behavior,
cognitions, and consciousness
Considerable work
in comparative psychology and zoology has been devoted to behavioral comparisons
between man and other animals. Comparative differences are often useful in
helping us to understand possible evolutionary trends and the development
of specific types of brain functioning. Man often uses such comparisons to
argue for his own superiority over other animals, a position of some question
if we use criteria such as how an animal treats a fellow of his species. Man
created a phylogenetic scale and modestly placed himself at the top, and some
people hold the curious belief that man is the final product of evolution.
Similarly many people argue that dogs are more intelligent than cats because
dogs are better at learning to do what man wants them to do, a somewhat egocentric
approach to the concept of “intelligence.” To appreciate some of the legitimate
differences between man and the other animals we will first briefly mention
some of the research on chimpanzees.
In some extremely
important field work Jane Goodall (Lawick Goodall, 1971) lived for several
years with wild chimpanzees in the rain forests of Tanzania. It took her considerable
time and patience to gradually approach and be accepted by the chimps. But
after she was finally accepted she was able to observe and record the behavior
of chimps in their natural settings, behavior which proved to be much more
complex than had been expected. The chimps showed a wide range of identifiable
emotions, including fear, rage, shock, confusion, amusement, worry, and embarrassment.
They would often dance and play games. When a new fruit tree was discovered
they would hug each other and slap each other on the back. And they often
organized hunting parties with complex plans to catch their prey.
Perhaps most important
of Goodall’s observations relates to the chimps’ use of tools. Before these
observations, toolmaking was generally considered to be unique to man. Other
animals, such as some birds, might use tools, but only
man was assumed capable of making
the tools he used. Goodall
observed that the chimps did in fact make and use tools. They would chew leaves
to make sponges in order to sop water out of a branch. When they desired some
termites they might poke twigs or blades of grass into termite nests and then
withdraw them with termites on them. To maintain man’s uniqueness as toolmaker,
some anthropologists now say
that for an implement to be a tool it has to
be made according to a regular pattern.
One set of chimpanzee
experiments has involved raising the chimps in homes, like humans (Kellogg,
1968). These experiments tell us what types of human behaviors chimps might
be capable of. Home-raised chimps easily learned to wear clothes, sleep in
beds, drink from glasses, eat with silverware, open doors, work faucets, and
play catch. They matured faster than humans in eye-hand coordination and locomotion.
The chimps enjoyed photographs and motion pictures. However, attempts at teaching
the chimps to speak more than a few words always failed.
Trying to teach chimps
to speak, however, may not be a fair test of their language capabilities,
for chimps are generally not vocal animals unless disturbed. Therefore some
researchers are investigating language learning in chimps with non-vocal language.
Gardner and Gardner (1969) taught their chimp to use sign language
with specific hand gestures for words such as “more,” “open,” and “please.”
As soon as the chimp had a vocabulary of eight to ten words she started using
combinations of words such as “gimme tickle.” She invented the phrase “open
food drink” when she wanted the refrigerator opened, yet had no word for “refrigerator.”
Premack (1970), on the other hand, taught his chimp a language of more than
120 words, where the words were plastic figures put on a board. This chimp
was shaped to be able to understand and construct sentences such as “Mary
give apple Sarah.” Premack systematically demonstrated that he could produce
in his chimp a range of language properties previously considered to be unique
to human communication.
Although chimps may
be capable of language learning in ways qualitatively similar to man, it is
the amount of language usage that provides large differences
between the behavior of humans and nonhumans, for through his language man
creates a culture which acquires an autonomy that supersedes the individuals.
When an animal dies, most of what he has learned dies with him; other members
of his species must keep starting from the beginning again. But much of man’s
learning is incorporated into the culture’s memory storage (e.g., books, articles,
folk-tales) which other men can draw on. The culture in turn takes an active
role in the socializing and conditioning of its members, as through its mores,
laws, and schools. Current evolution is clearly more cultural than biological.
Early antagonists of Darwin, such as Paul Kammerer, disliked the idea that
natural selection seemed purposeless. They prefered a model of man in which
what a man masters and learns might be passed on biologically. Their mistake
was that the type of evolution they wanted probably occurs at a cultural
level, not at a biological level.
If it weren’t for
language, man would essentially have no culture. Take away culture and all
that is derived from it and the differences between man and chimp would be
considerably reduced. Although the preceding discussion is oversimplified,
language is clearly a key variable in the complexity of man’s behavior. Pavlov
was so impressed by the importance of language that he suggested that with
the advent of language a new principle of neural action was introduced.
As language becomes
internalized into processes such as “thinking” and “reasoning,” we enter the
domain of consciousness. Of all of the proposed differences between man and
the other animals, from disparate areas such as psychology, philosophy, and
theology, some of the strongest and potentially most important arguments relate
to differences in consciousness. Furthermore, an understanding of the nature
of consciousness and how it interrelates with learning underlies some of the
key issues of psychology, particularly those related to therapy and self-discovery
and to the relationship between awareness and performance.
Consciousness is
a nebulous, poorly defined construct. It refers to a subjective experience
within the organism in which the organism is aware of some event such as sensory
input or the associative processing of his brain. Each person has some idea
of the nature of consciousness from his own personal experiences, and we generally
assume that other people have similar conscious experiences. However, we cannot
know for sure, for at the current scientific level our only measure of the
content of consciousness of another person is what the person tells us.
Much of our knowledge
about consciousness comes from introspection—looking inward. We assume here
that the mind has the ability to observe itself. Hebb (1968, 1969) has questioned
this assumption and suggested that much of introspection may be fantasy. That
is, a person may be aware of a sense impression or a memory trace that has
been elicited and has the illusion that he is observing the working of his
mind. The type of illusions that may arise can be seen in the imagery of consciousness.
For example, if a group of people are told to close their eyes and to imagine
seeing the word “Louisiana,” most people will report that they have a clear
image of the word in their mind. But if asked to quickly spell the word backward,
which they should be able to do if they really had a true image of the word,
they usually have trouble. Similarly the reader might stop here and recall
some specific activity he has done, such as diving into a swimming pool or
working in a garden. When they “recall” such memories, people often have images
that they never actually observed, such as seeing themselves doing the activity
from the perspective of another person. For example, my memories of a recent
bicycle ride include images of myself riding the bicycle as seen from
the front door of my house. Hebb’s recollection of a certain field involved
a visual image of the field as seen from 30 feet in the air, although he had
never seen the field from this point.
Because the nature
of consciousness is currently so subjective and is not directly measurable,
many psychologists, particularly those influenced by Skinner, do not consider
it a phenomenon worth pursuing and generally do not include consciousness
as a construct in their psychological models. If we are measuring consciousness
by means of verbal report, then let us restrict our discussions to the verbal
report rather than postulating a consciousness that precedes verbal report.
