God Soul Mind Brain

time. (Some of this complexity is described in Chapter 4.) The brain does not really function as a single intentional agent. Yet the common view that we have of each other makes sense from the point of view of social perception. The purpose of perception is not to supply a scientifically accurate model of reality, but a useful model. The machinery for social perception, whether it is applied to other people or to ourselves, appears to use a simplifying trick, an efficiency. It is easier and faster to model a mind as a single intentional agent. Your perception of the people around you, and to some extent your perception of yourself, seems to be a little like a Newtonian view of the solar system. Planets can be approximated as point masses. People can be approximated as point agents. The approximation works well enough. We all do it.

Ventriloquism

    When my son turned three I decided to learn ventriloquism in order to entertain him. So far I’m mediocre, but he’s too young to know that. He’s happy with the added company. He talks to his stuffed animals and they talk back to him while wagging their heads up and down. Oddly, they can only talk when I’m around.

    Ventriloquism depends partly on a sensory illusion called “visual capture.” If you hear a sound and see something move at the same time, you tend to perceive the sound as emanating from the moving object. It is not a sure-fire illusion, but works pretty well. It is the reason why, at a movie theatre, you perceive the spoken words as coming from the lips of the characters on screen, and the bang as coming from the exploding car on screen. The sounds are coming from speakers placed around the theatre, but because of the phenomenon of visual capture, you misperceive the sound source.

    The visual capture illusion is also sometimes called the ventriloquist illusion. But as I studied ventriloquism and watched videos of professionals (Jeff Dun-ham is my favorite), I realized that the label is not correct. The ventriloquism illusion goes far beyond the visual capture illusion. Nobody is really astonished by the visual capture illusion. You wouldn’t pay to see a pencil waved back and forth in time to a click, thereby producing the illusion that the pencil was clicking. How boring would that be? In fact, when you watch a ventriloquist on TV, the sound comes out of the TV speaker in any case, whether the man is speaking or the dummy. The visual capture illusion is equally present in both cases. Yet you are not impressed when the man’s lips move in synchrony with the words. You are impressed with the dummy. You pay to see a dummy come to life. You pay to see a social illusion. Not only do you perceive the sound to be coming from the dummy’s mouth, but your social machinery constructs a model of the dummy’s mind and you perceive that mind to be located inside the dummy.

    The trick depends on giving the dummy a unique personality. That is why the dummy always has a different tone of voice from the ventriloquist, a different agenda, a different set of emotions and goals. That is why the dummy often ends up arguing with the ventriloquist. All of these methods are used to trick your social machinery into assigning a separate agency, intentionality, personality, and set of emotions to the dummy. You perceive it to have a spark of life. A soul. Cognitively, you know it does not. But perceptually, you fall for the illusion. You feel consciousness emanating from a piece of hinged wood. The illusion is so potent, and yet so ridiculous, that the contrast is entertaining. Ventriloquism is a particularly obvious example of a social perceptual illusion.

Feeling the stare of another person

    Everyone is familiar with the feeling of being stared at. (Gary Larson the cartoonist proposed a new medical condition called anatidaephobia, the feeling that “somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you.”) Sometimes people describe it as a sixth sense, or a prickle, or a heat as if a beam were coming out of the other person’s eyes. Some people claim that they can sense the difference between a friendly and an unfriendly stare. Sometimes people even claim that it works through closed doors and walls. Yet when the phenomenon is studied systematically, it disappears. Put Joe in a chair and tell him to turn around when he feels someone staring at the back of his head. Remove all subtle sensory cues like creaking, quiet breathing, and shadows. Joe will turn around the same