Book: Vital Lies, Simple Truths
Tagline: The Psychology of Self-Deception
Author: Daniel Coleman
Find Online:Google Books
Date Read: September 2017

Why did I choose to read this book?

Jazz recommended this to me when we lived together because she'd read it and found it very helpful. It was definitely eye-opening.

Excerpts

… and, for most of us, being oblivious to that relationship allows us to slip into the grand self-deception, that the small and large decisions .in our material lives are of no great consequence. The question, then, is what can we do t o break out of these self deceptions…

there are, it seems, vital parts of our lives which are, in a sense, missing-blanks in experience hidden by holes in vocabulary

it results in an inca­pacity to bring attention to bear on certain crucial aspects of our reality, leaving a gap i n that beam of awareness ·which defines our world from moment to moment.

The denial evident in this reminiscence is a hallmark of the vital lie. If the force of facts is too brutal to ignore, 'then their meaning can be altered.

Semantics plays a big part in mini­mizing what is actually occurring; euphemisms are em­ ployed to hide what is really going on. A "good" drinker, marital "disputes," or “stern disciplinarian.”

Psychiatrists give the name "nuclear numbing" to the widely observed-inability of people to let themselves feel the fear, anger, and rebelliousness that fully grasping the human predicament­ notably, the arms race-might bring them. People seem to anesthetize themselves, as though the danger were too vast to arouse con­ cern. Lester Grinspoon, a psychiatrist, notes how, in nuclear numb­ ing, people "avoid acquiring information that would make vague fears specific enough to require decisive action"; how "they con­trive to ignore the implication of the information they do allow to get through." In other words, they treat this-everyone's problem - as if it were someone else's.

Attention is the gathering of information crucial to existence. Anxiety is the response when that information registers as a threat. The intriguing part of this relationship is straightforward: we can use our attention to deny threat, and so cushion ourselves from anxiety.

What enters our attention is within the frame of awareness; what we crop out vanishes.

So with attention. It defines what we notice, but with such subtlety that we rarely notice how we notice. Attention is the frame around experience.

Perception is selection. Filtering out information is, in the main, for the good. But the very capacity of the brain to do so makes it vulnerable to skewing what is admitted to awareness, what re­jected. Buchsbaum goes on to point out that the differences in what people filter out "would then appear to produce a different con­sciousness of the external environment, each person biasing his admission or rejection of sensory signals."

Attention is ruled by forces both conscious and unconscious. Some are innocuous, such as the limits on capacity set by the mechanics of the mind. Some are crucial, such as the bias introduced by saliency, where what matters at the moment takes the foreground of awareness. Some, as I will show, can be self-defeating. Foremost among these is the self-deception induced by the trade-off between anxiety and awareness

The trade-off of a distorted awareness for a sense of security is, I believe, an organizing .principle operating over many levels and realms of human life.

My thesis, in sum, revolves around these premises:
• The mind can protect itself against anxiety by dim­ ming awareness.
• This mechanism creates a blind spot: a zone of blocked attention and self-deception.
• Such blind spots occur at each major level of behavior from the psychological to the social.

Schemas operate in the unconscious, out of awareness. They direct attention toward what is salient and ignore the rest of experience -an essential task. But when schemas are driven by the fear of painful information, they can create a blind spot in attention.

Selye's use of .. stress," though it has found its way into common parlance with several loose connotations, has a very precise meaning. He described a series of neurophysiological changes that the body undergoes in response to injury, the threat of harm, or life's minor ordeals.

In brief, when a person perceives an event as a stressor, the brain signals the hypothalamus to secrete a substance called CRF, or "cortico-releasing factor." CRF travels through a special gate­ way to the pituitary gland, where it triggers the release of ACTH (for adrenocorticotrophic hormone) and opioids, particularly the endorphins. Presumably, early in evolution this brain alarm went off when a saber toothed tiger came into view. In modern times, a meeting with the accountants will do.

Schizophrenic language is a symptom of an underlying problem, disrupted attention. Schizophrenics are easily distracted -by noise, by movements, by ideas. Most significantly for their odd language patterns, they are distracted by their own background thoughts and mental associations.

Attentional breakdown in schizophrenia has been well recog­ nized for at least a century. But only recently has this deficit been linked to another odd characteristic of schizophrenics: they have a higher than normal tolerance of pain.

These two elements of experience-the numbing of pain and dimming of attention-seem to have a common purpose: dimming attention is one way to numb pain. That these neurochemical systems should be linked attests to the elegance of the brain's design.