This approach has proven extremely productive and powerful. Someone like Skinner
can generally adequately account for the complexities of human behavior without
appealing to such elusive phenomena as consciousness. The only fault with
such an approach is that many people may consider it worthwhile to study consciousness
for its own sake. Many theorists give great importance to the nature and functions
of consciousness.
The ambiguity about
consciousness becomes even greater when we move from humans to nonhumans,
for it is very difficult to extrapolate from our subjective experiences to
those of nonhuman animals, and the animal doesn’t tell us much by verbal report.
There are basically two approaches to the issue of whether animals have consciousness.
The first, popular among many theologians and anthropologists, is that consciousness
is a property that emerges only when the nervous system reaches a certain
complexity, and this minimum level of complexity appears to have been reached
only by man. Thus man has consciousness and other animals do not. According
to this view, consciousness is a threshold phenomenon; it does not occur at
all until some threshold value of nervous system complexity has been reached.
One wonders whether a future computer network will reach the level of complexity
necessary for consciousness.
The second approach
to consciousness assumes that consciousness occurs in varying degrees in different
animals, depending on the complexity of their nervous systems. Thus nonhumans
have some conscious- ness, but theirs is probably much less complex and sophisticated
than that of humans. A large part of most human consciousness is visual images,
since vision is one of the most important senses to man, and language symbols
such as words. Animals don’t use symbols as much as man; not that they necessarily
cannot use symbols, but symbols are not that important in their life, so they
don’t learn them. Therefore we might expect the consciousness of animals to
be relatively symbol-free. Animal consciousness is probably dominated by sequences
of sense impressions emphasizing the sense modes that are important to the
animal’s particular species. It is also probable that man’s greater use of
symbols and language in his reasoning is the basis for the major behavioral
differences between man and other animals.
It is sometimes suggested
that only man has self-awareness — awareness of himself as
an object. It is not clear exactly what self-awareness is, but some experiments
with chimps suggest that they may have something akin to self-awareness, if
self-recognition in a mirror implies a primitive concept of self. Gallup (1971)
exposed jungle- born chimpanzees to mirrors. At first they responded to their
images as if they were other chimps. By the third day, however, the chimps
used the mirrors to inspect parts of their bodies they could not see and to
make faces at themselves. One time, after the chimps were anesthetized so
that they were unconscious, Gallup applied to each chimp an odorless dye to
the upper ridge of one eyebrow and the top half of the opposite ear. When
the chimps awoke they didn’t know that they had the dye on them until they
saw themselves in the mirror. They then became agitated and started touching
the dyed areas. Thus it appears that chimps have at least some concept of
self.
Differences in consciousness
are generally considered related to differences in the complexity of the nervous
system. But exactly what aspects of the nervous system account for these various
differences? Pure size is not the answer, for an elephant’s brain is larger
than a man’s. The brain of the porpoise is larger and more convoluted than
man’s brain. To develop a complete explanation for the differences between
humans and nonhumans, we will probably have to examine variables such as the
specific types of neurons, how the neurons are organized, and the types and
efficiency of neural transmission. Right now the structural differences between
the brains of man, chimp, and porpoise seem too superficial to account for
the large differences in capabilities.
One of the major
unresolved philosophical issues is the mind-body problem (Eacker, 1972;
Tibbetts, 1973). The “body” here refers to the unthinking, observable substance
that constitutes the form and figure of a person. The “mind,” on the other
hand, has no substance, and is generally defined in terms of its functions,
primarily thinking. That is, it is the mind which thinks and is conscious.
The mind-body problem is the question of how two entities as different as
mind and body can influence each other.
The approach of monism assumes that mind and body are simply two aspects of the same underlying
reality; in other words, there is just one entity which is observed, conceptualized,
and described from different perspectives. This is essentially the position
of Skinner, who assumes that the same laws of behavior apply to events inside
a man as outside; it is just harder to measure and observe the internal events.
As Skinner (1972) argues:
What we feel when
we have feelings and what we observe through introspection are nothing more
than a rather miscellaneous set of collateral products or by-products of the
environmental conditions to which behavior is related. (We do not act because
we feel like acting, for example; we act and feel like acting for a common
reason to be sought in our environmental history.) Do I mean to say that Plato
never discovered the mind? Or that Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, and Kant were
preoccupied with incidental, often irrelevant by-products of human behavior?
Or that the mental laws of physiological psychologists like Wundt, or the
stream of consciousness of William James, or the mental apparatus of Sigmund
Freud have no useful place in the understanding of human behavior? Yes, I
do. And I put the matter strongly because, if we are to solve the problems
that face us in the world today, this concern for mental life must no longer
divert our attention from the environmental conditions of which human behavior
is a function.
Munn (1971, p. 12)
defined a person’s mind as “the integrated totality of the conscious and unconscious
processes involved in acquiring, storing, and utilizing information in his
interactions with his environment.”
The opposite of monism
is dualism, in which the mind and body are considered separate
entities which may or may not interact. There are many forms of dualism, three
of which are discussed below:
1. According to interactionism, the mind and body are different substances which
causally interact with each other. For example, Descartes suggested that the
mind and body interact through the mediation of the pineal body, a small gland
in the brain of unknown function.
2. The position of
parallelism is that the mind and body do not interact but simply run in parallel.
Bodily and mental events may correspond, but they are not causally connected
to each other.
3. The position of
epiphenomenalism assumes that the phenomena of the mind accompany
the functions of the body but have no important effect on the body. Consider
a futuristic robot that has been programmed to behave according to specified
laws, but which is complex enough so that its behavior is modifiable by experience.
That is, the robot’s behavior is determined, but it can also learn. Assume
also that we can somehow give the robot an awareness or consciousness of its
own behavior, including awareness of some of the processes of the mediating
circuitry inside itself. Now if the robot’s programming and the current stimulus
situation determine its behavior as well as what goes into the robot’s awareness,
but the awareness has no effect on the behavior, then the robot’s mind is
an epiphenomenon. The mind receives input from the body but does not send
output to the body. The robot could also be programmed to be aware of a response
that it is about to make just before it actually makes the response. Then,
even though its behavior is determined, the robot might have the belief it has free will since it has the illusion of deciding to make a response
before actually making it. The reader might consider what differences he thinks
exist between us and the robot.
Physiological studies
have produced a number of observations that bear on the relationship between
brain and consciousness. In Chapter Two we discussed split-brain studies in
humans, studies in which the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres
is severed. This produces a person with essentially two brains: the major
hemisphere (usually the left hemisphere), which contains the basic areas related
to speech, and the minor hemisphere, which is incapable of producing speech.
The major hemisphere has the kind of consciousness that we usually experience,
particularly consciousness whose content is speech-related. But there may
also be an independent and different stream of consciousness in the minor
hemisphere. Sperry’s (1968) studies of the functioning of the minor hemisphere
“suggest the presence of ideas and a capacity for mental association and at
least some simple logic and reasoning.” For example, from a number of items,
the minor hemisphere consciousness can identify a wrist watch as being the
most like a wall clock, suggesting some concept of timepieces. The minor hemisphere
can also use symbols, as is indicated by its ability to do simple arithmetic
problems. Sperry also notes that the minor hemisphere “is able to comprehend
both written arid spoken words to some extent, although this comprehension
cannot be expressed verbally.” For example, it can match actual objects to
the written name of the object. The minor hemisphere also displays emotions,
as when the subject is surprisingly shown a picture of a nude.
