The Illusion of Conscious Will Read Free

willful and voluntary if we were just watching and hadn’t learned of the patient’s lamentable loss of control. In the case of another patient, for example, “While playing checkers on one occasion, the left hand made a move he did not wish to make, and he corrected the move with the right hand; however, the left hand, to the patient’s frustration, repeated the false move. On other occasions, he turned the pages of the book with one hand while the other tried to close it; he shaved with the right hand while the left one unzipped his jacket; he tried to soap a washcloth while the left hand kept putting the soap back in the dish; and he tried to open a closet with the right hand while the left one closed it” (Banks et al. 1989, 457). By the looks of it, the alien hand is quite willful. On the other hand (as the pun drags on), however, the patient does not experience these actions as consciously willed. One patient described the experience as a feeling that “someone from the moon” was controlling her hand (Geschwind et al. 1995, 803).

    Figure 1.1
    Dr. Strangelove. Courtesy Archive Photos.
    Brain damage is not the only way that the experience of will can be undermined. Consider, for instance, the feelings of involuntariness that occur during hypnosis. Perhaps the most profound single effect of hypnosis is the feeling that your actions are happening to you rather than that you are doing them (Lynn, Rhue, and Weekes 1990). To produce this experience, a hypnotist might suggest, “Please hold your arm out to your side. Now, concentrate on the feelings in your arm. You will find that your arm is becoming heavy. It feels as though a great weight were pulling it down. It is so very heavy. It is being pulled down, down toward the ground. Your arm is heavy, very heavy. It is getting so heavy you can’t resist. Your arm is falling, falling down toward the ground.” With enough of this patter, many listeners iwll indeed experience the arm’s becoming heavy, and some will even find their arm falling down. When quizzed on it, these individuals often report that they felt no sense of moving their arm voluntarily but rather experienced the downward movement as something that happened to them. This doesn’t occur for everyone in this situation, only some proportion, but it nonetheless indicates that the experience of will can be manipulated in a voluntary action.
    In the case of hypnotic involuntariness, the person has a very clear and well-rehearsed idea of the upcoming action. Admittedly, this idea of the action is really phrased more as an expectation (“My arm will fall”) than as an intention (“I will lower my arm”), but it nonetheless occurs before the action when an intention normally happens, and it provides a distinct preview of the action that is to come (Kirsch and Lynn 1998; Spanos 1986). Hypnotic involuntariness thus provides an example of the lack of experience of will that is even more perplexing than alien hand syndrome. With alien hand, the person simply doesn’t know what the hand will do, but with hypnosis, conscious will is lacking even when knowledge of the action is present. And without the experience of willing, even this foreknowledge of the action seems insufficient to move the action into the “consciously willed” category. If it doesn’t feel as though you did it, then it doesn’t seem that the will was operating.

    Figure1.2
    A table-turning séance. From L’Illustration (1853).
    Another case of the absence of experience of will occurs in table turning, a curious phenomenon discovered in the spiritualist movement in Europe and America in the mid-nineteenth century (Ansfield and Wegner 1996; Carpenter 1888; Pearsall 1972). To create this effect, a group of people sit gathered around a table, all with their hands on its surface. If they are convinced that the table might move as the result of spirit intervention (or if they are even just hoping for such an effect) and sit patiently waiting