The conceptual split between pain perception and attention may be more artificial than we realize. The brain does not neces­sarily parse mental functions as we do in experience. Buchsbaum makes the point that the scientific study of pain and of attention has been separated by virtue of the different disciplines that study them. These recent findings about the intimate tie between atten­tion and pain, in his words, "indicate that this separation is artifi­cial, since the same neurotransmitters, anatomic structures, and information-processing systems" may modulate both pain and attention. The endorphin system, then, is rigged to reduce attention as it soothes pain. Pain relief and selective attention share common pathways through the brain, although their relationship is one of mutual exclusivity: as endorphins activate, pain lessen_s and atten­tion dims. The increased attention that accompanies ACTH en­hances pain sensitivity.

Pain ordinarily prompts responses that aid recuperation and healing-withdrawal, rest, a slowed metabolic rate and lessened activity. This round of recuperation, though, has zero survival value if one is about to be eaten, needs to defend one's young, or should run. In such instances a means to bypass the urge to attend to a painful wound is essential. The endorphins allow just that.

Fitness for survival falls to members of a species who, when events war­ rant, are best able to ignore their pain while dealing with the threat . at hand. The high survival value of pain-numbing would explain why it is found i n primitive brain areas, which humans share with more ancient species. Indeed, opiate receptors have been found in every species examined, including those with nervous systems as primitive as leeches.

This precise difference in reactions to types of stress, they observe, is also found in tumor growth. When laboratory- rats with cancer tumors get an inescapable shock, the tumor growth rate quickens. When they can escape the shock, the growth rate does not change. Endorphins ma)' be the culprit: when tumorous rats are given opioid antagonists like naltrexone, their tumor growth rate slows and they surviye longer. This pattern suggests that the opioids, while they dull pain, interfere with healing.* The broader implication i s that the endorphin pain-suppression system, while it may be of vital survival value in harn:lling emergencies, is not the response of choice when recuperation is needed.

Anxiety is cognitive static. The essence of anxiety is the intrusion of distress into physical and mental channels that should be clear.

Anxiety is a particular blend of emotion and cognition. It melds the arousal pattern of the emergency response with the cognition of threat. The forms of anxiety are multiple, for it expresses a complex melange of biological and cognitive events, any one of which can manifest itself most prominently as the key symptom

It is not danger, but rather the threat of danger, which most often primes the stress response. The central characteristic of the information that signals stress is uncertainty. Uncertainty calls forth an early warning, an alert to check for the possibility that a threat looms. A stirring in the bushes may or may not be a predator. But those small primates that startled into action at the first stir ·were the ones whose descendants have survived to write books about it.

In the most general case, anything new or novel, anything unfamiliar or out of the routine, bears scrutiny, if only in passing. The new, by definition, is unknown; novelty is the essence of un­ certainty, which in turn is the harbinger of possible threat. The brain confronts novelty by calling the stress response into readiness (but not total engagement)-just in case. The stress response has a dual link to attention: Attention triggers that response in the first place, and attention centers are in turn activated by the stress alert .. If the possibility of threat is confirmed, then the stress response will go into high gear. The exhilaration of the new and novel can be traced to this neural hookup: novelty gears the body to act by engaging a low-grade arousal

The hippocampus, then, keeps the· brain from making every event an emergency, and keeps the routine from intruding on awareness. In the stress response, part of the brain circuit that triggers the ACTH release is via pathways that ascend from the brain stem through the hippocampus.1 1 These pathways prime attention as well. The net effect is that attention and stress arousal are inter­ twined: some stress steroids are released whenever the brain rouses attention above a certain threshold.

While stress arousal is a fitting mode to meet emergency, as an ongoing state it is a disaster. Sustained stress arousal leads to pa­ thology: anxiety states or psychosomatic disorders such as hyper­ tension. These diseases are end products of the stress response, the cost of an unrelenting readiness for emergency. That response is in reaction to the perception of threat. Tuning out threat is one way to short-circuit stress arousal. Indeed, for those dangers and pains that are mental, selective attention offers relief. Denial is the psychological analogue of the endorphin atten­ tional tune-out. I contend that denial, in its many forms, is an an­ algesic, too.