Sperry concludes
that “Observations like the foregoing lead us to favor the view that in the
minor hemisphere we deal with a second conscious entity that is characteristically
human and runs along in parallel with the more dominant stream of consciousness
in the major hemisphere.” Ornstein (1973) suggests that the left (dominant)
hemisphere generally is “predominantly involved with analytic thinking, especially
language and logic” and “seems to process information sequentially,” whereas
the right hemisphere is “primarily responsible for our orientation in space,
artistic talents, body awareness, and recognition of faces” and “integrates
material in a simultaneous, rather than linear fashion.” More generally, Sperry
(1969) considers consciousness to be an emergent property of the simple neural
constituents. Consciousness is assumed to exert a holistic form of causal
control over brain activity.
Humans with damage
to the frontal cortex often show a form of perseverative behavior, a tendency
to keep repeating a way of responding, even after the particular responses
are no longer appropriate. That is, they often do not adapt as fast as normal
to changing contingencies. However, observation of frontally damaged humans
shows that they often know what the correct response should be (as, for example, in a card-sorting task), but they can’t make the
response (B. Milner, 1964). To oversimplify, it is as if the part of the brain
which “knows” what the correct response is, and can often verbalize it, had
inadequate control over the part of the brain that moves the body in making
the response. This latter part then has a tendency to perseverate responses.
There is some slightly suggestive evidence for similar phenomena in rats with
lesions of the caudate nucleus, a brain area which in rats has some functional
similarities to the frontal cortex in man (Mikulas & Isaacson, 1965).
Earlier we emphasized
the importance of contiguity in learning and performance. Many times events
are associated together, not through simple contiguity but through the mediation of a common event to which they are both associated. Thus if A is associated
with C, and B is associated with C, then the person may associate A and B
through the mediation of C. The concept of mediation has proven powerful to
psychology (e.g., Kjeldergaard, 1968), since it allows us to explain complex
associations and behavior patterns in terms of contiguity and mediation. Deese
and Hulse (1967, p. 316) give three of the basic forms of mediation: (1) chaining
involves learning A-B and B-C and then testing for the association A-C;
(2) stimulus equivalence
involves learning A-B and C-B and then testing
for A-C; (3) response equivalence
involves learning B-A and
B-C and testing for A-C. In all cases, A and C became associated through the
mediation of B.
A lot takes place
within an organism between the stimulus situation that the organism is exposed
to and the response that he makes to the situation. Some theorists disregard
what goes on within the organism, some theorists fill the organism with various
assumed variables and constructs, and some theorists put volition within the
organism. It is also possible to argue that between stimulus and response
there is a complex sequence of mediation of the types discussed above. That
is, through learning the nervous system develops a complex web of mediated
associations that interconnect stimuli and responses. In test situations subjects
are often aware of the mediational processes involved, but it is also well
established that mediation can occur without awareness (Kjeldergaard, 1968).
Much or all of thinking
might simply be mediational processes, some of which we are conscious of.
The consciousness may or may not have any effect on the mediation. It is also
possible that sometimes our thinking is consciousness of mediational processes
other than the ones actually determining our behavior.
Much of our learning
occurs without our being aware of what we are learning or even that we are
learning at all. A person might be able to remember where a shoe repair shop
is in his town because he has passed it a number of times, but it is possible
that when passing the shop the person may not have paid any attention to it
or been consciously aware it was there. When walking along with someone we
may adjust our pace to accommodate them and not be aware that we are doing
so. Later, when starting a walk with the same person, we might immediately
assume the learned pace, again without being aware. The above types of learning
may, of course, involve awareness, but they need not; for awareness can only
accommodate a small part of our behavior and the variables affecting the behavior.
If we had to be aware of everything we learn, our learning capabilities would
be cut down significantly and we would be much less efficient at coping with
a changing environment. This is particularly true when the relevant stimuli
are subtle environmental cues or internal stimuli.
Similarly, many behaviors
that may have required (or produced) awareness at one time may now no longer
have a conscious component. Consider learning to drive a car. When first learning
to stop at a stop sign, the beginner may have to be aware of putting in the
clutch, braking, shifting gears, and then simultaneously releasing the clutch
and pressing the accelerator. After the person acquires more experience, he
can do all of this without being aware of it, as when his awareness is involved
in a conversation with a passenger. Yet even after these behaviors are no
longer conscious, learning may still be taking place as the driver becomes
more and more skilled at using the car.
Not everyone, however,
agrees with what has just been said. Some theorists believe that awareness
is necessary for learning, at least some forms of learning. Most of the relevant
research and arguments have revolved around the role of awareness in verbal
conditioning.
The verbal conditioning
and awareness studies essentially began with an experiment by Greenspoon (1955).
Greenspoon told his subjects to just continually say individual words. After
getting a baseline of how many plural nouns the subject ordinarily says in
such a situation, an attempt was made to increase the rate of plural nouns
through reinforcement. This was accomplished by the experimenter subtly saying
“mmm-hmm” after each plural noun. The overall result of the reinforcement
was small in magnitude, but significant in effect. The reinforcements doubled
the rate of the subjects’ saying plural nouns. The reader can easily repeat
this experiment with a friend if the reader is careful not to make his “mmm-hmm’s”
obvious.
After the conditioning
sessions were over, Greenspoon questioned his subjects about how aware they
were about what was going on. Those subjects who could correctly describe
the reinforcement contingency were not included in the final analysis given
above. Thus it appeared that people’s verbal behavior could be conditioned
without their being aware of the conditioning. This launched a massive number
of experiments and theories relating awareness and verbal conditioning (e.g.,
Dulany, 1968; Greenspoon & Brownstein, 1967; Holz & Azrin, 1966; Marlatt,
1972; Spielberger & DeNike, 1966). The experiments involved conditioning
a variety of types of verbal behavior, such as types of verbs or specific
pronouns to complete sentences, with subtle reinforcements, such as “good”
or a nod of the head.
Awareness during
these experiments is generally measured by verbal report of the subject, either
oral or written. Verbal report is a highly questionable measure of awareness,
but it is not clear what a better alternative might be. A major problem is
that verbal behavior can be considered just another behavior that follows
the same laws of learning as any other behavior. That is, verbal behavior
can be conditioned in ways that often make it suspect as a reliable measure.
It seems somewhat paradoxical that studies demonstrating the conditioning
of verbal behavior use verbal behavior as a measure of the awareness of the
conditioning.
