The Soul Illusion

Competent individuals get into patterns of acting counter to their interests and principles. They are not intending to hurt themselves and their loved ones. They are repeatedly taken in by an illusion. And, as is the case with illusions, the lessons learned from painful experience do not prevent us from being taken in again.

The soul illusion is a critical element of mood disorders (depression, anger, and anxiety) and incentive use disorders. If there is a recurring pattern to your problems, the soul illusion is likely to be the key to the trap.

The Illusion

The alcoholic really means it when he says he will never have another drink, but everything looks differently when he is lonely and frustrated on a Saturday night. He makes a solemn vow of abstinence, when he is in one motivational state, and predictably breaks it when he is in another. After the violation of his vow, he will once again discover what a mistake it was and vow never to do it again. But everything looks differently when he is in a high-risk situation. All those great intentions and cognitive resources are far away. What influences his appraisals is what is immediate.

The soul illusion refers to the following: Local conditions have a much greater influence on our perceptual biases than we predict. Since this is always the case we are taken in by it again and again. When the alcoholic vows abstinence, he really means it. Predictably he will relapse and vow abstinence again, and this time really mean it. Because of the soul illusion he will be taken in again and again.

The key to this illusion is in the Rodney Dangerfield of philosophical questions: When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, is there a sound?

It gets no respect, because it seems to be one of those pointless questions that has no answer. But there is an answer - an answer with profound spiritual and practical implications. The answer is: There is no sound!

When the tree falls, it produces a series of pressure waves in the surrounding air. The ear drum converts these waves into a mechanical signal which is transmitted by 3 small bones to the fluid filled cochlea - the spiral bony canal of the inner ear. Hair cells of the cochlea are the actual receptors. Each is tuned to a particular frequency of the fluid waves. Hair cell vibrations are converted to electrical impulses, and transmitted along the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex where intensity and frequency of the vibrations are mapped. Neither pressure waves, physical movements of body parts [bones, hair], nor electrical signals are sound. The experience of sound exists only in the mind of the perceiver.

Perception differs qualitatively from the physical properties of the stimulus. The nervous system extracts only certain information from the natural world. We perceive fluctuations of air pressure not as pressure waves but as sounds that we hear. We perceive electromagnetic waves of different frequency as colors that we see. We perceive chemical compounds dissolved in air or water as specific smells or tastes. In the words of neurologist Sir John Eccles: "I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound - nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent."

Sounds, colors, patterns, etc., appear to have an independent reality, yet are, in fact, constructed by the mind. All our experience of the natural world is our mind's interpretation of the input it receives.

When we are angry we both perceive the world and respond differently than when we are contrite. Perception, motivation, and response tendencies are state-dependent, and local motivational states [e.g., anger, craving, etc.] are continually influencing our subjective reality and behavior. The Psyche is continually taken in because the the perceptual system itself participates in the state-dependent bias, and so the distortions are always invisible to the perceiver.

We do not appreciate, at the moment, that actions such as striking out in anger, giving in to avoidance, or relapsing back to drugs, food, sex, etc. will seem crazy or stupid in retrospect. The states of mind that put us at risk of behaving foolishly are transient, but the errors they provoke play out in the objective world, and so are irreversible.

A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

- Nietzsche