Anxiety is the extreme end of the ordinary contin­ uum of arousal. Grappling with a tough mental problem o r return­ ing a tennis serve both activate arousal. This increased arousal is fitting and useful; such

Anxiety is the extreme end of the ordinary contin­uum of arousal

Based on a detailed investigation of dozens of patients with stress-based symptoms, Horowitz has been able to enumerate many of the guises and disguises anxious intrusions take. His list is wide-ranging and particularly instructive: every one of the varieties of intrusions is some aspect of the stress response carried to -- an extreme. These include:
• Pangs of emotion, waves of feeling that well up and subside rather than being a prevailing mood.
• Preoccupation and rumination, a continual awareness of the stressful event that recurs uncontrollably, beyond the bounds of ordinary thinking through of a problem.
• Intrusive ideas, sudden, unbidden thoughts that have noth­ing to do with the mental task at hand.
• Persistent thoughts and feelings, emotions or ideas which the person cannot stop once they start.

Hyper-vigilance, excessive alertness, scanning and searching with a tense expectancy.
• Insomnia, intrusive ideas and images that disturb sleep.
• Bad dreams, including nightmares and anxious awakening, as well as any upsetting dream. The bad dream does not nec­essarily have any overt content related to a real event.
• Unbidden sensations, the sudden, unwanted entry into awareness ,of sensations that are unusually intense or are un­ related to the situation at the moment.
• Startle reactions, flinching or blanching in response to stim­uli that typically do not warrant such reactions

How one construes events determines whether or not they will be stressful

Stress, in his view, occurs when the demands of the environ­ment in a person's eyes exceed his reSources. The operative phrase is "in the person's eyes." It is not just that an event is in and of itself overwhelming; whether it is or not depends on how the person construes it. A given event-divorce, job loss, childbirth­ can be seen as a threat, as a challenge, or as a relief, depending on the person's circumstances, attitudes, and sense of resources. The nature of threat is highly subjective. It is not the event per se, but its meaning that matters. When events. are seen as threats, the stress response is triggered. Stress is the product of a cognitive act, appraisal.

Appraisal begins a t the initial instant of orienting and initiates a chain of cognition aimed at finding the most finely tuned response. When reappraisal fails-the threat does not evaporate­ then other strategies are needed.

Technically speaking, "coping" is the term for a range of cognitive maneuvers that relieve stress arousal by changing one's own reaction rather than altering the stressful situation itself.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

One can take some action to remove the threat – call the insurance agent, get to the emergency room, pay the overdue bill.

Or one can try to calm oneself. Lazarus refers to the first of these alternatives as "instrumental" and the second as "emotion-focused" coping

Horowitz offers as extensive a list for the varieties of denial as he did for intrusion. The forms of denial include:
• Avoided associations, short-circuiting expected, obvious connections to the event that would follow from the - implica­tions of what is said or thought.
• Numbness, the sense of not having feelings; appropriate emo­tions that go unfelt.
• Flattened response, a constriction of expectable emotional reactions.
• Dimming of attention, vagueness or avoidance of focusing clearly on information, including thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations.
• Daze, defocused attention that clouds alertness and avoids the significance of events.
• Constricted thought, the failure to explore likely avenues of meaning other than the obvious one at hand; an abbreviated range of flexibility.
• Memory failure, an inability to recall events or their details; a selective amnesia for telling facts.
• Disavowal, saying or thinking that obvious meanings are not so.

Blocking through by fanciful thoughts fantasyof what , avoiding might reality have been or its or implications could be.

Options for short-circuiting stress : If an event appraised as a threat can be reappraised as a non-threat, the stress reaction will not begin. Once begun, the coping options are external-change the s i t uation t o make the event no longer a threat-or internal-soothe the.arousal. If these fail or are not tried, stress arousal can lead to stress­ based diseases and/or anxiety states.

Stress, in his view, occurs when the demands of the environ­ment in a person's eyes exceed his resources. The operative phrase is "in the person's eyes." It is not just that an event is in and of itself overwhelming; whether it is or not depends on how the person construes it. A given event-divorce, job loss, childbirth­ can be seen as a threat, as a challenge, or as a relief, depending on the person's circumstances, attitudes, and sense of resources. The nature of threat is highly subjective. It is not the event per se, but its meaning that matters. When events. are seen as threats, the stress response is triggered. Stress is the product of a cognitive act, appraisal

Lazarus lumps such intrapsychic maneuvers with taking drugs or drinking to ease anxiety. All are palliatives: they reduce anxiety without changing the status of the threat an iota. Such a strategy, says Lazarus, is normal: "For my serious sources of stress in life, there's little or nothing that can be done to change things. I f so, you're better off if you do nothing except take care of your feelings ... healthy people use palliatives all the time, with no ill effect. Having a drink or taking tranquilizers are palliatives. So is denial, intellectualizing, and avoiding negative thoughts. When they don't prevent adaptive action, they heJp greatly."