Another problem is
the question of exactly what it is that the subject is supposed to be aware
of. Is awareness simply being cognizant that something is going on? What if
the subject is generally aware of the contingency, but his hypothesis is not
quite right? For example, the subject might believe that the experimenter
is saying “good” after all nouns that end in “s” when in fact the experimenter
will reinforce any plural noun. A determination of awareness is
often harder than it seems. Most experimenters consider a subject aware when
he can state the correct reinforcement contingency. Marlatt (1972) suggests
that the “concept of awareness should be defined as the degree of congruence
between the subject’s own perception of the purpose of the experiment and
the experimenter’s purpose.”
Numerous studies
have been reported demonstrating verbal conditioning without awareness, and
many other studies have found conditioning only when the subjects were aware;
thus, the controversy is yet unresolved. In attempting to account for such
discrepancies, Spielberger and DeNike (1966) suggested that many of the measures
of awareness used in some experiments were not sensitive enough. In their
research they used more detailed questioning about awareness and assessed
for awareness at different intervals during the conditioning itself, rather
than assessing after the last conditioning trial. They found that only those
subjects who were judged to be aware showed any performance gains during conditioning.
Also, the subjects were judged aware at that point of the conditioning at
which performance gains began. Thus it seemed that awareness was necessary
for verbal conditioning, and previous studies that did not find this did not
use sensitive enough measures of awareness. According to Spielberger and DeNike
the verbal conditioning studies are essentially problem solving tasks in which
the subject learns to be aware of a correct response-reinforcement contingency.
There are some problems
with the Spielberger and DeNike approach. First, to say that a person learns to be aware is at least allowing for some type of learning without awareness.
Second, a measure of awareness might be considered sensitive enough only if
it shows awareness to precede or correspond to performance changes. A researcher
who believes that awareness is necessary for learning might discount those
findings that don’t match his bias by saying that the measure used was not
sensitive enough. Third, and most important, is that the procedures that Spielberger
and DeNike used to determine awareness may have facilitated the subject’s
becoming aware. Perhaps the subjects would not have been aware if they hadn’t
been questioned so much.
Thus the problem
is how to question the subject in enough detail so that you have a reasonable
measure of awareness, but at the same time to do this in a manner that does
not make the subject aware. Rosenfeld and Baer (1969, 1970) seem to have found
a way. In their first experiment (1969) they told a graduate student that
he would be an interviewer whose job was to reinforce mannerisms in a subject
who was the interviewee. This was accomplished by the interviewer’s asking
questions of the interviewee and then reinforcing by head-nodding whenever
the interviewee rubbed his chin. In fact, the interviewee was a “double-agent”
working for Rosenfeld and Baer. The interviewee was reinforcing the interviewer
for certain verbal responses such as “yeah.” The reinforcement the interviewee
used was his own chin-rubbing, which was reinforcing to the interviewer since
this was the response he was trying to produce.
During the time-outs
between conditioning trials, the interviewer could be questioned in detail
about the experiment without making him suspect that he was the actual subject
of the experiment, for he believed that he was conditioning the interviewee,
rather than the other way around. Using this approach it was possible to demonstrate
that the verbal responses of the interviewer could be reinforced and altered
in rate without the interviewer being aware.
In a variation on
this approach, Rosenfeld and Baer (1970) had their subjects believe that they
were experimenters who were reinforcing fluent pronunciation of nouns by people
speaking over an intercom. In fact, the supposed “people” were a double-agent
multitrack tape recorder which reinforced the subjects with fluent nouns whenever
the subjects made certain types of verbal requests for the next noun. Again,
verbal conditioning without awareness was demonstrated.
Like Spielberger
and DeNike, Marlatt (1972) views the verbal conditioning studies as problem-solving
tasks. According to Marlatt, the subject at first does not know how to perform
successfully in the task. He gradually gains information through sources such
as instructions, verbal reinforcement, and models. Awareness might result
from any combination of these sources of information. Marlatt suggests that
the reinforcement serves two functions: (1) it has informational properties
which may feed into awareness; and (2) it has incentive properties that may
affect the person’s intentions regarding performance. That is, reinforcement
in verbal conditioning tasks is a form of feedback and hence may have any
of the properties of feedback discussed in Chapter Six.
There seems to be
sufficient reason and evidence to suggest that verbal conditioning may occur
without awareness. Awareness may often occur in such tasks, but it does not
seem to be a prerequisite for conditioning. On the other hand, procedures
aimed to make the subject more aware may often facilitate learning through
effects on processes such as attention and the values assigned to different
stimuli. For discussion let us assume, like Spielberger, that changes in petformance
occur only after awareness occurs. If this were true, would it prove that
awareness is necessary for learning in verbal conditioning? Again the answer
is no. First of all there is the old problem of going from correlation to
causation. That is, just because awareness and performance changes may be
correlated does not tell you which caused which or if perhaps both are effects
from some third source.
More important is
the fact that information relating awareness to performance changes may be irrelevant to the issue of whether awareness is necessary
for learning (Mikulas, 1970). For example, it may be that
during the early conditioning trials learning is gradually taking place, but
it is not displayed in performance because it is below some threshold value.
When the strength of learning reaches this threshold, performance gains occur.
Now awareness might also occur at the point, or just before the point, when
learning reaches the threshold. The awareness may then be a result of the
learning or it may be independent of the learning.
An important implication
of the verbal conditioning literature is that it makes us a little suspicious
of the reliability of verbal report as a measure of something else, such as
internal states, attitudes, or other behaviors. We have noted how the parent,
teacher, or therapist might, intentionally or otherwise, reinforce the person
he is interacting with to talk in a certain fashion that may more reflect
the first person’s bias rather than what the report is supposed to measure
in the second person. For example, a therapist who relies on his patient’s
verbal report may reinforce his patients to talk in ways that fit the therapist’s
theoretical orientation. Many examples of so-called insight may be nothing
more than the products of a subtle shaping program. And much of this learning
may occur without the patient’s being aware of it.
INTERACTIONS
OF COGNITIONS AND
BEHAVIORS
For the purpose of
discussion let us consider two
different systems of human
activity — a behavioral system and a cognitive system.
The behavioral system includes the output of the person: what he does, both
skeletally and autonomically, as well as overtly and covertly. The behavioral
system encompasses how the person responds to a situation, including internal
responses such as physiological reactions. The cognitive system includes the
subjective conscious experience that accompanies and perhaps precedes the
behaviors. The cognitive system is the seat of consciousness, awareness, insight,
and the evaluative component of attitudes.
Important questions
for anyone concerned with change processes are: (1) Do changes in the cognitive
system result in changes in the behavioral system? and (2) Do changes in the
behavioral system result in changes in the cognitive system?
Unfortunately there
is currently no way of measuring the cognitive system independently of the
behavioral system, for we can’t know about another person’s cognitions except
through some behavior such as verbal report. One approach to this dilemma
is to deny the existence of the cognitive system or to discount questions
about it as being meaningless. Another possibility is that all aspects of
the cognitive system will eventually reduce to the behavioral system. For
purposes of this discussion, however, we will assume that there are two systems,
realizing that the cognitive system is always measured via the behavioral
system.
