Well, recently a subdomain of philosophy has appeared on the scene, called experimental philosophy. Philosophers have long pontificated about how people think, and base their thought experiments on the assumptions of “folk psychology” — naive, common-sense assumptions about our everyday behaviors and why we think and act the way we do. Until recently, philosophers have pulled from the work of scientists (at best) or just ignored the science (at worst). But now, experimental philosophers are performing actual experiments, controlling variables and collecting data. Take, for example, the entertaining video below of comedian Eugene Mirman explaining a recent experiment:

The results in the video come from work done by Joshua Knobe. This and a series of related experiments on folk intuitions of intentional action are still available online. You can run through the experiments yourself, and learn how other people responded.

It remains to be seen whether experimental philosophy has something unique to offer scientifically, above and beyond the work already being done by cognitive scientists, social psychologists, neuroscientists and related fields of science. That is, is there something about these experiments that makes them different from similar social psychology research exploring how peoples’ intuitions are pumped by the wording of a question or the context of a situation?

Regardless, experimental philosophy certainly represents an important step toward integrating scientific results into philosophy. Given how relevant research has been to understanding things like the brain and its relation to how we think, this is crucial if philosophy is to address the world as we understand it today, rather than the world as Aristotle and his philosophical descendants understood it.

Furthermore, the study showed that priming someone to feel out of control increases their support for and defense of government (especially if they perceive the government as generally benevolent). It’s as if people change their beliefs about the orderliness of the external world based on how they feel inside about their personal level of control. Kay and colleagues label this a “compensatory control mechanism” — when your perception of personal control goes down, perceptions of external control go up to compensate.

To test this general explanation, the researchers asked whether the effect would work in reverse. If you prime people to see an external source of control as chaotic or unjust, will they perceive a higher level of personal control as a result? The researchers had subjects watch a video story about an HIV patient who sought government medical assistance. Participants saw one of two versions of the video: in one version, the government was depicted as effectively helpful; in the other, it was not.

After seeing one of those two videos, participants played a simple computer game where they repeatedly pressed the space bar (or didn’t press it) in order to make a green circle appear on the screen. They didn’t know it, but the appearance of the green dot was random, and unrelated to whether or not they pressed the space bar a lot. That is, they had no control over the green dot’s appearance. The participants were asked afterward how much control they felt in the task, and those who had seen the video of an ineffecient, unjust government rated their personal level of control as higher than those who had watched the success story. In other words, if you feel like the world is chaotic, your feelings of personal control go up to compensate, just like your perceptions of external control go up when your feelings of personal control are low.

This finding is backed up by similar results published in Science by Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky (2008). In a series of experiments, they found that people lacking control tend to perceive patterns where there are none: they see false correlations, imaginary figures and conspiracies, and they believe superstitious behavior works.

In one experiment, participants who received random performance feedback on a task afterward tended to report higher need for personal structure (e.g. “I enjoy routines”) than those who didn’t get random feedback. Those with random feedback in the task also tended to later see more patterns in random, “snowy” images (like TV static), compared to those who didn’t receive random feedback.

Another experiment primed participants to feel out of control (as with Kay’s study, there were asked to recall a time they lacked control), after which they were more likely to see a connection between supersitious behavior and outcomes in a story. For example, in a story where someone knocks on wood before an important meeting and then the meeting goes well, those who were primed to feel lack of control tended to report higher connection between the superstitious behavior and the outcome.

Those who were instead primed to feel in control (remembering a time they had control over a situation) were less likely to associate the superstitious behavior with the outcome; they were also less likely to say they intended to perform similar behaviors in the future. Furthermore, those primed to feel out of control also saw more nonexistent pictures in “snowy” images, and tended to see conspiracies in ambiguous stories about a group of people.

In another experiment, Whitson and Galinsky ran participants through a financial investment simulation, where the people were told either that the market was volatile or that it was stable. Those told the market was volatile tended to see false correlations and overestimate rare negative information in a company financial report compared to those told the market was stable; in turn they shifted their investment intentions based on this.

