showy party trick for everyone else.4 And in a final clever enhancement of this self-enhancement, people believe that their weaknesses are so common that they should hardly even be considered weaknesses, yet their strengths are rare and special.5

  What these strategies reveal is that a bit of ambiguity can be taken a very long way by a vain brain. The next technique in your brain’s arsenal of ego defence exploits ambiguity to the full. When we explain to ourselves and others why things have gone well or badly, we prefer explanations that cast us in the best possible light. Thus we are quick to assume that our successes are due to our own sterling qualities, while responsibility for failures can often be conveniently laid at the door of bad luck or damn fool others. This self-serving bias, as it is known, is all too easy to demonstrate in the psychology lab.6 People arbitrarily told that they did well on a task (for example, puzzle solving) will take the credit for it, whereas people arbitrarily told that they did badly will assign responsibility elsewhere, such as with their partner on the task. The brain is especially self-advancing when poor performance could deliver a substantial bruise to your ego.7 People told that puzzle solving is related to intelligence are much more likely to be self-serving than those told that puzzle solving is just something that people who don’t like reading books do on trains. The bigger the potential threat, the more self-protective the vain brain becomes. In a final irony, people think that others are more susceptible to the self-serving bias than they are themselves.8 (Allow yourself a moment to take that sentence fully on board, should you need to.)

  Thus when life or psychology researchers are kind enough to leave the reasons for success or failure ambiguous, the self-serving bias is readily and easily engaged to protect and nurture the ego. However, our vain brains aren’t completely impervious to reality. No matter how partial my explanation of why I added up the restaurant bill incorrectly, I have no intention of applying for any professorships in mathematics. In a way, this is definitely good. When we lose all sight of our ugly face in reality’s mirror, this generally means that we have also lost grip on our sanity. But on the other hand, who wants to see the warts and all with pristine clarity? We’ve already seen how the vain brain casts our features at their most flattering angle. Now we’ll rummage deeper into its bag of tricks. For by calling on powerful biases in memory and reasoning, the brain can selectively edit and censor the truth, both about ourselves and the world, making for a softer, kinder and altogether more palatable reality.

  Failure is perhaps the greatest enemy of the ego, and that’s why the vain brain does its best to barricade the door against this unwelcome guest. The self-serving bias we’ve already encountered provides a few extra services to this end. One approach is to tell yourself that, in retrospect, the odds were stacked against you and failure was all but inevitable. Researchers have found that optimists in particu
lar use this strategy, which has been dubbed ‘retroactive pessimism’, and it makes failure easier to digest.9

  ‘Self-handicappers’, as they are called, exploit the self-serving bias in a different way. In self-handicapping, the brain makes sure that it has a non-threatening excuse for failure, should it occur. If you can blame your poor performance in an intelligence test on your lack of effort, for example, then your flattering self-image of your intelligence and competence can remain unchallenged. Self-handicapping also enhances the sweetness of success when it occurs, creating a win-win situation for your ego. Drug use, medical symptoms, anxiety … they can all be used to shield the ego from failure. Take, for example, a group of students who reported suffering severe anxiety during tests. According to a trio of refreshingly brusque researchers, the brains of these devious strategists exploit their test anxiety, whenever they can, to serve ignoble ends.10 The researchers gave their test-anxious students a difficult two-part test, purportedly a measure of general intelligence. In the interval between the two parts of the test, the students were asked to say how anxious they were feeling about the test, and how much effort they were putting into it. However, right before this survey, some of the students had their potential handicap snatched away from them. They were told that a remarkable feature of the test they were taking was that their score was impervious to anxiety and – no matter how nervous they were – their score would be an accurate measure of their intellectual ability.

  This was cunning as well as mean. If a test-anxious student merely reports accurately how anxious she is feeling, with no self-serving motivations, it should make no difference to her whether she thinks that anxiety might reduce her score on the test – she should declare the same level of anxiety regardless. However, if test anxiety is used to protect self-esteem, then it will be important whether she thinks that anxiety offers a plausible excuse for poor performance on the test. If she thinks that scores are adversely affected by nerves, she will be tempted to protect herself against possible failure by claiming greater susceptibility to the jitters. This is exactly what the researchers found. Only students who thought that their anxiety offered its usual non-threatening excuse for low marks hoicked up their self-reports of anxiety. The other students, who knew that they wouldn’t be able to blame their nerves, didn’t bother. They did something else instead. In place of their handicap of choice, these students instead claimed to have made less effort on the test. It takes more than a few psychologists to stymie the cunning of a determinedly vain brain.