Do We Know Our Minds?

We understand very little about how minds work, including our own. Consider: when you are trying to remember something, what is happening in your brain? Sometimes you may work through related things or try other clues – does it start with a P? – but sometimes there is just a blank until the sought for item suddenly appears from the depths. Where did it come from?

A vast array of psychological studies have shown that we understand just as little about how our brains accomplish other tasks. The classic psychological paper laying out the experiments in this vein is Nisbett and Wilson 1977. Experimenters have found hundreds of ways to manipulate people toward certain answers or solutions, then found that they had either no idea the manipulation had taken place or denied that it had any impact. Here is a famous study, first carried out in 1931:

In Maier’s classic experiment, two cords were hung from the ceiling of a laboratory strewn with many objects such as poles, ringstands, clamps, pliers, and extension cords. The subject was told that his task was to tie the two ends of the cords together. The problem in doing so was that the cords were placed far enough apart that the subject could not, while holding onto one cord, reach the other. Three of the possible solutions, such as tying an extension cord to one of the ceiling cords, came easily to Maier’s subjects. After each solution, Maier told his subjects, “Now do it a different way.” One of the solutions was much more difficult than the others, and most subjects could not discover it on their own. After the subject had been stumped for several minutes, Maier, who had been wandering around the room, casually put one of the cords in motion. Then, typically within 45 seconds of this cue, the subject picked up a weight, tied it to the end of one of the cords, set it to swinging like a pendulum, ran to the other cord, grabbed it, and waited for the first cord to swing close enough that it could be seized. Immediately thereafter, Maier asked the subject to tell about his experience of getting the idea of a pendulum. This question elicited such answers as “It just dawned on me.” “It was the only thing left.” “I just realized the cord would swing if I fastened a weight to it.” . . . Persistent probing after the free report succeeded in eliciting reports of Maier’s hint and its utilization in the solution of the problem from slightly less than a third of the subjects. This fact should be quickly qualified, however, by another of Maier’s findings. Maier was able to establish that one particular cue – twirling a weight on a cord – was a useless hint, that is, subjects were not aided in solving the problem by exposure to this cue. For some of the subjects, this useless cue was presented prior to the genuinely helpful cue. All of these subjects reported that the useless cue had been helpful and denied that the critical cue had played any role in their solution.

Such faulty reasoning has been documented in hudreds of experiments. People either have no idea how they reached their conclusions or dream up explanations that ignore factors the experiments know to be important. 

Of course the criticism can be made of all these studies that they take place in highly artificial laboratory settings where people are to some degree unmoored from their usual habits of thought. But there is also an extensive literature based on the self-understanding of various creative geniuses, especially mathematicians, as to how they came up with their insights. Most have reported having no idea how their ideas come to them:

The mathematician Jacques Hadamard reports that “on being very abruptly awakened by an external noise, a solution long searched for appeared to me at once without the slightest instant of reflection on my part . . . and in a quite different direction from any of those which I previously tried to follow.” Poincaré records that “the changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.”

Which does not mean that these ideas appeared magically; in both cases these mathematicians had been immersed for months or years in their problems, turning them over in different ways; it also sometimes happens that the key insight still needs months of work to yield a definitive result. The point is only that the mathematicians themselves identified the key ideas, the ones that would lead to their being called “geniuses,” as appearing in their minds as if from outside.

I have for thirty years been trying to understand where my ideas come from and how my own opinions are formed. When I probe myself I keep finding that my ideas rely to a disturbing degree on irrational prejudices. For example I deeply distrust String Theory, and Supersymmetry in general, which leads me to cheer any evidence that comes up against them. But of course I understand nothing about the underlying math, and have only minimal knowledge of how physical theory works in general and the role of abstract math in advancing it. Once I understood this I backed off from having firm ideas about the sujbect. My readers know that I have been reading a great deal about fusion power, partly because I sense in myself a strong, ultimately unmotivated skepticism about whether it can really be done within the next 20 years.

But my deep irrational feelings have also influenced my judgment about things I do know something about, like how medieval kings governed and how to interpret archaeological features. I have, for example, an irrational preference for believing that ordinary medieval people did have ideas about good government and cared about what their kings did. Once I identified this prejudice I began revisiting the evidence, which is extremely thin before the 14th century. I have a very complex interior relationship with the question of whether propaganda is effective, because I know I have a strong predilection to think that it is not; this is a hard problem without any simple answer, but anyway I know that I have seemingly innate ideas on the subject and must always guard against a strong desire to just repeat them.

So I think that we can, with effort probe a little more deeply into our own mental processes, and perhaps improve them. But ultimately I think we will always remain mysterious to ourselves.