All of this suggests that people have an inherent need to feel in control, and this need unconsciously motivates them to make connections among randomness and see patterns where there are none so as to bring order and predictability back to their world.

For a final experiment, Whitson and Galinsky once again primed people to feel out of control, but this time some subjects were also primed to feel good about themselves by completing a self-affirmation task. Going through this self-affirmation reduced the tendency to see illusory pictures in “snowy” images and also reduced the tendency to see conspiracies in an ambiguous story.

In other words, when people who feel out of control and made to feel more psychologically secure, they are less prone to seeing illusory patterns. Going back to Kay’s study, perhaps self-affirmation would help compensate for a lack of personal control, replacing the need to invoke belief in and support for higher powers like gods and governments.

References
Aaron C. Kay, Danielle Gaucher, Jamie L. Napier, Mitchell J. Callan, Kristin Laurin (2008). God and the government: Testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95 (1), 18-35 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.95.1.18

J. A. Whitson, A. D. Galinsky (2008). Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception Science, 322 (5898), 115-117 DOI: 10.1126/science.1159845

The link above takes you to a great 12-minute segment (after a brief commercial) from the TV show “60 Minutes” about brain-computer interfaces. It’s amazing to see how neuroscience can directly change the lives of people who otherwise might not be able to interact with the world at all.

By recording the electrical activity of the brain (typically the premotor or primary motor cortex, where movements are planned and executed), scientists can translate thought into simple computer commands, out of which more complicated interfaces can be built. For someone with advanced ALS or related conditions, this technology can free their brain to communicate with the outside world despite being locked in an unmoving body.

It’s exciting to see how quickly this technology is moving forward.

Some people are better than others, of course. In the 1960s, Walter Mischel tested young children by giving them a marshmellow. They could eat it immediately if they wanted, but if they waited 15 minutes, they got a second marshmellow. Some kids succeeded in waiting, some didn’t; and it turns out the ability to wait was linked to success later in life.

Self-control is a valuable skill, but is it unique to humans? We can look at our close evolutionary ancestors, the non-human primates, for a hint.

Researcher Michael Beran presented chimpanzees and orangutans with a task similar to the marshmellow task. Each ape subject had a bowl in front of it, and the experimenter slowly added up to 20 chocolate candy pieces to the bowl one at a time, up until the subject took the bowl. So the longer the ape waited, the more chocolate it would get — but chocolate candy is a tempting treat to a chimp or orangutan. Beran showed that they can wait until all the candy is in the bowl before taking it. So it’s not just humans that can show a little self-control in order to maximize their payoff. (In fact, researchers have shown similar results in other animals, like pigeons and rats).

Likewise, Ted Evans and Greg Westergaard gave capuchin monkeys a pretzel or celery stick which they could either eat immediately, or carry over to a far-off box to probe inside for more-preferred food (peanut butter). Many of the monkeys were able to pass up eating the food in their hands in order to save it and use it as a tool elsewhere to get better food.

However, human self-control is not just a matter of waiting a couple minutes to get more marshmellows or M&Ms, or to get a better food item very soon after. We also manage to pass up temptation here and now in order to get payoff much further into the future. We anticipate future needs and motivations that are not present right now (like future hunger), and adjust our behavior accordingly. For example, we save part of our paycheck for rent (or even retirement) instead of spending it all immediately. We show planful self-control. Do primates other than humans manage that feat?

For a long time, the answer seemed to be ‘no’. Primates in captivity will often throw extra food out of their cage once they are done eating, even though they will undoubtedly be hungry later that day or early the next. Like many animals, primates tend to show temporal myopia, a tendency to overvalue immediate circumstances and undervalue or not account for the future.

However, in 2004 researchers clearly demonstrated planful self-control in monkeys (McKenzie et al. 2004). At feeding time, captive squirrel monkeys were offered a choice between a big pile of food and a pile of food half that size, and not surprisingly they preferred the larger pile, even if the smaller one was enough to fill them up immediately. After choosing the large pile, they often took hours to consume all the food, going back to eating after long delays away from the food. But this doesn’t prove they were planning for the future — maybe they were just following a very simple rule to always go for the larger food choice, all else being equal.