Thus, when talking
about the interactions between changes in the cognitive system and changes
in the behavioral system, what we will really be considering are the interactions
between changes in the cognitive system, as measured by specific behaviors,
and changes in behaviors other than those used to measure the cognitions.
Obviously if the two sets of behaviors are very similar they will change in
similar ways as the result of response generalization. Our interest will be
more in those situations where the behaviors are dissimilar. For example,
when considering whether changing a person’s attitudes toward a minority group
will change the way the person acts toward members of this group, we really
are asking a question such as the following: “How do changes in Fred’s behavior
of checking rating scales about the minority group (presumed to measure attitudes)
correlate with changes in Fred’s behavior of helping a member of the minority
group to get a home in Fred’s neighborhood?”
There is no question
that a person’s behaviors generally match his cognitions; a person generally
does those things that he consciously intends to do. But how effective is
it to change cognitions in an attempt to change behaviors? Consider attitudes
first.
Attitudes have basically
two components: an emotional component in the behavioral system and an evaluative
component in the cognitive system. The evaluative component includes the subjective
associations and classifications that a person has toward some stimulus complex.
The cognition “a woman’s place is in the home” is an example of the cognitive
part of an attitude that many people are currently trying to alter. The basic
problem is to determine how changes in attitudes correlate with changes in
the general behavioral system. It is assumed by educators, politicians, and
other influence agents that changing attitudes is an effective way to produce
changes in a number of behaviors. However, there is little support for this
assumption, particularly for long term effects.
The general finding
is that although it may be relatively easy to change attitudes,
unless general behaviors are altered independently in the same direction,
the attitudes will drift back to where they were before. The attitudes of
a white racist might be altered so that he will say that he likes blacks,
but if his general behavior isn’t independently altered to make him act toward
blacks in a more favorable manner, there is a good chance that his attitude
will change back to that of a racist.
In an early review
Festinger (1964) concluded that attitude change is “inherently unstable and
will disappear or remain isolated unless an environmental or behavioral change
can be brought about to support or maintain it.” In a later, very extensive
review Wicker (1969) noted that “Taken as a whole, these studies suggest that
it is considerably more likely that attitudes will be unrelated or only slightly
related to overt behaviors than that attitudes will be closely related to
actions.” Wicker could find “little evidence to support the postulated existence
of stable, underlying attitudes within the individual which influence both
his verbal expressions and his actions.”
A number of common
examples support these conclusions. Many smokers are well informed about the
hazards of smoking and believe this information, but this does not stop their
smoking; the same is true for many alcoholics. After pointing out how research
in psychotherapy has neglected the relationships between attitudes and behavior,
Ludwig (1968) suggested that constructive attitude change with alcoholics
might merely produce a more insightful drunk.
It is possible to
think of situations in which changes in attitudes seem to produce long term
general changes in behavior. If these situations are investigated carefully,
however, it is usually possible to identify variables apart from the attitude
change which deal with the behavioral system directly. Perhaps in addition
to changing a person’s attitudes one also reinforces him for acting in a different
way. The person might also be exposed to salient models or required to role-play
new behaviors. In some situations following attitude change the person might
be sent out on specific behavioral assignments requiring him to act in new
ways which may then be reinforced by the social environment. It is also possible
that during the attitude €hange procedure the person is exposed to counterconditioning
of new responses in place of old responses, either overt responses or mediating
responses in a response chain. Many of these variables affecting the behavioral
system are often artifacts of attempting to alter attitudes. A more powerful
approach is to develop a systematic learning program that attempts to directly
alter the behavioral system. Such an approach goes under many names, one of
which is behavior modification.
A trend among many
social psychologists is to no longer merely alter attitudes but to also directly
change the related behaviors in the same direction. For example, Zimbardo
and Ebbesen (1970, p. 85) conclude that “changes in attitude are not necessarily
accompanied by changes in behavior. Furthermore, when changes in behavior
do occur, they are rarely, if ever, general or enduring.” Their solution to
this problem is to wed learning theory and social psychology into “social
learning,” which add to the attitude change techniques the behavior change
techniques of respondent conditioning, operant conditioning, and modeling.
“When would the social learning approach expect verbal statements to match
nonverbal behavior? Essentially it would predict a match whenever a person
expects similar consequences for both kinds of behavior.” (Zimbardo &
Ebbesen, 1970, p. 92).
A general area that
is based on the assumption that cognitive change produces behavioral change
is insight-oriented psychotherapy. Here it is assumed that providing
the patient with insight or awareness about the nature and etiology of his
problems will result in changes in his behavior and correction of these problems.
A person might spend hundreds of hours with a psychotherapist working through
events of his psychosexual history, interpreting the symbols of his dreams
and fantasies, and learning to perceive his behavior from the theoretical
orientation of the therapist. Out of such a process, or from some other insight-oriented
psychotherapy, new cognitions arise. But do such cognitive changes produce
general behavioral changes? The answer appears to be no.
Eysenck (1952) searched
the published literature and could find no evidence that patients given psychotherapy
improved significantly more than patients given no formal psychotherapy. Although
there were some methodological problems with some of the evidence that Eysenck
presented, his challenge still stands. There is still a conspicuous absence
of well-controlled studies demonstrating that psychotherapy as practiced by
professional therapists is more effective than treatment by nonprofessionals
such as ministers and friends.
In his presidential
address to the Division of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological
Association, Hobbs (1962) suggested that “Insight is not a cause of change
but a possible result of change. It is not a source of therapeutic gain, but
one among a number of possible consequences of gain.” Similarly London (1969,
p. 53) concludes that “Insight therapy is clearly a poor means of symptom
control; after almost 70 years of use, there are still few indications that
uncovering motives and expanding self-understanding confer much therapeutic
power over most troubling symptoms.”
As with attitudes,
it appears that in therapeutic settings, changing cognitions is an inefficient
way to change behaviors. This is not surprising since simply understanding
a problem doesn’t necessarily mean that the person has the skills to overcome
it. His behaviors may be too strongly conditioned. Consider a person with
a fear of snakes. He might know that the snake we are going to show him is
harmless and locked in a glass case. He knows there is no reason to be afraid
of this snake. But when we put him near the case with the snake in it, he
will be anxious. The anxiety is beyond his cognitive control. The reader can
probably identify things that make him anxious, such as heights, speaking
before groups, or certain insects. Do you think that being aware of the irrationality
of your fear, its etiology, or its symbolic meaning is going to reduce your
fear significantly? Probably not. It would be better to condition the anxiety
out with procedures such as desensitization, discussed in Chapter Five.
The author worked with a case of a sexually impotent man who, following psychotherapy, “knew” and “understood” his impotence in terms of his puritan childhood and was “aware” of the irrationality of his anxiety in his present marriage. But the man was still impotent. However, over a period of a couple of months it was possible to countercondition out his anxiety and countercondition in the desired sexual response.