Palliatives are intrinsically rewarding, just by virtue of their easing anxiety. What is rewarding is habit forming. There i s ample proof that a person's palliative of choice, whether Valium or Jack Daniels, can be addictive. So also, I contend, are the mental ma­neuvers on which we rely to ease our private anxieties.

Mental palliatives skew one's ability to see things just as they are: that is, to attend clearly. When anxiety is at large in the mind, even if capped by an artful mental maneuver, there is a cost to mental efficiency. Denial compromises full, unflinching attention.

The first point in Freud's psychic apparatus was "Perception," the point at which the mind takes, in sensory stimuli. The last point was motor activity, the "Response.”

The psychic apparatus, said Freud, has a sense of direction; as we would say now, information "flows.”

As it passes through the mind, information is not merely transmitted-it is transformed. What the eye senses is an array of waves; what the ear senses is a form of vibration. By the time sight and sound become memory, they have gone through radical changes in the kind of information they embody.

At each point in the transmission of information, there is selec­tion; some aspects of what has been received are not passed on, while others survive.

Freud's prescience is exemplified in his positing a perceptual capacity that has no memory of its own, takes fleeting note of the sensory world, but stores no lasting impressions. He saw that the functions of receiving sensory signals and registering them are sep­arate, a fact later borne out by the neurophysiology of the sensory cortex. It was not until 1960 that his description of perception found a scientific basis with the experimental discovery of what we today call "sensory storage," a fleeting, immediate impression of our sensory world.

Modern research shows that, if anything, Freud was too cau­tious in proposing points where biases could sidetrack the flow of information. What he did not realize is that the flow of information is not linear, but is intertwined among mutually interactive subsys­tems. The mind does not pass information along a single track, like a train going from town to town. Rather, information flows in and about circuits that loop like New York City subways or Los Angeles freeways. The possibilities for bias in such a system are even richer than Freud's model suggests.

Ways in which the mind can skew attention:
• Information flows, and is transformed during its passage, be­tween interlinked subsystems.
• Information is unconscious before it is conscious.
• Filters and censors select and distort information

The selective filter, he believed, is essential here because of a bottleneck: there is a sharply limited channel capacity at the next stage of processing, often called "short-term" or "pri­mary" memory. Primary memory is the region of perception that falls under the beam of attention. For our purposes we will call it ''awareness. " The contents of the zone of awareness are what we take to be "on our minds" at a given moment; it is our window onto the stream of consciousness. This zone is quite fragile, its contents fleeting

Only information that reaches awareness, he proposed, will be retained for very long that is, we remember only what we first pay attention to.Awareness, then, is the gateway to memory, and a filter controls what enters awareness. But what controls the filter?

During the course of these tune-outs and tune-ins, the sounds coming to your ears may be identical in volume. What changes is the focus of your attention. This means that information is scanned for meaning before it reaches the filter, contradicting Broadbent' s assertion that the filter tunes in or out based solely on physical aspects of a message. The filter seems to have some intelligence; it is tuned by the importance to a person of the message. This has major consequences…

Meanings are stored in long term memory. What is required is a loop between longterm memory and the earlier stages of information processing.

…contents by drawing on the vast repertoire of experience, on the meanings and understand­ings built up over a life span, stored in long-term memory. The judgment "salient" or "irrelevant" can be made only on the basis of the knowledge in long-term memory

The more thoroughly information in sensory storage can be sorted out, the more efficiently the next way station-awareness­ can operate. If too much gets through, awareness is swamped; as we have seen, one such intrusion is anxiety. It is of critical import that this filter operate at a peak, i n order to save us from continuous distraction by a mass Of irrelevant information. I f the filter were much less thorough we might literally be driven to distraction by distractions, as happens in schizophrenia.

“semantic" memory, the repository of meanings and knowledge about the world. For example, every bundle of sounds automati­cally is directed to an "address" in semantic memory that yields its meaning. If you hear the word "grunt," semantic memory

A third . view, offered by the cognitive psycholo­gists Donald. Norman and Tim Shallice, reconciles the Neisser ob­jection to a limit on capacity with the Miller theory that the limit is fixed. 10 Norman and Shallice propose that the mind can process several parallel strands of information simultaneously. A few strands· come within the band of awareness; the amount that can be handled there is limited. But an unknown-and large-number of strands operate out of awareness, never entering consciousness. This view airees with Miller that there is a fixed limit to the span of awareness. But it also allows for Neisser's contention that there is no fixed limit to the total amount of information the mind can handle. The necessary added assumption is simply that much goes on in the mind out of awareness

Experience is kaleidoscopic; the experience of every moment is unique and unrepeatable," writes James Britton in Language and Learning. "Until we can group items in it on the basis of their similarity we can set up no expectations, make no predictions: lacking these we can make nothing of the present mo­ment."