So the experimenters did something sneaky. Fifteen minutes after the monkeys chose a food pile, the experimenters started stealing or replinishing the food, such that in the long run the smaller pile actually paid off with more total food. If they kept selecting the larger pile, most of the extra food they didn’t immediately consume would be pilfered. If they started selecting the small pile, however, they would end up getting more food in the long run (when they were hungry again later). Sure enough, the monkeys began inhibiting their natural preference for the large pile (even though it would still completely satiate their current hunger) and chose the small one. They seemed to be passing up extra food now in anticipation of future consequences later. Primates do show planful self-control.

Even cooler than that, however, is a more recent study by Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call. They let apes (orangutans and bonobos) figure out how to solve various problems using different tools; a given problem required using a particular tool, whereas the other tools wouldn’t work. Then for the experiment the apes were allowed to see which problem they would later be presented with, after which they were taken to a room with all the tools laid out. Their task was to pick the correct tool, with no immediate feedback, and if they so chose, to carry it with them. Then up to fourteen hours later, they were allowed back into the room with the problem, and if they had chosen the right tool and kept it with them, they were able to solve the problem and get their food reward.

Sure enough, the apes were able to plan that far in advance, remembering which problem they had seen and anticipating the future need for a particular tool even when the problem in question was out of sight, and alternate tools (which had been just as good at solving other problems previously) were available. It may not seem like self-control per se, but note the behavioral cost that is involved in lugging around a tool all day just so that you can use it the next morning when you’re going to be hungry (even if you’re not hungry and can’t use the tool right now).

So it appears that humans are not the only primates that can show self-control, even in planning for the future. A more interesting question now might be: why are some individuals (human or not) better at self-control than others, and to what extent is it a skill that can be learned and improved with practice?

In Evans and Westergaard’s study, the monkeys that were best at saving the pretzel or celery stick for later use in dipping for peanut butter also tended to be those monkeys with the most tool-using experience. Maybe it is the case that monkeys with self-control (or some other trait related to self-control) were more likely to catch on in tool-using tasks, or maybe practice in tool-using actually led to increased self-control later. Hopefully future experiments will tell.

References
Beran, M. J. (2002). Maintenance of self-imposed delay of gratification by four chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and an orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus). Journal of General Psychology, 129, 49-66 [abstract].

Evans, T. A., & Westergaard, G. C. (2006). Self-control and tool use in tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120, 163-166 [abstract].

McKenzie, T., Cherman, T., Bird, L. R., Naqshbandi, M., & Roberts, W. A. (2004). Can squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) plan for the future? Studies of temporal myopia in food choice. Learning & Behavior, 32, 377-390 [abstract].

Mulcahy, N. J., & Call, J. (2006). Apes save tools for future use. Science, 312, 1038-1040 [abstract].

However, sexism may come in more subtle forms, sometimes labeled benevolent sexism. Paternalist traditions such as opening doors, paying for meals and carrying things may be seen as sexist if they imply a lack of competence on the part of the woman to do these things herself. Patronizing comments may involve ambivalent content, such as praise combined with an implied devalued position (“It’s okay, honey, don’t worry your pretty head about it”). Women may be seen as warm but incompetent, or as needing men’s help. Examples of benevolent sexism are often less clear-cut than hostile sexism.

A 2007 study at the University of Liege looked at the effects of these two types of sexism on women performing job-related tasks. Specifically, women in a trade school or college doing job interview training were told about a potential job opening up at a place that had previously employed only men. The training consisted of (1) a description of the job, and then (2) taking what was described as a standard job interview test involving a simple task.

The Job Description
What the experimenters did was alter the standard job description slightly to add on either hostile sexism or benevolent sexism, versus a control condition with no changes. For example, the hostile sexism description added: “Industry is now restricted to employ a given percentage of people of the weaker sex. I hope women here won’t be offended, they sometimes get so easily upset. You’ll work with men only, but don’t believe what those feminists are saying on TV, they probably exaggerate women’s situation in industry simply to get more favors.” Pretty outright sexist.