Many people, because
of their conditioning history, have strong negative emotional responses
to blacks. For some people, unfortunately not enough, their emotional reactions
to the blacks are contradictory to their social-religious philosophy. But
since their philosophy (cognitions) is insufficient to alter their conditioned
emotions, they continue to respond emotionally to blacks and avoid discussing
or thinking about this discrepancy with their philosophy, as awareness of
the discrepancy is unpleasant. Again, counterconditioning seems called for.
This doesn’t mean
that a person who goes through insight-oriented psychotherapy will show
no behavioral changes. There is too much evidence for such behavioral changes.
However, the behavioral changes which do result probably are not due to
cognitive changes per se. Rather they are due to the role of learning variables
such as reinforcement, extinction, modeling, role-playing, counterconditioning,
and behavioral assignments. The psychotherapist may provide the patient
with discrimination training, alter incentives to which the person responds,
or produce respondent conditioning through complex language-mediated associations.
Whatever the changes
in the behavioral system, they are probably based on the principles of conditioning.
Unfortunately many therapists produce such changes as an unintentional side
effect of trying to alter cognitions. This makes such behavioral changes
quite inefficient. The advocate of behavior modification argues that the
therapist would be significantly more effective if he applied a systematic
conditioning program to alter the behavioral system, rather than trying
to produce behavioral changes indirectly by altering the cognitive system.
Of course sometimes the goal is cognitive changes for the sake of cognitive
change alone, but that is a different issue than is being discussed here.
Elsewhere the author
(Mikulas, 1972a, p. 9) has argued that “The assumption of psychology is
that there is a set of laws that describes factors that determine a person’s
behavior. If a person’s behavior is changed, regardless of what the procedure
is called (e.g., behavior modification, analysis, influence, nondirective
counseling), the change must be based on these laws. And the closer the
treatment program comes to utilizing these laws, the more effective it is.
It is not known exactly what these basic laws are, but the experimental
psychologist believes that the information from the experimental laboratory
is the best approximation we have at present.”
Having made the
preceding generalizations about cognitive change and behavior change, we
can now qualify some of the points with the following useful (albeit oversimplified)
discussion of the possible role of cognitions as mediators in response chains.
Here we will speak of cognitions as responses when more technically we mean
the processes which are the substrates of the subjective cognitions.
We can think of
the behavior of a person as being the end of a chain of responses initiated
by the stimulus situation. That is, the initial stimuli elicit some response
which leads to a second response which leads to a third response and so
forth through the nervous system, until we come to the final behaviors.
(The reader might prefer to use some other word than “response” for such
mediating chains; the terminology is not important here.) This response
chain will generally have several branches that produce different overt
behaviors, as well as side branches which do not lead to overt behavior.
If a cognition is a link in a direct path leading to a specific overt behavior,
then altering the cognition may break the chain and alter the behavior.
However, the cognition may be part of a chain that does not lead to an overt
behavior, in which case altering the cognition will not change any overt
behaviors. Or the cognition may be a link in chains for some behaviors,
such as verbal behavior, but not be a link in the chain for the behavior
we wish to alter. To the extent that this analogy is correct, it is not
surprising that changing cognitions will seldom change a range of overt
behaviors.
Two actual case
examples will illustrate the different roles of cognitions as mediators.
The first case was a young man who had a phobia about being around more
than one or two people and an unrealistic fear of social criticism. When
in the presence of a number of people, he became anxious. The anxiety then
led to cognitions about social criticism. After desensitization eliminated
the anxiety, the related cognitions dropped out, as the chain was broken.
Between treatment sessions the subject often found himself in the presence
of a number of people without realizing that this was a situation that used
to cause anxiety. In this case, simply altering the cognitions would not
have helped the anxiety, since it was the anxiety that produced the cognitions.
A second, somewhat
similar, case involved a female secretary who had irrational fears concerning
people talking about her. A group of her co-workers standing by someone’s
desk elicited the cognition “They are talking about me,” which then elicited
anxiety. In her case, simply eliminating the anxiety would not alter the
cognitions. Therefore the behavioral technique of coverant control was used
to alter the unwanted thoughts; this broke the chain and eliminated the
anxiety.
In practice, response
chains are not as simple as they might appear from the preceding discussion,
and most cases are not as simplistic as the two given as examples. Rather,
a good practitioner would often use a combination of techniques, such as
desensitization and coverant control. Overall it seems that cognitions more
often change following changes in overt behaviors than the other way around.
Earlier it was
mentioned that thoughts could be altered by coverant control. This approach
is based on the logic that a thought is a response that follows the same
laws of conditioning as any other response. The main difference is that
it is a covert rather than an overt response. The word “coverant” is a contraction
of “covert operant” and coverant
control is the application of operant conditioning to
thoughts (Homme, 1965; Mahoney, 1970). By systematically reinforcing desired
thoughts to occur in specific situations, we can replace undesired thoughts
with desired thoughts. This is often worth doing just for itself, as with
a depressive person who continually has negative thoughts about himself.
To the extent that some of the undesired thoughts lead to undesired behaviors,
coverant control may break the response chain.
It is also possible
to use respondent conditioning procedures to alter the affect elicited by
thoughts or words (DiCaprio, 1970; Hekmat & Vanian, 1971). This again
may be a useful way to break response chains.
Behavior modification
is increasingly developing procedures that alter behavior by breaking the
response chain at some point before the final behavior
is reached. This gives more generality to the treatment procedures as well
as laying the groundwork for teaching people self- control over many different
problematic behaviors, for self-control is very often merely the ability
to alter a response chain before the overt behaviors occur. Moving back
in the response chain may also provide a basis for synthesis between behavior
modification and some cognitive theories, if such a synthesis is desired.
Earlier it was
argued that changing the cognitive system generally is ineffective in changing
the behavioral system. The next question is whether changing the behavioral
system produces changes in the cognitive system. The answer appears to be
yes, often.
Ayllon and Michael
(1959) treated a female patient who refused to eat and who made delusional
statements such as that the food was poisoned. Treatment consisted of the
staff’s spilling food on her when she was spoon-fed and reinforcing her
when she fed herself. Although no attempt was made to deal directly with
her delusions, they disappeared as she began to feed herself and found that
she was not poisoned.
Cautela (1965)
described three cases in which desensitization was used to treat phobias.
Although Cautela made no attempt to make the patient aware of the etiology
of his anxiety, the patient gave “insightful- like” statements as the desensitization
became effective. In one case a 29 year old nurse felt great anxiety when
in social situations, but had no idea what caused the fear. Near the end
of the desensitization to social situations she “realized” her fear was
that people would think she was emotionally unstable because she came from
a broken home. It may be unimportant whether this is a “valid” insight,
since following treatment she was functioning adequately.