Perception is interactive, constructed. It is not enough for in­formation to flow through the senses; to make sense of the senses requires a context that organizes the information they convey, that lends it the proper meaning

The packets that organize information and make sense of ex­perience are "schemas," the building blocks of cognition. Sche­mas embody the rules and categories that order raw experience into coherent meaning. All knowledge and experience is packaged in schemas.

Piaget used the concepts "assimilation" and "accommodation" to describe how these mental structures are shaped by interaction with the world. As we learn, schemas change

In a sense, a schema is like a theory, an assumption about experience and how it works. A schema, in the words of the cognitive psychologist David Rumelhart, is "a kind of informal, private, unarticulated theory about the nature of events, objects, or situa­tions which we face. The total set of schemas we have available for interpreting our world in a sense constitutes our private theory of the nature of reality,"

As Gestalt psychologists have long told us, the whole is greater than its parts–‘it gives them meaning. Knowing that something is a "face" sets up a ·vast number of potential uses of that information. A network ties the schema for face to other kinds of information, such as faces of friends, skin care, attractiveness, facial expression

A schema is the skeleton around which events are interpreted; as events are complex and layered, so schemas are ·interlocked in rich combinations. A train of association is a roadmap through loosely connected schemas_. Schemas are the structures memories are stored in; the inventory of schemas that a person accumulates makes up the contents of his long-term memory.

This interplay between attention and schemas puts them at the heart of the matter. Schemas not only determine what we will no­ tice: they also determine what we do not notice. Consider the question Ulric Neisser poses: "There is always more to see than anyone sees, and more to know than anyone knows. Why don't we see it, why don't we bother to know it?"

The answer given by Freud and Broadbent, implicit in their models of mind, is that we filter experience so we see only what we need to see, know only what we need to know. Neisser's an­swer, however, is that it is not so much that we filter it out, as that we simply do not pick it up. In terms of our model, information not picked up drops out at the filter.

Schemas are intelligence in action: they guide the analysis of sensory input i n the sensory store, simplifying and organizing it, weeding out what is not salient. They scan information that passes out of the sensory store, and filter it through the priorities and relevancies they embody. Schemas determine which focus attention seeks, and hence what will enter awareness.

The familiar, the data showed, becomes the preferred – even when familiarity is unconscious.

We actively select what we attend to mainly on the basis of need, in­terest and perceptual prominence.

At any one time we are aware of only a small percentage of the total stimulation reaching our senses. We actively select what we attend to mainly on the basis of need, interest and perceptual prominence. The selection process itself, however, is unconscious. We experience something "popping" into consciousness but a complex and uncon­scious process prepares that "pop." … Taken together, subliminal and attention studies show that our brains are humming with cognitive and emotional activity prior to consciousness.

The model of mind we have generated here easily accom­modates this version of the mind's operations. Schemas work backstage, in the vicinity· we have labeled "long-term memory" (another, more general term might be better-like "the uncon­scious". The mind is aware of the meaning of an event before that event and its significance enter awareness. In schema terms, this pre-awareness means that schemas which are activated but are out of awareness organize experience and filter it before it gets into awareness. Once the most relevant schemas are activated, they "pop into consciousness.

As Freud put it, "We learn from observing neurosis that a latent, or unconscious, idea is not necessarily a weak one."

In an unconscious response, information flows from the sensory store and _filters directly into memory, bypassing awareness altogether. The response is also executed outside awareness. Automatic routines fol­low this -allows for pathway parallel , as channels do other of our perception of awareness and phenomena action, one . in Note awareness that this, the other unconscious.

Hilgard' s explanation (assuming the volunteer is to be be­lieved) is that there is a capacity of mind that can register and store information outside a person's awareness. Under certain circum­stances, that unconscious awareness can be contacted and can com­municate, still outside the person's main awareness. That special capacity Hilgard calls the "hidden observer."

In summary, perception need not be conscious. The weight of research evidence supports this contention; the prevailing models of mind assume it. Indeed, perhaps the most crucial act of percep­tion is in making the decision as to what will and will not enter awareness. This filtering is carried out before anything reaches awareness; the decision itself is made outside awareness

The later volitional decision of what to attend to has, as a con­ sequence, a pre-limited range. William James suggested that con­scious, voluntary attention is the essence of will. The evidence reviewed here, though, suggests will is free only within limits: The array presented to awareness, from which we can choose to note one thing or the other, is preselected. Attention can range freely, but within a delimited domain. We never can know what information our schemas have filtered out, because w e cannot attend t o the operation of the filter that makes the selection.