The benevolent sexism description added: “Industry is now restricted to choose women instead of men in case of equal performance. You’ll work with men only, but don’t worry, they will cooperate and help you to get used to the job. They know that the new employee could be a woman, and they agreed to give you time and help.” The sexism is less obvious here, but the idea is that women might feel talked down to or sense paternalism in the implications that they need extra help.

The Task
Then each of the women who had gotten these job descriptions was given either a word memorization task or a spatial task, and afterwards a brief questionnaire that indirectly asked about their motivation on the task and any perceived sexism in the job description.

Regardless of whether the job description was in written form or given aloud by a man, and regardless of what task they were given, the women did worse on the task in the benevolent sexism condition than they did in the hostile sexism or control conditions.

This is a little counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t the hostile sexism be at least as bad? The questionnaires given afterward showed that women were equally motivated to perform in both sexism conditions, so it wasn’t like those who got the outright sexist condition compensated by trying harder in order to prove the sexists wrong. Furthermore, when asked about the unpleasantness of the job context/description, women found both forms of sexism equally unpleasant (compared to the neutral control description). So they were certainly perceiving something bothersome even in the benevolent condition.

However, in the benevolent condition there was not a perception of sexism, per se, whereas in the hostile condition there was. So when women confront hostile sexism, they can identify it as sexism, writing it off as a flaw of the one writing the job description. When they confront benevolent sexism, it is difficult to attribute sexism because it is less straight-forward and may be masked among pleasantries or praise.

The authors argue that being unable to identify the sexism and attribute the perceived unpleasantness to it leads to an ambiguous situation which is harder to deal with. This may preoccupy the mind, causing subsequent worse performance on the tasks used to test for the job training. The cognitive load keeps the mind busy in the case of benevolent sexism, whereas with hostile sexism, the sexism can be identified and some method of coping instituted, so performance does not suffer.

Certainly hostile sexism is not acceptable (which is why there are norms and in some cases laws against it), but it appears its effects on task performance may not be as damaging as benevolent sexism in the short term. The authors of the study suggest that informing women of the dangers of benevolent sexism may reduce ambiguity and uncertainty (and the corresponding cognitive load), preserving performance.

Reference
Dardenne, B., Dumont, M., & Bollier, T. (2007). Insidious dangers of benevolent sexism: Consequences for women’s performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 764-779.

High self-monitors are often likeable and successful people, and highly desired romantic partners. However, a 2007 study showed that people who score high on measures of self-monitoring may seem desireable partners, but often they are less happy in their relationships and less committed.

Michael Roloff, one author of the study, suggests that a tendency to adapt their personality to fit different situations keeps them from letting their true selves out during intimate interactions with romantic partners.

Low self-monitors, on the other hand, are less likely to hide their feelings, and appear to be happier with their relationships and more committed. However, as Roloff points out, these people might be less diplomatic, they may say hurtful things, and studies show they tend to be worse negotiators and get promoted less at work.

Obviously, most people fall in a middle ground between these extremes, and have some aspects of both traits. It seems valuable, then, for all of us to keep in mind the trade-offs of being diplomatic and fitting in versus wearing all your thoughts on your sleeve all the time. Certainly some combination of diplomacy and bluntness can mitigate the downsides of both. Indeed, Roloff’s study points out that intimate communication and tendencies that enhance communication quality tend to improve the quality of relationships even for high self-monitors.

Hopefully not, else you may be imagining things — no such footage exists. But if you claimed to remember it, you would be in good company. Around 40% of British college students said they remembered such a video, when filling out questionnaires a mere three months after the bombings. It seems as if people had invented a memory to fill in or coalesce the details of an event they had seen or heard described later.

Psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus has studied false memories like these for a while. For example, one study she worked on showed participants a Disneyland ad with Bugs Bunny in it. Almost a third of people who had been to Disneyland at some point in their life falsely reported that they had met Bugs Bunny and shook his hand there — falsely because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character. The false memory was much less likely in people who were shown the same Disneyland ad without Bugs Bunny in it.

