in male/female courtship interactions may evolve toward costlier ones that are more difficult to fake (for example, antler size, physical strength, and bodily symmetry), but there is always room for deception, and many systems do not obey this simple rule regarding cost.
CHAPTER 3
Neurophysiology and Levels of Imposed Self-Deception
Although study of the neurophysiology of deceit and self-deception is just beginning, there are already some interesting findings. Evidence suggests a greatly diminished role for the conscious mind in guiding human behavior. Contrary to our imagination, the conscious mind seems to lag behind the unconscious in both action and perception—it is much more observer of action than initiator. The precise details of the neurobiology of active thought suppression suggest that one part of the brain has been co-opted in evolution to suppress another part, a very interesting development if true. At the same time, evidence from social psychology makes it clear that trying to suppress thoughts sometimes produces a rebound effect, in which the thought recurs more often than before. Other work shows that suppressing neural activity in an area of the brain related to lying appears to improve lying, as if the less conscious the more successful.
There is something called induced self-deception, in which the self-deceived person acts not for the benefit of self but for someone who is inducing the self-deception. This can be parent, partner, kin group, society, or whatever, and it is an extremely important factor in human life. You are still practicing self-deception but not for your own benefit. Among other things, it means that we need to be on guard to avoid this fate—not defensive via self-deception but via greater consciousness.
Finally, we have treated self-deception as part of an offensive strategy, but is this really true? Consider the opposite—and conventional—view, that self-deception serves a purely defensive function, for example, protecting our degree of happiness in the face of reality. An extreme form is the notion that we would not get out of bed in the morning if we knew how bad things were—we levitate ourselves out via self-deception. This makes no coherent sense as a general truth, but in practicing self-deception, we may sometimes genuinely fool ourselves for personal benefit (absent any effect on others). Placebo effects and hypnosis provide unusual examples, in that they show direct health benefits from self-deception, although this typically requires a third party, either hypnotist or doctor-model. And people can almost certainly induce positive immune effects with the help of personal self-deception, as we shall see in Chapter 6.
THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF CONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE
Because we live inside our conscious minds, it is often easy to imagine that decisions arise in consciousness and are carried out by orders emanating from that system. We decide, “Hell, let’s throw this ball,” and we then initiate the signals to throw the ball, shortly after which the ball is thrown. But detailed study of the neurophysiology of action shows otherwise. More than twenty years ago, it was first shown that an impulse to act begins in the brain region involved in motor preparation about six-tenths of a second before consciousness of the intention, after which there is a further delay of as much as half a second before the action is taken. In other words, when we form the conscious intention to throw the ball, areas of the brain involved in throwing have already been activated more than half a second earlier.
Much more recent work, from 2008, gives a more dramatic picture of preconscious neural activity. The original work involved a neural area, the supplementary motor area involved in late motor planning. An important distinction is whether preparatory neural activity is related to a particular decision (throw the ball) or just activation in general (do something). A novel experiment settled the matter. While seeing a series of letters flash in front of him or her, each a half-second apart, an individual is asked to hit one of two buttons (with left or right index finger) whenever he or she feels like it and to remember which letter was seen when the conscious choice was made. After this, the subject had to choose which of four letters was the one he or she saw when consciously deciding to press the button. This served roughly to demarcate when conscious knowledge of the decision is made, since each letter is visible for only half a second and conscious knowledge of intention occurs about one second before the action itself.
What about prior unconscious intention? Computer software can search through fMRI images (showing