In an extensive
study Bandura, Blanchard, and Ritter (1969) treated snake phobias with various
combinations of desensitization and modeling. Although no attempt was made
to deal directly with attitudes, attitudes were assessed by general attitude
scales and adjective rating scales. As the treatment procedures altered
the subjects’ phobic behavior, there was a corresponding change in the subjects’
attitudes toward snakes, which became more favorable.
The three studies
just discussed are a sample of a number of reports suggesting that changing
the behavioral system often changes the cognitive system. Exactly why and
in which situations this happens is not known, although it may be nothing
more than generalization from the responses of the assumed behavioral system
to those responses presumed to measure cognitions. Another theory is that
getting the person to behave in a new way may provide a set of new learning
experiences that alters the cognitions.
It is likely that
there is a psychological need for consistency between cognitions and behaviors.
Since the behavioral system is generally dominant to the cognitive system,
when there is a discrepancy between cognitions and behaviors it is the cognitions
that usually change to match the behaviors. If a person has a snake phobia
and negative attitudes toward snakes, simply changing his attitudes will
create a discrepancy between his new attitudes and his old phobic behavior.
This discrepancy will be reduced by the attitudes changing back to match
the phobic behavior. However, as described in a study above, if the phobic
behavior is changed, the discrepancy between attitudes and behaviors will cause
the attitudes to change to match the new behaviors. An interesting question
is whether this postulated psychological need to reduce the discrepancy
between cognitions and behaviors is a learned need.
Along this line
the human mind has a tendency to construct reasons for behaviors that are
better explained in other ways. Delgado (1969, p. 115) describes a patient
who was forced to turn his head by electrical stimulation of a part of the
brain called the internal capsule. Although the stimulation produced simple
movement, the patient seemed to need to justify why he was turning his head:
“I am looking for my slippers,” “I heard a noise,” or “I was looking under
the bed.” It may be that the stimulation elicited hallucinations, but more
probably the cognitive system had to “justify” activities of the behavioral
system.
When the author
was a graduate student, he and other students conditioned one of the Michigan
psychology faculty, such conditioning being a popular pastime among psychology
students around the country. When the professor was in one half of the room
the students were somewhat more attentive and interested, took more notes,
and asked more questions. Because these things were reinforcing to the professor,
he spent most of his time lecturing from this half of the room. Then this
half of the room divided into two quarters and the professor was reinforced
only for being in the quarter nearest the windows. This type of shaping
was continued until the professor gave most of his lectures standing right
next to the windows. Although this was far from a controlled experiment,
a couple of observations are of interest. First, the professor was not aware
that he was being conditioned, even after he was told. Second, the professor
offered good “reasons” for what he did, such as being able to see the blackboard
better from the window wall because it reduced the glare on the board.
The reader might
ask himself how many of the reasons we have for our behaviors could simply
be justifications for behaviors that are better explained in terms of variables
that we are not aware of, and which may be completely unrelated to our reasons.
Philosophers and
social scientists, among others, have spent considerable time debating whether
man has any free will or whether all of his behaviors are completely determined.
The issue is unresolvable for the simple reason that anytime someone offers
a situation in which a person seems to be acting out of free will it can
always be argued that the behavior is determined, but that we aren’t scientifically sophisticated enough to
be able to identify the relevant variables. Apparent acts of volition might
be simple illusions, conscious links in a determined mediation chain, or
legitimate expressions of free will. Whatever the answer, there is practical
value in considering the different levels of freedom.
The lowest level
of freedom is that experienced by the person who is a complete pawn of his
external environment. His mannerisms, appearance, and philosophy are under
the tight control of variables such as social reinforcers and modeling cues.
His emotions are outside of his control and are readily elicited by environmental
stimuli. His behavior is quite predictable to the trained observer. The
highest level of freedom is that of the person whose behavior, as much as
possible, is under the control of those internal variables which, rightly
or wrongly, are identified with acts of volition. This is the person who
is aware of the external influences on his behavior and how they interact
with his internal variables to yield his final behavior. This person has
learned control over his emotions and can manipulate the environment to
alter his own behavior. He is aware of more alternatives and how to take
advantage of them. Very few people, of course, exist at either end of this
continuum of levels of freedom; most people are somewhere in-between. I
do not mean to argue that as a person moves into higher levels of freedom
his behavior is less determined (although this may be true). The behavior
might be just as determined, but the relevant variables may be more internal
than external; the determined mediating chains may be more complex; different
parts of the mediating chain may be gaining access to consciousness; or
the mind may be creating an illusion. Skinner (1971, 1972) argues that variables
inside the person follow the same deterministic laws of behavior as variables
outside the person. The important point, however, is that many people value
moving toward higher levels of freedom. At these higher levels many people
feel more free and autonomous, and hence happier. Therapy and many religions
are often aimed at helping the person reach higher levels of freedom.
In a therapy situation
a person is often at such a low level of freedom that he feels completely
overwhelmed and often isn’t really sure what he wants. As a crude parallel
the reader might consider how his own thinking effectiveness is impaired
when he is absorbed in a problem that makes him quite anxious. A person
at a low level of freedom cannot adequately introspect, make important decisions,
or objectively observe his own behavior. Environmental control over his
actions, emotions, and thoughts is too strong. Therefore he is a poor candidate
for cognitively oriented therapies such as existential psychology or non-directive
approaches.
Behavior modification,
however, may be used to raise a person into higher levels of freedom, for
such modification is geared toward dealing with the variables that control
behavior, and the locus of control can easily be switched from external
to internal variables. That is, through behavior modification a person whose
behaviors were under undesired environmental control can learn self-control
of these same behaviors (see Goldfried & Merbaum, 1973). A person who
feels uncontrolled anxiety in certain situations can with behavior modification
learn to eliminate this anxiety and feel relaxed in the same situations.
A person who does not have the “will power” to keep from overeating can,
through behavior modification, learn self-control of his eating, whereas
before his eating was controlled by the environment.
Thus behavior modification
is probably the most effective way for moving toward higher levels of freedom.
When the subject reaches a high enough level of freedom, the therapist may
wish to interweave a cognitively oriented therapy, although it is not always
clear when, how, or why this should be done.
Similarly many
people who wish to evolve as individuals or explore the reaches of their
consciousness are not at a level of freedom where this is possible. The
environment exerts too much control over their thoughts and behaviors. There
are innumerable free-thinking, liberated, unbiased, mind-exploring individuals
who look, talk, live, and think essentially just like their free-thinking,
liberated, unbiased, mind-exploring friends. They may be spinning their
wheels until they move into a higher level of freedom.
Consciousness is
often considered a relatively unitary phenomenon. However, some researchers
such as Tart (1972a, 1972b) argue that there are qualitatively different
states of consciousness. According to Tart, a state of consciousness is
an “overall patterning of psychological functioning.” Although properties
of different states of consciousness may overlap, Tart suggests that significantly
different states may result from a variety of different situations, including
sleep, hypnosis, meditation, and being under the influence of such drugs
as alcohol, marijuana, and LSD.