Another recent study by Loftus showed participants a photograph from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. However, for some participants the photograph had been doctored, adding a large crowd to a familiar picture of a man standing alone in front of tanks. Asked whether the photograph they saw was familiar, those who were shown the doctored photo responded the same as those who were shown the original image, so they didn’t seem to detect the change. However, those who were shown the fake photograph reported remembering more people being at the protest. A subtle, undetected alteration to a famous photograph easily distorted peoples’ memory of the event.

In all of these cases, people are not necessarily inventing memories out of thin air. Even in the first example — of CCTV footage for the 7/7 bombings — the participants were actively prompted by the questionnaire about footage for a significant event, which itself might subconsciously suggest to them that such footage does exist, and that they should remember it or would be likely to have seen it. In other words, the memory came from prodding or priming, not recalled on its own. Likewise, the Bugs Bunny and protest studies found false memories mostly in those exposed to a fake ad or photograph.

In other words, these studies are not about how generally poor our memory is, but about how susceptible our memory is to cues, suggestion or persuasion.

Unfortunately, our memory problems may go deeper, even when there is no false information (or subtle suggestion of it, as with the 7/7 bombing questionnaire). In 2007, Norbert Schwarz and others showed people a CDC flier listing common views about the flu vaccine, some labeled true, some false [pdf]. 30 minutes after reading the flier, they were asked which statements were true and which false. Young people did pretty good, but older people misremembered 28% of the false statements as true. Questioned again three days later, older people misremembered even more of the false statements as true, and even younger people ended up doing as bad as the older people had after 30 minutes.

Mere exposure to false information — even clearly labeled as such — can cause people to believe it. Trying to correct a misconception may in fact strengthen it, which has disheartening implications. False news stories may stick in the public’s mind as true even if clear evidence corrects it later. Note, for example, how many Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Frankly, our memory is full of biases that make us susceptible to false recall and recognition. Knowing about these may be a first step to minimizing their effects.

I think the bigger lesson here, though, is in coming to understand that our memory does not work how we commonly think. It is not like a computer, where whatever is put in is retrieved in the same form. Rather, our memory is constructive: whenever we retrieve a memory, we fill in the gaps with plausible information that fits our schematic representation of the event in question, or with information that has been cued externally (say, by an altered Disneyland ad). When you recall a vivid experience from young childhood, you may not be directly recalling the event itself, but rather bringing to mind the story you have told (or been told) again and again, and reconstructing the memory out of the oft-repeated story.

Accepting the inaccuracy of our own memory is a hard pill to swallow. Without our memories, a large portion of our personality is gone, so calling your own memory into question is like calling a significant piece of yourself into question. But it’s something we must learn to do if we are ever to understand how memory really works and immunize ourselves as much as possible against the false information of propagandists, marketers, and anyone else who would use our memory biases against us.

For the experiment, the participant (as teacher) was moved to a separate room from the learner. Through an intercom, the participant was to read a list of word pairs to the learner, who then had to choose matching pairs when quizzed. After incorrect answers, the participant was to flip a switch to shock the learner — a panel at their desk had switches labeled 45 volts increasing up to 450 volts. The participant had watched the learner get strapped in to the shock equipment. The learner mentioned in passing that he had a heart condition, after which the experimenter authoritatively assured him that there was no danger (again, this was all acted out with the participant thinking the learner was just another volunteer). Back in the test room, the participant received a not-insignificant 45 volt shock to see what it felt like, and then the word-pair testing began.

The teacher read the words, and the learner appeared to be responding, and getting shocked at successively higher levels after each mistake. In fact, there were no real shocks, but a pre-recorded tape played reactions to each shock. As the shock levels went up, the learner feigned increased pain and eventually banged on the wall, complained about his heart condition, and asked to be released. If the participant continued, the learner stopped responding at all.

