Cogito Ergo Sum and Brain Washing

“Cogito Ergo Sum” can be translated as “I think, therefore I am.”  Many people take the words in their plain meaning literally and interpret the statement as encouraging people to think, and to think more so as to make their lives meaningful.  However, some regard “Cogito ergo sum” as the important conclusion of Descartes’ deep meditation to prove his own existence because of the fact and the action that he engaged in thinking.  His focus was on the “I”.  He satisfied himself that there was a thinker existing behind the act of thinking.  This seemingly obvious thinker/thinking paradox has haunted many philosophers.  Also through deep meditation, an opposite conclusion was reached by the Buddha.  He realized that there was no real existence of the person.  There was no thinker behind the act of thinking.  Rather, the thinker was an illusion made up to explain the act of thinking.

There are many philosophers and scientists who also doubt the obvious, particularly in the fields of the brain, the mind and thinking.  In late 1880s, psychologist William James came up with a new theory to explain the relation between our emotion and our behavior.  He proposed that our behavior was something instinctive, and our emotion only came after the behavior so as to rationalize it, or to explain for it as a habit of experience.  So, by his theory, our common sense was reversed.  People did not run from a bear because they were afraid of it.  Rather, they became afraid of bear because of the act that they ran from it.  Similarly, people did not smile because they were happy, but they felt happy because they were smiling.

Then in late 1960s, a young psychologist James Laird encountered William James theory and designed an ingenious experiment trying to verify it.  He succeeded in showing that people making happy facial expressions really felt happier; while those making angry facial expressions really felt angry.  Amazed by the results, other psychologists carried out various studies, in equally ingenious but different designs, and confirmed his findings.    

Also in the 1960s, another psychologist, Stanley Schachter, extended William James’ theory into bodily sensations.  At that time, it was known that different emotions were associated with different bodily sensations, such as change in heart rate, skin temperature and sweating.  However, there were obviously not enough parameters to account for the vast categories of emotions.  By a set of not-so-ethical experiments involving injecting adrenalin into participants, he was able to show that people tried to make sense of their increased heart rates by looking around them.  Thus people were much happier with increased heart rates from the adrenalin shots in a happy setting, and also angrier in an angry setting, than the controls with the saline shots.  So it was the bear that made you sweat, and then you looked around, saw the bear, and then began to feel afraid.

How about one step further?  Would the way we behave affect the way we think?  Can keep singing the national anthem make you more patriotic?  The book “The Wave” described how a 25-year-old history teacher and baseball coach created (too easily) a microcosm of Nazi Germany in his school.  In reality, in 1967, Ron Jones somehow unethically gradually modified his students’ behaviors to study the rise of Nazi Germany.  He lectured about the beauty of discipline, asked the students to sit in attention postures, and asked the class to repeatedly recite the phase “Strength through Community”.  He also created a class salute, gave memberships cards to students for the newly formed organization called the “Third Wave”, and encouraged students to report on anyone who openly expressed skepticism about the project.  The Third Wave grew by itself in days’ time and soon got out of control.  Ron had to call off the project in an assembly, and to explain to the students that how easily people’s behavior and belief could be manipulated.

You must have come across Zimbardo’s prison experiment about participants playing the roles of prisoners and guards.  Soon enough, participants fitted into their assigned roles.  The guards began to abuse the prisoners, while the prisoners tended to take such abuses reluctantly.  This was another strong illustration on how one’s behavior, in this case taking a certain role, would change one’s mindset.  You might not know that this experiment is required by law to be described in all books about the history of social psychology.  You might also not know that Zimbardo had himself adopted the role of the prison superintendent in his experiment.  He was astonished to find that his thinking had also been altered to the extent that he was unwilling to stop the experiment early when things got out of control.

When talking about brain washing, people tend to figure directly something to do with the brain.  However, in psychology, there is no crazy operation, flashing lights, white noise or injection of novel chemical to achieve this task.  Thinking is manipulated by modification of behavior in well proven experiments. 

(Source: HKMA News October 2012)