As he wished it to be, so he recalled it.

The relationship between attention and memory is intimate. Memory is attention in the past tense: what you remem­ber now i s what you noticed before. Memory i s in double jeopardy, for apart from an initial skew in what is noticed, there can be later biases in what i s recalled

The self-system sculpts the way a person filters and interprets experience; it invents such self-serving readings of past events as Dean's and Darsee.

There is, in other words, a structural advantage to having the self as a central framework for memory and action; crucial knowl­edge can cohere within a single coding scheme.

Such self-defeating trends of thought, Beck observes, are the hallmark of depression, which he sees as the chronic activation of negative self-schemas. In milder depressions, says Beck, a person will have negative thoughts about himself, but retain some objec­tivity about them. But as the depression worsens, his thinking will become increasingly dominated by negative ideas about himself. The more such negative self-schemas activate, the more dis­torted his thinking becomes, and the less able he is to see that his depressing thoughts may be distortions. At its most severe, a de­ pressed person's thoughts about himself are completely dominated by intrusive, preoccupying self-condemnations, completely out of touch with the situation at hand.Self-schemas in depression, says Beck, finally lead the person "to view his experiences as total deprivations or defeats and as irreversible.Concomitantly, he categorizes himself as a 'loser' and doomed.'' Beck contrasts the skewed self-perception of a depressed person with the more balanced view of someone who is not in the grips of the disorder:

When a threat to the self-concept looms, anxiety can be warded off by a healthy self-schema through an artful maneuver or two. Events can be selectively remembered, reinterpreted, slanted. When the objective facts don't support the self-system, a more sub­jective recounting can: If I see myself as honest and good, and events don't support that view, then I can preserve self-esteem by skewing my rendering of them.

Along the way the infant inevitably has some heavy going in, for example, distinguishing crucial boundaries between cleanli­ness and feces, or food and those things that cannot go in the mouth. An infant who is suddenly the object of his mother's anx­ious or angry yell-"No, dirty!"-is apt, in Sullivan's words, to be suddenly cast "from a condition of moderate euphoria to one of very severe anxiety," a bit like a sudden blow on the head. The range ·of the mother's disapproving acts, from mild reprimand to utter anger, produces a rriatching, graduated range of anxiety in the child. This anxiety gradient more or less directs the course of how the child develops.

The i nfant learns to manage this _sort of anxiety through what Sullh:-an calls "security operations," tampering with his own awareness to soothe himself. "Even before the end of infancy," says Sullivan, "it is observable that these unattainable objects come to be treated as if they did not exist." If I can't have it, says the infant in effect, I will deny it

That framework and data show, in modem terms, how the selfsystem protects us against anxiety by skewing attention

A schema implicitly selects what will be noted and what will not. By directing attention to one pattern of meaning, it ignores others. In this .sense, even the most innocuous schema filters experience on the basis of relevancy. This filter of perception becomes a censor when it suppresses available information on the ground that it is not just irrelevant, but forbidden.

woman is standing i n a museum before a huge and graphic painting of the Rape of the Sabine Women. Her gaze is studiously fixed on the artist's signature in the lower comer. Neisser calls these programs not to notice "diversionary sche­mas." They are a special sort of schema, what I call “meta-schemas”: schemas that dictate the operations of other schemas.* In this instance, the diversionary schemas direct attention not to reg­ister the forbidden object in awareness.

There are other sorts of meta-schemas; for example, the linguistic rules that guide our understanding and use of language. Meta-schemas are difficult to detect directly. A linguist can infer the rules of a language after much study, but a speaker of that language is at a complete loss to explain how he puts words together in a sentence or comprehends what he hears. Linguistic meta-schemas do it for him, irretrievably out of awareness

for what we are talking about than "diversionary schema." That being the case, a borrowed one will have to do: I will use the term "lacuna," from the Latin for gap or hole, to refer to the sort of mental apparatus that diversionary schemas represent. A lacuna is, then, the attentional mechanism that creates a defensive gap in awareness. Lacunas, in short, create blind spots.

Our language, unfortunately, does not offer a more congenial term for what we are talking about than "diversionary schema." That being the case, a borrowed one will have to do: I will use the term "lacuna," from the Latin for gap or hole, to refer to the sort of mental apparatus that diversionary schemas represent. A lacuna is, then, the attentional mechanism that creates a defensive gap in awareness. Lacunas, in short, create blind spots.