At a certain level, many participants stopped to question the experiment, querying the experimenter who was observing in the same room. When the participant did so, the experimenter verbally pushed them to continue (“Please continue”, “The experiment requires that you continue”, “It is absolutely essential that you continue”, “You have no other choice, you must go on”). Only if the participant still refused to go on was the experiment ended; otherwise it went on until they had delivered three shocks at the maximum level (450 volts, labeled “dangerous” on their panel).

Amazingly, most of the subjects — 65% — gave the final level of shock. While every participant at some point questioned the experimenter, not a single one dropped out before the 300 volt shock level. Even those who quit the experiment before the final level just removed their own participation, without trying to stop the experiment itself or check on the health of the learner. (Remember, the learner had complained of a heart condition before and during the experiment, and had gone silent after a possibly dangerous shock).

This experiment and its later replications vividly demonstrate the power of authority over peoples’ behavior. In this case it was a man in a labcoat in a university, but the experiment itself was inspired by the “just following orders” defense used in war crime trials for World War II Nazis. It’s not just the World War II Germans, though. Atrocities can be committed by anyone, including Americans. As Michael Albert put it:

“I have long since understood that the Germans weren’t different than the Brits or Americans or anyone else, though their circumstances were different, but for those who still don’t understand mass subservience to vile crimes induced by structural process of great power and breadth, I have to admit that I mostly just want to shout: Look around, dammit!”

But Milgram showed us that it is not just soldiers who can be influenced by authority to do bad things, but also normal people. Someone might counter that the Milgram results happened in a very different era, and that people today would act differently. However, the experiment has recently been replicated with similar results. See the ABC video below:

Related experiments have further confirmed how situational effects can bring normal people to commit horrible acts. In 1971, researcher Philip Zimbardo at Stanford created a fake prison underground in the psychology building. An experiment assigned the participants to play either a prisoner or a guard role, and paid them by the day to stay in the experiment. Prisoners were stuck in the basement 24/7, while the guards worked shifts in the mock prison and then went home to their normal life. What’s interesting, though, is that the guards quickly took on their role in seriousness, abusing the prisoners and showing genuine sadistic tendencies. Guards adapted their behavior to conform to what they thought Zimbardo — playing Prison Superintendent — wanted. (See this YouTube video for more).

Haslam and Reicher (2003) partially replicated Zimbardo’s prison experiment, demonstrating the crucial role of a leader (in this case, Zimbardo as superintendent) in establishing these patterns of behavior.

However, it is not just authority that can alter a normal person’s behavior for the worse. Conformity to a larger group can make people go against their better judgement. In the 50′s, Solomon Asch ran an experiment in which a group of participants were presented with a simple task: shown a picture with a plain line labeled X and three parallel comparison lines (A, B and C), choose which comparison line is the same length.

Crucially, all but one of the alleged participants in the group were actually accomplices to the experiment. All of the group members responded in order, out loud, which line matches the example line’s length. Occasionally, though, what the accomplices did was uniformly select a wrong answer — something anyone with normal vision could see was wrong. But after hearing a row of people claim this wrong answer, the participants often conformed and gave an answer they knew was wrong.

In later interviews, many subjects claimed they did not actually believed their conforming answers, but some actually did. Was it possible that their very perceptions were changed by the pressure to conform?

A more recent replication study, published in 2005, used brain imaging to show that different parts of the brain were active depending on whether the actor was conforming or independently dissenting. When not conforming, regions of the brain associated with emotion were active, suggesting an emotional cost to going against the group. Whether conforming to a wrong answer or not, there was no increased activity in the parts of the brain associated with conscious decision making. Crucially, though, when conforming to a unanimous wrong answer, a brain area devoted to spatial awareness lit up. In other words, it appears that how we see things — not just metaphorically, but literally what we see — is affected by social pressure.

Together, these and similar experimental results show how tenuous our control is over our own behavior. Under the combined influence of authority, leadership and conformity, perfectly normal people can come to disregard their own beliefs, morals and even perceptions. Deep down in all of us lurks a potential monster.

