When I was very young, my parents gave me a stamp album. I thought I had lost it but, to my surprise, I found it again the other day on my bookshelves. It is called "The Improved Postage Stamp Album" with its "7400 spaces and maps" and "updated with spaces for all the latest stamp-issuing countries". It still contains the stamps, bought in the 1950s in a shop in Needless Alley in Birmingham.

In fact, I found it next to a copy of a book given to my brother and me when we were kids. It’s a book of "100 new magic tricks" whose author was a person I vaguely remembered being called Bruce. I now see that the author was Bruce Elliot. Looking at the magic book again, I was reminded of the expression: 'The quickness of the hand deceives the eye'. The magician distracts us from where the action actually is so that he can make the substitution or change necessary to make the trick work.

From my experience as a child with a magic kit, I can confirm that it certainly takes quickness (and confidence) if ones Uncles and Aunts are even to be able to make a pretence of having been fooled. No, I wasn’t very good at it, and neither was John. What is really needed is a lot of practice so that the movements barely need to be thought about, so that they happen almost automatically.

Something-else I wasn’t very good at was sport. It appears however that there can be good reasons for a lack of sporting prowess. One is the ‘speed of sight’. A new concept to me.

Our ability to perceive rapid changes in visual scenes over time varies a lot between people. This suggests that some people can track fast-moving objects – as in some sports - better than others because of their innately superior vision. 

Our speed of sight is also known as the ‘flicker fusion threshold’: how many ‘frames per second’ our visual system can cope with. This varies widely in the animal kingdom, being higher in creatures that can move faster, especially if they hunt other speedy animals. For instance, the peregrine falcon, can cope with about 130 images per second. The average flicker threshold for humans is about 50, but it varies a lot - from 34 to 61.

Mostly, that wouldn’t be significant, because things are not moving fast enough. But when things move very fast, as in sport, it might make all the difference. For someone with a low threshold, a ball hit at high speed might not be captured successfully at all.

But sporting ability can also depend on the same hand eye coordination needed for those conjuring tricks. It is said the very best tennis players can infer the likely trajectory of an opponent’s shot just from his stance. And this requires practice. To intercept a flying object, the response must come from the unconscious level. There is no time to think consciously about its probable trajectory.

But it seems it’s not just sport which depends on our sub-conscious. Since 1983 we have had increasing evidence that decisions made in the ordinary course of our lives, although appearing to be made consciously, are in fact made at a sub-conscious level. They are apparently made some seconds before we believe ourselves, consciously, to have made the decision.

My own experience gives some support to this phenomenon: often, when doing a crossword puzzle, at first, I can’t see the answer. Then, on going back to it later, the appropriate word pops into my head. I have the impression that my sub-conscious has been working on it in the meantime with the answer coming, apparently unbidden, from the depths.

Now, obviously, many processes in the brain occur automatically with little or no involvement of our consciousness. For example, once, as babies, we have learnt to walk, we leave that quite complex motor skill to our subconscious self. This sub-contracting prevents our conscious mind from being overloaded by routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions, such as where we actually want to walk to, we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind.

That though is the subject of increasing debate. Experiments have been done in which the subjects have been surrounded by all manner of scanners to record electrical activity in various parts of the brain. They were asked to make a random decision – to press either button A or B – and, prior to acting out the decision, to press another button to indicate that they had come to a conclusion. From the brain activity, the researchers could predict the subjects’ choices before they indicated knowing the choices themselves – in fact from 4 to 20 seconds before. Spooky!

If though we accept that our thoughts, feelings and intentions, our self-awareness is simply an awareness of what our unconscious brain has already decided, we have a problem. It means that we are no more than informed spectators. We have apparently developed a brain function without purpose. And if so why do we believe that we have a “self” with executive control over our cognitive functions?

Some researchers have explained this in evolutionary terms as a benefit for the social group, rather than any particular individual.  They point to two psychological predispositions. The first relates to perceptions of causality. Our unconscious thought systems generate the belief that it was, for example, the self’s wish to move that brought about the movement. It does this to maintain a conscious narrative featuring a self that is in control. This perceived causal relationship also applies to thinking, feelings and moods.

The second psychological predisposition is anthropomorphism, a tendency to attribute human characteristics and so intentionality to animals and inanimate objects. They believe that humans anthropomorphise their own consciousness, attributing agency and meaning to vividly experienced phenomena so that we can tell others of the contents of our consciousness, including our beliefs, prejudices, feelings and decisions.

In this lies the evolutionary advantage – not the experience of consciousness itself. This sharing of our thoughts in turn enables the development of adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behaviour of others, which could be beneficial to species survival. It also allows of our being influenced by similar information coming from other members of society. And so whether an awareness of social norms and values or absorbing information, none of this would be possible without our compelling sense of self awareness.

But although an interesting theory, there is no evidence for it and no means of testing it that I can see. As such it is metaphysics rather than science.

And in any event I can’t help feeling that we’re making a lot out of a little. All of the experiments that I’ve read about have related to decisions to do randomly chosen things. Some have built on the randomness by requiring the participant to do something in response to the random act, but it’s still at root an experiment which asks people to do things randomly.

And we do not normally engage in that sort of decision making. Indeed, one might argue that it is only ever done in the context of scientific enquiries into how the mind works. Even gamblers can offer explanations for their choices. So then how can we derive any meaningful theory of mind from experiments which require us to do things we don’t normally do, to act in ways irrelevant to our daily lives?

I’m not at all convinced that they in any way reflect the sort of input, output and processing of information required even to create a modest essay on that very topic. Using our reason to find connections between various facts is in a different category to the choice made as to when to press a button when there is no particular reason to press it in the first place.

Indeed, acting randomly is very difficult for us and very boring. So difficult that, if asked to take part in such experiments, I would create a simple system to enable me to decide which button to press, and then think about other things, leaving the work to my sub-conscious mind. ….Oops!

7 January 2024

Paul Buckingham