Consciousness and the Social Brain

convenient way to keep track of who is attending to what. Again, the purpose of a perceptual model in the brain is not to be slavishly true to the physical reality in all its details but to be useful.
Mesmerism

    The intuition that we can feel someone else’s gaze on us or that some psychological force emanates from people and touches other people seems to have a hold on the human imagination. One of the more intriguing episodes in the history of science, or pseudoscience, is the story of mesmerism. In the 1770s, the physician Anton Mesmer claimed to have found a special, invisible force that emanates from or is influenced by animal tissue. He called it animal magnetism. 14
    At that time, Coulomb had recently discovered the mathematical laws that govern electrical forces. Magnetism was considered to be another fundamental force of nature, though Faraday had not yet formulated its fundamental equations. Galvani had recently used an electrical source to shock the severed legs of frogs, thereby causing the legs to kick. 15 Galvani’s discovery was arguably the beginning of modern neurophysiology. It was a milestone in medical science. It also, incidentally, helped to set the stage for Mary Shelly’s novel
Frankenstein
, published in 1818, 16 in which the famous monster, sewn together from miscellaneous parts of cadavers, was brought to life by electrical current. The idea that electricity, magnetism, and the secret energy of life were interrelated was in the cultural air.
    In that climate, Mesmer began to experiment with passing iron bars over his hysterical and delusional patients, who often went into fits, spasms, and faints as a result. 17 , 18 He announced that he had discovered a new force of nature, animal magnetism, and continued to refinethe “science” until he had a large and lucrative clientele. He eventually dispensed with iron bars and magnets and claimed that his hands were good enough conductors of animal magnetism for his medical purposes. People could palpably feel the energy coming from him. In his account, the force could pass through walls and closed doors.
    In 1784, the king of France was so impressed by the popularity of the fad that he commissioned a scientific team to investigate it. (The team included Benjamin Franklin.) The report of the commission, which makes for rather fascinating reading, concluded that mesmerism seemed to be mainly imagination and under controlled tests its “energy” never did pass through a wall or a door and never did work on blindfolded people who were not informed that a source of magnetism was nearby. In short, it was largely fraud mixed up with a fascinating, poorly understood, but potent tendency toward suggestibility and mass human irrationality. The human mind seemed primed to believe in an invisible force that could emanate from one person and affect another.
    The mysterious force, I suggest, is awareness. It originates in each person, can flow out of a person, and can touch another person. Of course I am not suggesting that any force actually emanates from one person to affect another. But I am suggesting that mesmerism depended on a basic property of human social perception. We are primed to perceive human awareness in this manner, as an energy-like plasma that can flow from person to person, because our perceptual machinery naturally constructs that type of model. Indeed, the belief is so natural that mesmerism continues to be popular today. 17
The Myth of Psychokinesis

    Almost everyone who casually thinks about consciousness assumes that consciousness can directly cause actions. Consciousness can move things. We consciously choose to move a hand, and lo, it moves. From that everyday notion, psychokinesis, the supposed ability tomove things at a distance with thought, is merely an extrapolation. It may be pseudoscience, and it may be within the domain of charlatans and illusionists, but the belief is culturally widespread and historically old. It is shockingly easy to convince people that they are psychokinetic by rigging an experimental setup and tricking them with a few well-timed coincidences. 19 , 20
    An example from modern culture comes to mind. In a charming Super Bowl ad for Volkswagon, a little boy dressed as Darth Vader tries a mind trick on the family car. To his amazement, when he gestures and glares, the car turns on. He’s psychokinetic! Either that or his sneaky father, watching from inside the house, has used the remote control. This