According to Tart,
the laws of one state do not necessarily apply in another state. That is,
the principles of one state of consciousness, such as principles of organization,
information-processing, and subjective experience, may be qualitatively
different from the corresponding principles in a different state of consciousness.
Thus it would be difficult, if not impossible, to “understand” or “explain”
the nature of one state of consciousness from the perspective of a different
state of consciousness. This results in what Tart calls state-specific sciences, sciences based entirely on the principles of
one relatively common state of consciousness. Within our Western scientific
tradition the “ordinary-consciousness science” is the only state-specific
science we have developed, although there have been some attempts to chart
the properties of different states of consciousness (Fischer, 1971; Tart,
1969).
There is considerable
evidence that different states of consciousness do exist. There are the
reports of people such as mystics and drug users who claim to have experienced
qualitatively different states of consciousness. Aldous Huxley (1954) graphically
described his early experiences with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline.
Huxley also often put himself into different states of consciousness, including
one he called “Deep Reflection” (Erickson, 1965). Much of Huxley’s creative
work was done while he was in these different states.
Other possible
evidence of different states of consciousness comes from our attempts to
understand the nature of such phenomena as sleep and dreams. Psychotherapists
and occultists, among others, have struggled to learn the laws and meanings
of the sleep-dream state. The current explosion of drug usage, particularly
marijuana, has filled our culture with psychological perspectives and attitudes,
styles of dress and behavior, and humor that “fit” better into the marijuana
state than into the traditional consciousness state. Some forms of music,
such as acid rock, are created by, performed by, intended for, and best
liked by drug users.
It may be that
there is just one general form of consciousness which underlies all of the different states of consciousness. These states then are simply
slices of the whole which seem qualitatively different because we do not
understand or perceive the general continuums that underlie them. However,
even if this is true, it may still be useful to talk in terms of different
states.
Many reasons have
been offered for why it is desirable to experience different states of consciousness.
For some people it is another window through which to view an ultimate reality
underlying all consciousness. For others it is a way of gaining new perspectives
on some part of life and experiencing new ways of thinking and perceiving.
For some, like Huxley, it facilitates creativity.
Robert Louis Stevenson
commanded the “brownies” of his mind to furnish him with stories while he
slept. Poincaré described mathematical ideas rising in clouds while he lay
in bed awaiting sleep. Kekule developed his theory of molecular constitution
as the result of images he had during dreamlike reveries (Green et al.,
1971).
Green, Green, and
Walters (1971) have observed that experienced meditators often generate
theta waves in their EEG when in a state of reverie. Believing that a state
of reverie is associated with creativity, they hope to train people to be
more creative by teaching them to put themselves in the state associated
with low frequency alpha and theta waves and to learn to use the experiences
that they encounter in this state.
MENTAL
ILLNESS AS A STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The concept of
mental illness is a social-political fiction. There is no such thing as
a person who is mentally ill; there are only people who behave in ways that deviate enough from a culture’s norms that the culture classifies
them as mentally ill. The arbitrariness of this approach may be seen in
cultural anthropology, which shows that for almost any behavior that our
culture considers mentally ill or abnormal there exists (or has existed)
a culture where the same behavior is the norm or is highly esteemed. Homosexuality
is generally considered abnormal or perverse in our culture, but in some
of the early Greek cultures it was considered superior to heterosexuality.
Cannibalism is an abnormality in our culture, but not in the New Guinea
culture discussed in Chapter Five. Most of the major religious leaders of
the past, if they threatened our society today, would probably be put into
mental hospitals. With the exception of people whose abnormal behavior is
due to major organic dysfunction, just about anyone who is classified as
mentally ill is a person who, because of his particular conditioning history,
has learned a set of behaviors that the people in power consider abnormal.
Treatment, then, should consist of providing a controlled set of new learning
experiences, as with behavior modification, so that the person learns behaviors
that the society considers normal. Such an approach, as is true of any treatment,
counseling, or influence, raises ethical questions about altering a person’s
behavior toward arbitrary norms.
It is also possible
that many people who are called mentally ill have experienced different
states of consciousness. If they could utilize these experiences and perhaps
integrate them into the “ordinary conscious” state, then they might be artists,
mystics, prophets, or play some other social role within the range of “normalcy.”
However, if they are overwhelmed by their experiences in the different states
or have trouble moving back into the ordinary consciousness, they may be
considered mentally ill.
Barron (1972) has
shown a number of similarities between creative people and schizophrenics.
He found that creative writers are unusually open to non-rational experiences.
Half of the male writers he studied reported sensory experiences of things
that weren’t there. Half of all the writers reported intense experiences
of mystical communion. Twenty per cent of the writers reported dreams that
proved prophetic. When given the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI), the writers were well above the general population on measures of
schizophrenic tendency and depression, moderately high on measures of hysteria
and psychopathic deviation, but also well above average in ego strength.
Barron found that creative artists and schizophrenics both report odd sensations
such as ringing in the ears or peculiar odors, high levels of tension and
restlessness, and a proneness to impulsive outbursts. However, creative
artists “seem to be able to incorporate psychotic-like experiences and tendencies
in a matrix of rationality, very high conceptual intelligence, honesty,
and personal effectiveness.”
Many of the proponents
of the radical therapies
(see Ruitenbeek, 1972),
particularly under the influence of R. D. Laing (1967), view many forms
of mental illness as an adventure into a different state of consciousness.
Treatment, according to Laing and his supporters, should not consist of
trying to force a person right back into ordinary consciousness; rather,
the person should be helped and guided during his journey in inner space
so that he is not overcome but profits from his experiences in this state.
Then the person is gradually guided back to ordinary consciousness, hopefully
in a way that facilitates the integration of the different states.
Does it make any
sense to say that one state or level of consciousness is “higher” than another?
Perhaps not, but many psychologists, mystics, and theologians explicitly
or implicitly assume that the different levels of consciousness can be rank-ordered
along some dimension of importance. Maslow (1970) describes “plateau-experiences”
and “peak-experiences” that correspond to different levels of consciousness.
A plateau-experience is
a feeling of exceptional serenity and calm, usually with a cognitive element.
It may involve marvelling and enjoying a simple experience in a new way.
Plateau-experiences may be achieved through hard work and require the experience
of living. A peak-experience is an exceptional, emotional, climactic experience.
It may have no cognitive element but be purely emotional. It is a “first-time”
experience, a rebirth. During a peak-experience the person may perceive
the universe as a unified whole. Maslow believed that other high-level conscious
experiences, such as mystical experiences, are examples of peak-experiences
interpreted within a particular framework such as religion.
Maslow considered
it important and desirable that an individual have plateau-experiences and
hopefully peak-experiences. However, he was not particularly enlightening
on how to attain these experiences. Perhaps a first step would be raising
a person’s level of freedom.
DeRopp (1968, p.
51) offers the following five approximate levels of consciousness, which
correspond closely to levels of consciousness proposed by many other writers
in this area: