You might think that, if there’s one thing in this world you can trust, it’s your brain. You are, after all, as intimate as it is possible to be. But your brain is entirely undeserving of your confidence. It has shifty habits that distort and disguise the truth. Your brain is vainglorious. It deludes you. It is emotional, pigheaded and secretive. This is more than a minor inconvenience. That fleshy walnut inside your skull is all you have to know yourself and to know the world. Yet, thanks to the masquerading of an untrustworthy brain with a mind of its own, much of what you think you know is not quite as it seems.
For a start, your brain shows you a world massively coloured by vanity. It sets you on a pedestal above your peers. It says you are invincible, invulnerable and omnipotent. It is so very vain that, studies show, it even considers the letters that appear in your name to be more attractive than those that don’t. Research shows that these positive illusions are, in fact, essential. They keep your head high and your heart out of your boots. They keep you from contemplating ending it all.
If you don’t see yourself and your world through the lens of deluded optimism, your immune system begins to wonder whether it’s worth the effort of keeping you alive. And, most extraordinary of all, it seems that sometimes your vain brain manages to transform its grandiose beliefs into reality. Buoyed by a brain that loves you like a mother, you struggle and persevere — happily blind to your own inadequacies, arrogantly dismissive of obstacles — and actually achieve your goals.
How deluded are we? When asked, people will modestly confess that they are more ethical, more nobly motivated employees and better drivers than the average person. In the latter case, this even includes people interviewed in hospital after being pulled from the wrecks of their cars. No one considers themselves to be in the bottom half of the heap and, statistically, that’s not possible. But in a sample of vain brains, it’s inevitable. When people in psychological studies are arbitrarily told that they did well on a task (for example, puzzlesolving) they will take the credit for it, but people arbitrarily told that they did badly will find something or someone to blame. And in a final irony, we all think that others are more susceptible to this self-serving bias than ourselves.
By calling on powerful biases in memory and reasoning, the brain can selectively edit and censor the truth, making for a softer, kinder and more palatable reality. If you fail an intelligence test, one response is to tell yourself that, in retrospect, the odds were stacked against you. Researchers have found that optimists in particular use this strategy, which has been dubbed “retroactive pessimism”. It makes failure easier to digest.
Memory is one of your ego’s greatest allies. Good things about us tend to secure a firm foothold in the brain cells, while bad stuff has a habit of slipping away. Imagine being given a personality test and then being presented with a list of behaviours the test says you are likely to display. Would you later remember more negative behaviours (such as, “You would often lie to your parents”) or more positive behaviours ( “You would keep secrets if asked to”)? Researchers found that it wasn’t the insulting results that stuck in the memory, but the predictions of caring and honourable behaviours.
Not only does memory collude with the brain in the information that it lets in, it also controls the information it lets out. All brains contain an enormous database of memories that bear on that perennially fascinating question “Who am I?”, also known as the self-concept. But the self-concept, psychologists have found, convenient shifts. If the self- concept you are wearing no longer suits your motives, the brain slips into something more comfortable.
Two Princeton researchers observed this metamorphosis directly, by tempting the vain brains of their volunteers with an attractive change of self-concept. They asked a group of students to read one of two (fabricated) scientific articles. The first article claimed that an extroverted personality helps people to achieve academic success. The second article claimed that introverts tend to be more successful academically. You can guess what’s going to happen. Imagine it. You’re a vain brain. You’re a vain brain at Princeton, for goodness’ sake. Someone’s offering you a dazzling self-concept that says: “Hey, world. I am going to make it.” A personality trait you’ve been told offers the crystal stairway to triumph might not be quite your size, but if you can make it fit with a bit of tweaking, you will. Whichever personality trait the students thought was the key to success, the more highly the students rated themselves as possessing that attribute.
Vain brains can even trick us into unconsciously manipulating the outcome of a medical diagnosis to make it more acceptable. To show this, a group of volunteers were asked to immerse their forearm in icy water and to keep it there for as long as they could bear. They had to do this both before and after taking physical exercise. Some volunteers were told that if they could keep their arm in ice water for longer after exercise, that was a sign of long-life expectancy.
The other volunteers were told the reverse. Although they weren’t aware that they were doing so, the volunteers changed their tolerance for cold water after exercise in whichever direction they’d been told predicted a long and healthy life. Of course, manipulating their tolerance in this way couldn’t possibly affect life expectancy, but that’s not what’s important to a vain brain.
Don’t feel angry with your vain brain for shielding you from the truth. There is, in fact, a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are clinically depressed.
And depression and pessimism are bad for your chances. When pessimists fail, they think that the fault is in themselves (“I’m stupid”; “I’m useless”), that it will persist for ever and will affect everything they do. This is a far cry from the explanations that happy, self-serving people give for failure. It seems that this pessimism can seriously endanger your health. Pessimists visit the doctor more, have weaker immune systems, are less likely to survive cancer, are more likely to suffer recurrent heart disease and are more likely to meet untimely deaths. It may be hard to cultivate a more optimistic perspective in the face of such data, but it’s worth trying.
One final glorious reason to thank your vain brain is that the joyous cry of the optimist — “Sure! I can do that!” — accompanies a strong motivation to persist with difficult tasks, including the difficult task of life itself, according to the sensationally named terror management theory, developed by Tom Pyszczynski, a professor of psychology at Colorado University. He says that a healthily vain brain is “a protective shield designed to control the potential for terror that results from awareness of the horrifying possibility that we humans are merely transient animals groping to survive in a meaningless universe, destined only to die and decay.” Thanks, brain.
Cordelia Fine is a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne. Her book, A Mind of its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, is published on Tuesday (Icon Books, £9.99). It is available from Times Books First at £9.49, free p&p. Call 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
