THE ROOTS OF DELUSION: A QUEST

Andrew R.B. Ferguson

Those who wish to appraise the human tendency to self-delusion will find the following books very helpful: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841); and The Comforts of Unreason by Rupert Crawshay-Williams (1947). However, it is one thing to be aware of the problem, but quite another to know what to do about it. Especially because the situation may be every bit as bad as Crawshay-Williams suggests in the epilogue to his book, "Whether or not I have made out a reasonable case for the views expressed in this book, I leave the reader to judge, confident that-if I am right-his opinions will probably remain unchanged whatever anyone says." While it would be hard to exaggerate the pervasiveness of this Ôdelusional' problem, a ray of hope is appearing, thanks to progress in neuroscience. This was reported by Vilinor Ramachandran, of the Neurosciences Institute in California, during the course of the 2003 BBC Reith lectures, which Ramachandran titled The Emerging Mind. He concluded his fifth, and last, lecture with these words, "I hope that I have succeeded in conveying to you the sense of excitement that my colleagues and I experience each time we try to tackle one of these problems that we have been talking about: hysteria, phantom limbs, free will, the meaning of art, denial or neglect, or any one of the syndromes that we have talked about in earlier lectures. Second, I hope that I have convinced you that by studying these strange cases, and asking the right questions, we neuroscientists can begin to answer some of those lofty questions that thinking people have been preoccupied with since the dawn of history. What is free will? What is body image? What is the self? Who am I? Questions that until recently were the province of philosophy. No enterprise is more vital to the well being and survival of the human race. This is just as true now as it was in the past. Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism, and war also originate in the human brain."

We must agree that neuroscience is important, but can it be applied to the "delusional" problem? Ramachandran showed us the extent of the progress that has been made in studying the brain using PET (Positron Electron Tomography) scans, and NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) scans.

For instance, he recounted the case of a man whose vision was largely normal, who therefore had no problem in recognizing that when his mother stood before him, she did indeed look exactly like his mother, yet he declared that she was an impostor. The patient insisted that while this person looked like his mother, it was actually someone else who was trying to deceive him. From brain scans, it was clear that the usual messages which are sent from the optical processors to the emotional centres had become inoperative. Thus while normal people would experience an emotion when they see their mother, this patient experienced no more emotion than he would when looking at a table or chair. The only reason that the patient could conjure up to explain this strange fact was that the woman he was looking at was an impostor!

That case mainly demonstrates how precisely we can see what is going on in the brain. What is of more relevance to the Ôdelusional' problem, which we are considering here, is the case of patients who suffer from hysteria in the medical sense. Hysteria, in the medical sense, refers to the situation in which a brain scan shows that there are no lesions in the brain, and that the muscles are in good order, yet a patient reports that a limb is paralysed. Doctors have, for a long time, explained this problem as being psychological. They were right. Moreover now, with the benefit of brain scans, we can understand the problem more precisely.

When a person wants to move a limb, the brain Ôlights up' in a pre-motor area, moments before the motor area actually moves the limb (contemporaneously with which one becomes conscious of the intention to move the limb). When a hysteric patient attempts to move the Ôparalysed' limb, the pre-motor area still lights up, showing that he or she really is trying to move the limb. In other words, he or she is not just saying they are trying; they really are trying. But then something odd happens. Other areas of the brain linked to the emotional centres light up, and cancel out the signals from the pre-motor area, so that the motor area never gets to operate. Moreover, the same brain pattern occurs with patients who have been hypnotised and told that they will not be able to move some limb.

While it is going beyond the experiments that Ramachandran reported, it seems a reasonable supposition that something similar is likely to be going on when people with a logical capacity refuse to see the logic of something that runs contrary to what they wish to believe. The alternative, to what might perhaps appropriately be called the Ôactive inhibition hypothesis', is that the logical faculty simply becomes inoperative whenever the subject under discussion is one on which a person has pre-conceived opinions. That too might tell us something important, but I suggest that the first hypothesis, the Ôactive inhibition hypothesis', appears to be the more plausible. If that is so, the inhibition areas - which most likely will again prove to emanate from the emotional centres - would only light up when discussing something about which the subject had strong opinions which he or she was unwilling to alter, for only such subjects would produce an emotional need to paralyse their logical faculties. Without going into all the details of how the relationship would need to be established in the first place, except to observe that rabid Ôcreationists' could prove very useful, once the truth of the hypothesis had been established, it would be easy to test someone, because it would not be necessary to know what was the right answer to the question being put. For if, when considering matters in which logical thought is clearly required, the person under investigation was consistently showing activity in the areas of the brain which cancel out their logical faculties, then that person is clearly incapable of making sound judgements in that area.

Were this advance in neuroscience to be made, there would be an easy way of weeding out those politicians, economists and media gurus who continue to hold obviously fatuous views. Their brains would be lighting up like Christmas trees a great deal of the time, as various parts of their brains sprung into action to cancel out their logical faculties! It might be a slow process, because first the voters would have to be brought to see the importance of not being led by deluded politicians, and thus insist that politicians must be tested before being accepted as possible candidates. Only when that step had been taken, with time allowed for it to take full effect, can one imagine that politicians would see the need to weed out deluded economists (i.e. 95% of them) and media gurus. It has to be admitted that the prospects of complete success in this project cannot be rated as high. Yet the danger of continuing along our path of delusion is so great, that anyone who is in a position to influence the focus of neuroscientists' activities should do all they can to encourage them to focus their attention on proving or disproving the Ôactive inhibition hypothesis'.

It should not be hard to be persuasive, for it is patently obvious that the general run of politicians, economists and media gurus, are so deluded that they are able to believe that: (a) globalization is good; (b) perpetual expansion is not only good but essential; (c) that when fossil fuels are exhausted, renewable energy can easily replace them; and (d) that there are no dangers for the Earth's ecological system in attempting to accommodate the present 6 billion humans. Nevertheless, one would have to choose with some care which neuroscientists to approach, because there must be a few of them who suffer from similar delusions to politicians, economists and media gurus, and therefore would be unable to see the urgency of making progress regarding the Ôactive inhibition hypothesis'.

References

Crawshay-Williams, R. 1947. The Comforts of Unreason: A Study of the Motives behind Irrational Thought. London: Regan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

Mackay, C. 1841. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Reprinted in 1995 by Wordsworth Editions Ltd. ISBN 1-85326-349-4 (pbk). £3.

Andrew R.B. Ferguson is the research co-ordinator for Optimum Population Trust in England, and editor of the OPT Journal. This piece first appeared in the August 2003 issue of the OPT in-house magazine, Jackdaw. Reprinted with permission of the author.