…one way the mind can deal with the threat,of anxiety is via a divCrsionary schema. Thus, if the thought of "being on my own" leads to thoughts of feeling ignored and unloved, the mind could override these upsetting thoughts by substituting the associati6n "peaceful, my own pace," and "intrusive, irritating crowds." The result is the conscious thought "I like being on my own-it's peaceful, and I can go at my own pace. Besides, crowds are intru­ sive and irritating." The thought "when I'm alone I feel ignored and unloved" meanwhile remains outside awareness, even though it triggered these substitutes

Should circumstances trigger these disturbing "worry" sche­mas, one way the mind can deal with the threat, of anxiety is via a diversionary schema. Thus, if the thought of "being on my own" leads to thoughts of feeling ignored and unloved, the mind could override these upsetting thoughts by substituting the association "peaceful, my own pace," and "intrusive, irritating crowds." The result is the conscious thought "I like being on my own-it's peaceful, and I can go at my own pace. Besides, crowds are intru­sive and irritating." The thought "when I'm alone I feel ignored and unloved" meanwhile remains outside awareness, even though it triggered these substitutes

The more anxious a person, says Hamilton, the greater the number of his schemas that encode a sense of threat, danger, or aversiveness. The more widespread and well elaborated they are in his cognitive net,. the more likely they are to be activated by life's events. And the more such fearful schemas activate, the more a person will come to rely on evasive maneuvers to avoid the anxi­ety they evoke. His attention will be lacunose, pockmarked with gaps. The greater and more intense the strategies that are used to deny, the more damage they do to awareness. Lacunas take a toll: they make for a deficit in attention as great as that caused by the anxiety they protect against

In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote: "Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell t o everyone but only to h i s friends. He has other matters i n h i s mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

The passing of pain out of awareness sends out no warning signals: the sound of repression is a thought evaporating.

According to Freud, the penalty for repression is repetition. Painful experiences not dealt with are, unconsciously, repeated. We do not quite realize that we are repeating ourselves, because the very diversionary schemas we are repeating keep the fact of their repetition from awareness. On the one hand, we forget we have done this before and, on the other , do not quite realize what we are _doing again. The self-deception is complete.

Epstein's reflections suggest the insights of the ana­lytic session. Indeed, his repression and its handily unlocked se­crets can stand as a model of a lacuna. The traumatic center is the day he went to the movies instead of his father's funeral. At some remove from that, but still in the same mental "file" (to use Freud's phrase), is the lighthearted novelistic treatment of the Holocaust. The cocoon that binds these sources of hurt and probably others from similar moments in his life-is the repression of feeling, the mental cauterizing of pain.

The cauterization, though, is self-defeating. The pain leaks out, the repression is too massive. He loses empathy with the lives around him and the capacity to feel fully his own emotions. His creative side tells him that the pain, though absent from awareness, lurks in. concealment: his California novel reads like a Holocaust book

Notice that Epstein's mental maneuver is not simply to repress a painful memory. He remembers the details, a funeral missed and the movie seen. What is repressed is the pain of it; he takes in the facts, but not the feelings that go with them. He brings the same strategem to his readings about the murdered Jews of the Holo­caust, whom, he notes elsewhere in his writing, he associates with his dead father. He immerses himself in the details of their agony, but fails to take in the agony himself

The attentional dynamic that underlies projection operates as well in these other defenses-isolation, rationalization, and subli­mation. In each, an actual state of affairs is denied-it passes into the unconscious before it reaches awareness. Once in the uncon­scious, the information can be cosmeticized in a variety of ways. In isolation the negative feelings recede from attention, while the event itself enters awareness. In rationalization it is one's true mo­tives that are split off and more acceptable ones spliced in in their stead. And in sublimation it is the nature of the impulse and its true object that are sanitized. From an attentional perspective, all these defenses share a common procedure with projection. Step one is denial; step two, transformation occurs in the unconscious; step three, the transformed version enters awareness.

While defense mechanisms censor memory, security op­erations distort attention to the present moment. To the list of Freudian defenses, we can add -some security operations from Sul­livan.

What can't be seen is hard to change. Both Freud and Sullivan, working from not so very different vantage points, hit on the identical formulation: the person prevails against anxiety by sacrificing his range of attention. This failure to see our self-deceits protects them; Sullivan is struck by "how suavely we simply ignore great bodies of experience, any clearly analyzed instance of which might present us with a very real necessity for change."