Perhaps an upside may be found among the variation of behaviors. Some people quit Milgram’s shock experiment (after giving quite a few shocks, of course). A few guards in Zimbardo’s prison experiment did little favors for the prisoners. Not everyone conformed in Asch’s line-perception experiments (having someone else dissent before you makes it much more likely you will dissent). And, of course, even some Nazi officers refused to participate in the atrocities of Hitler’s regime.

In other words, there is some hope. Further work in this line of study will hopefully identify and highlight the factors influencing non-conformity in similar situations, so that we might better understand what pitfalls to avoid in the future. Until then, we best keep these experiments in mind as a reminder that we are all susceptible to influence that may push us far beyond our normal ethical boundaries.

We’re all familiar with claims of out-of-body experience such as, say, looking down on your own body from above. That is to say, some people report visual input that seems to locate itself in a spatial location within the 3D world that is not the same as usual. In fact, they may see an image of their own body, much like what we see in a mirror; except in the case of a mirror the various sensory modalities still match up. When seeing yourself in a mirror, the proprioceptive and muscular feedback of lifting your arms corresponds to visual feedback of the arms moving up in the mirror image, as well as peripherally seeing the arms come up as normal. In an out-of-body experience, however, the body could move (or not) in a way that doesn’t correspond to the changes in sensory (usually visual) input to the experiencer.

One way to explain this might involve imagining that our self or mind, our perspective as a subjective experiencer, is not actually tied to the body in a strict way, and that we as an experiencing being can separate from the body and move about through space in some other way. Of course, aside from the major problems inherent to mind-body dualism in general, this also leaves us unable to explain how something lacking eyes and a brain could receive and process visual input from light waves.

However, there is a more plausible explanation for the reports of out-of-body experiences and autoscopy (perceiving one’s body as if from outside it). Maybe it happens because the normal brain processes that link up our multi-sensory input get messed up and the brain is just doing its best to represent the world however it can.

This is a rough description of how scientists studying the phenomenon have come to understand it. Olaf Blanke and others have found evidence that implicated the brain’s temporo-parietal junction in piecing together our multi-sensory experience. Basically, they suspect this area is crucial for the sense of self located in space, and disrupting it can lead to out-of-body experiences.

Meanwhile, scientists have come up with a completely different approach at studying the phenomenon. H. Ehrsson and colleagues managed to induce out-of-body, autoscopic experience in perfectly healthy participants. They hooked people up to a virtual reality head display which showed real-time video coming from two cameras located a little behind their body and aimed at it. In other words, they saw a real-time movie of their own body taken from right behind it.

Then the experimenters stroked the participant’s chest with a stick while at the same time stroking the air near the video cameras where a body’s chest would be if the video cameras were eyes. Doing this led to out-of-body experiences, reports of participants feeling as if they were behind their physical bodies and looking at the bodies from that location. But this only happened if both sticks were stroking synchronously; if not, then the out-of-body experience was not produced.

Furthermore, a followup by Olaf Blanke and company replicated this but then afterward blindfolder participants and passively moved them to another part of the room. Next, they asked participants to return to their original location. Intriguingly, those who had experienced the synchronous out-of-body condition moved to the wrong part of the room (closer to where the video cameras had been, rather than where their actual body had been). On top of their verbal reports, this provided further evidence that they had truly experienced themselves as being located where the virtual body was (that is, where the cameras were providing visual input from). People in the asynchronous condition did not experience this. [More details here]

These experiments show that it doesn’t take brain damage or near-death to induce out-of-body experience. Simply altering sensory input (specifically, how information from multiple senses comes in together) can alter our perception of self and body in space.

This is really cool stuff for two reasons: (1) it helps debunk supernatural/paranormal explanations for out-of-body experiences by showing how the illusion can be produced in a completely natural way, and (2) it helps us better understand how our brains produce conscious, subjective (from a particular perspective) experience.

