#daniel wegner

Penfield’s (1975) photo of the exposed conscious brain of patient M. The numbers were added by Penfield to indicate points of stimulation, and do not indicate the discovery of the math area of the brain. 

You don't need to remember your child's emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don't have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people's minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies —that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person's brain is gone.”

The Illusion of Conscious Will (Daniel Wegner, 2002)

“When you do something, how do you know that you are the one who did it? And when someone else does something, how do you know that you weren’t the one who did it?

These questions seldom arise in everyday conversation because the answer is usually obvious: Everybody knows that they are the authors of their own actions and not the authors of other people’s actions. (…)

The specific process is the perception of a causal link not only between self and action but between one’s own thought and action.”

(…)

“To label events as our personal actions, conscious will must be an experience that is similar to an emotion. It is a feeling of doing.

Unlike a cold thought or rational calculation of the mind alone, will somehow happens both in body and in mind.

This embodied quality gives the will a kind of weight or bottom that does not come with thoughts in general. (…)

He points out that there are a set of experiences, such as the feeling of knowing, the feeling of familiarity, or even the feeling of confusion,

that serve as indicators of mental processes or states and that thus inform us about the status of our own mental systems.

The experience of willing an action is likewise an informative feeling, a perception of a state of the mind and body that has a unique character.”

(…)

“Recalling that you ate fish for dinner last night would be an episodic memory, for example, whereas remembering that fish swim in water would be a semantic memory. (…)

Tulving (1985; 1999) suspects that episodic memory, however, is uniquely a characteristic of conscious human adults because of its special identity-relevance. (…)

The process of remembering thoughts and actions must carry on by allocating the body’s acts to particular agents, in line with the perception of the source of thoughts.

This process will seek a virtual agent to account for each thought-action unit, and will accumulate as an identity those thought-action units ascribed to the same source.

One key function of this system, then, is to create a “home agent,” a virtual agent that is perceived as the source of present thoughts and actions.

This is the place thoughts and actions are perceived to be coming from—the subjective self, the agent one inhabits.”

(…)

“The auditory hallucinations or voices heard by people with schizophrenia, for example, are understood by the person to be voices of other agents, not the self.

The experience of conscious will arises when a person infers an apparent causal path from thought to action. The actual causal paths are not present in the person’s consciousness. The thought is caused by unconscious mental events, and the action is caused by unconscious mental events, and these unconscious mental events may also be linked to each other directly or through yet other mental or brain processes. The will is experienced as a result of what is apparent, though, not what is real.

The Illusion of Conscious Will (Daniel Wegner, 2002)

“The movements of clock hands and raindrops and electric trains, for instance, can be understood in terms of causal relations that have no consciousness or will at all. They are mechanisms.

Extending the notion of causal agency to these items—to say these things have the ability to cause themselves to behave—doesn’t fit very well with the physical causal relations we perceive all around us.

Imagine a spoon, knife, and fork deciding to go for a walk to the far end of the dinner table (“We’re off to see the salad”), and you can see the problem.

Things don’t usually will themselves to move, whereas people seem to do this all the time.”

(…)

“This rudimentary observation suggests that people have at hand two radically different systems of explanation, one for minds and one for everything else. (…)

In the mechanical explanatory system, people apply intuitive versions of physics to questions of causality, and so they think about causes and effects as events in the world. 

In the mental explanatory system, people apply implicit psychological theories to questions of causality, focusing on issues of conscious thoughts and the experience of will as they try to explain actions.”

(…)

“In the case of moral judgment, Piaget (1932) found that children before the age of seven or eight who are asked to decide whether a person has done something wrong don’t concern themselves very much with the person’s intention and focus instead on the damage caused by the action. (…)

In looking at how children judge inanimate objects, Piaget (1929) noted that they sometimes ascribe the properties of living beings, including the property of intention, to nonliving things. (…)

At first blush, Piaget’s pair of insights suggest paradoxically that children underuse intention (in moral judgment) and also overuse it (in perceiving inanimate causality). 

This makes sense, though, when we realize that the child’s notion of a mind is under construction.

Without a fully developed idea of mental processes, children can fail to attribute intent when they should (in judging human beings) and attribute it too often when they shouldn’t (in judging objects).

Children are faced with the problem of building a picture of their own minds and the minds of others, and of achieving an understanding of what it is not to have a mind as well.”

(…)

“Perceiving mind and causal agency is a significant human ability.

It is possible that this achievement is accomplished by a fairly narrow mental module, a special-skill unit of mind that does only this, and that in different individuals this module can thus be particularly healthy, damaged, or even nonfunctional.

Leslie (1994) has called this set of skills a Theory-of-Mind-Mechanism (ToMM), and Baron-Cohen (1995) has proposed that such a mechanism may be injured or missing in some forms of autism.

He suggests that each of us has an “intentionality detector” that does the job of looking for actions that seem to be willed, in both self and others.

The Illusion of Conscious Will (Daniel Wegner, 2002)

“Even when four- and five-year-olds are taught new facts about animals, for example, or are taught new names for colors, they often later insist that they knew these things from the outset.

They make little distinction between the novel and the familiar and so become prey to a “knew it all along” effect. (…)

It is only with the eventual development of a representation of one’s own mind, and how that mind might differ from one time to the next,

that the individual becomes capable of understanding that prior intentions might differ from currently understood consequences of action.

The fact that adults can sort out prior intentions from the observed effects of their actions means that they must have constructed a representation of their own minds that has separate pockets for these things—a mind past and a mind present.

Very young children seem to have just one big pocket. Human adults, of course, start out as kids. This means that every one of us begins our lives with this odd tendency to invent false intentions after the fact.”

(…)

“It seems that as children develop, their speech about their actions only gradually comes to preview what they do. 

The Russian psychologists Vygotsky (1934) and Luria (1961) observed this in children as the development of nonsocial speech—speech used for the guidance of one’s own action.

These observers described the tendency in very young children to say what they were doing after they had done it.

A two-year-old might say, “I throw bunny,” just after throwing a stuffed animal across the room. 

Later the child might say “throw bunny” while throwing it, and at a yet later stage, “I’ve got a good mind to throw this bunny” just before doing so.

This sequence would suggest that language and thought might serve merely to describe or label action after the fact in very young children but could surface as a preview to action over the course of development. (…)

For youngsters, after all, thoughts about action may not occur very often before their actions occur and may instead perform a kind of postmortem function.