The monkey was shown a live video of the robot’s legs while both walked on their own treadmill, and the monkey’s brain soon ‘tuned in’ to the robot’s leg movements. In fact, when they turned off her treadmill and she stopped walking, she continued to concentrate on the video screen, and sure enough, her neurons kept firing, controlling the robot’s movement. The robot kept walking, controlled from across the seas by a stationary monkey’s brain.

The visual feedback (and feedback in the form of treats) had been quickly incorporated into the neural system. If they can do this with humans (and there is no obvious barrier), then people with limb injuries will soon be able to control prosthetics with their intentions. For that matter, people will be able to control any machine built with an appropriate interface. It is a much more refined extension of earlier biofeedback technology (e.g. therapeutic games played via physiological measures where winning requires training yourself to relax).

Animal Mentality?
An interesting side question: would we say the monkey was intentionally controlling the robot’s movement? Did she in some sense understand that she was in control?

If the robot is moving along according to the monkeys’ brain signals, let’s say we suddenly make it act contrary to those brain signals (go left when the monkey signal directs it right). Will this disturb the monkey, even if she continues getting treats regardless? At the least, that result would suggest she expected the robot to move a certain way, despite no outward cues on which to predict its behavior.

If the subject expected the robot to go a certain direction, would we say the monkey understood she was in control? Did she intend the robot to go in one direction and felt thwarted when it didn’t? Or did she just have inexplicable expectations (not realizing the source) and nothing more than that?

Whether animals can have intentions (whatever that means exactly) and understand their actions is a contentious issue. No matter how intelligent, flexible and intentional their behavior seems, there is often some alternate explanation at the purely mechanistic, behavioral level which could predict the same results, no matter how elegant the experimental setup.

Perhaps we have to accept that these are not always competing hypotheses so much as competing levels of explanation. It is possible that both are true — or perhaps I should say it is possible that both types of explanation can lead to useful new predictions and models.

We attribute inner mental states to other humans not because we have absolute certainty that they have them, but because it is such a useful assumption. It is possible that it’s all an elaborate ruse by an evil demon manipulating our experience, or they could be philosophical zombies, or we could be inventing them in our own solipsistic mind. But we don’t take these explanations seriously — not because we have ruled them out as possibilities, but because they don’t do much good as explanations. They add an extra layer to what we observe (the illusion of mind), but because our observations are so consistent, we can get by just fine by assuming that our neighbors do in fact have minds, do experience the mental states they claim and appear to experience.

So if we eventually find, after much more testing, that attributing some form of inner experience or mental states to some animals is a useful and parsimonious way to frame our observations of their behavior, then so be it. That is, if crediting animals with minds allows us to make useful predictions and meshes with our broader models of the world, then it is reasonable to give them such credit, even if we cannot rule out a purely mindless, algorithmic explanation.

After all, at some level our own behavior can be put in those terms: the predictable physics ruling the movement of atoms in our body, brain and environment can explain all of our behavior without resorting to mental state attribution. We allow that both explanations are valid because they are two levels of the same system, neither more ‘true’ than the other.

Sometimes it is useful to frame things from the reductionist perspective, and sometimes it is useful to consider things from the higher up, integrative perspective. After all, we survive better if we interpret the world as macro-level phenomena (a hungry tiger lurking nearby, or a car headed right for us) than if we try to see the world only as the mindless, intentionless, algorithmic interacting of countless invisible particles.

So there may come a point where it is similarly useful to assume that animals have certain mental states or inner experience. While this risks a slippery slope (what if a robot demonstrates just as much intelligence, flexibly or whatever in its responses?), that slippery slope might just end up demonstrating the problem with our assumption that mental states are some binary black-and-white, all-or-none thing, and somehow different from normal physical explanations. There is likely some continuum of feedback and flexibility in various systems (animal, human, robotic, etc.), and humans at one end are obviously different from rocks or very simple animals at the other end, but things bleed into fuzzy gray somewhere along the middle.

If, for systems of enough complexity of the right sort, we find it useful to label those physical events as mental states (as a shorthand for some properties that physical system demonstrates), then why not for animals — even if we can’t 100% prove they have inner experience any more than we can prove it for humans?