In keeping its secrets, the ego reveals to the analyst how it keeps those secrets: By the very act of resistance to therapy, the ego bares itself. The essence of analysis, then, is restoring aware­ ness of what we fail to notice-and fail to notice that we fail to notice

In sum, the ego's task is to control the flow of information in order to deflect anxiety; the architecture of self is shaped, in large degree, by the set of lacunas it favors to censor and guide informa­tion flow. As we will see in the next Part, defenses mold personal­ity: the particular-way we use attention to disarm anxiety indelibly marks us. For example, someone who relies on denial and repres­sion will perceive and act differently from someone who favors reversal and projection. Each will experience-and fail to experi­ence the world differently, and will muddle through troubled events making different sorts of waves.

Successful defense becomes habit, habit molds style. These familiar tactics become second nature; when psychic pain confronts us, we fall back into their soothing arms. What may have been at first a serendipitous discovery in the battle against anxiety comes to define our mode of perception and response to the world. Becoming adept at such strategies means that we favor some parts of experience while blocking off others. We set bounds on the range of our thoughts and feelings, limit our freedom of perception and action, in order to feel at peace.

Favored tactics of defense become a sort of armor-plating on experience, a gathering around of preferred bulwarks in the battle against unsettling items of information

Reich saw that the symptoms patients brought to therapy, whether anorexia or impotence, phobia or depression, were, in a sense, beside the point. The same symptom could bespeak very different underlying dynamics of character structure. Reich advocated that the therapist first attend to the overall style of the patient, to the patterning of resistances due to character, not to the present­ing symptom

Defensive style is character armor. In therapy, it leads to a typical mode of resistance, which will arise unmistakably no matter what the specific symptom. The stamp of the armor is on a person's whole mode of being. According to Reich, the resistance stemming from character… is expressed not in terms of content but …In the way one typically behaves, in the manner in which one speaks, walks, and gestures; and in one's characteristic habits (how one smiles or sneers, whether one speaks coherently or incoherently, how one is polite and how one is aggres­sive). It is not what the patient says and does that is indica­tive of character resistance, but how he speaks and acts; not what he reveals in dreams, but how he censors, dis­ torts, condenses, etc.

The person's entire mental apparatus-his mode of being in the world-is shaped in part by his defensive strategy, by his armoring of character.

Character armor," writes Ernest Becker, "really refers to the whole life style that a person assumes, in order to live and act with a certain security. We all have some, because we all need to orga­nize our personality. This organization is a process whereby some things have to be valued more than others, some acts have to be permitted, others forbidden, some lines of conduct have to be closed, some kinds of thought can be entertained, others are taboo -and so on. Each person literally closes off his world, fences him­ self around, in the very process of his own growth and organiza­tion.

Those forbidden acts and thoughts create blind spots. But the patterning of armor, Becker understands, is double-edged. While there are zones outlawed from attention, other parts are high­lighted. The areas of ample awareness are zones in which we be­ come particularly adept operators. These regions of expertise are defined by our lacunas: those that block awareness entirely form its margins; those that allow in some information-even if twisting it so as to decontaminate threats-give these zones their inner def­inition.

Let us recapitulate. From the need to soften the impact of threatening information, lacunas arise. They operate on attention, through .. .a variety of tactics, all of which filter the flow of informa­tion. These strategies for dealing with the world come to define the shape of responses as well as perception. Their outlines become the frame for character.

The weakness of The Detective's attentional style is related to its strengths. His search is driven; it is for something. Its goal is to confirm a preconceived idea. And here he falls prey to the danger Sherlock Holmes warned against: "One begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts." When his vigilance is pushed toward its extremes, it twists into a biased search, a search that seeks to prove a notion rather than simply to investigate and let the facts yield up a theory.

When routine strategies for handling difficult times fail a child, says Millon, he will resort to increasingly more distorting and denying maneuvers. The rule of thumb in coping, remember, is that when one can't do anything to change the situation, the other recourse is to change how one perceives it. That defensive twist of attention is the job of a diversionary schema. If this works as a temporary tactic for the child, well and good; a balance is restored and he can resume an even keel. But if the threat is too persistent, too unremitting, too severe, the child dares not let down his guard.

The basic recipe for shaping attention into this paranoid pat­tern, in summary:

1. To be hurt as a small child without anyone acknowledging the situation as such;

2. To fail to react to the resulting suffering-with anger, denying one's own feelings to oneself;

3. To show gratitude to one's parents for what are supposed to be their good intentions;

4. To forget everything;

5. To displace the stored-up anger onto others in adulthood and fail to notice that what seems to be their anger is one's own.

Those forces we will explore in the next part. As we shall see, the family stands as the first model we meet of life of how to attend to a shared reality-and how to keep anxiety at bay through tricks of attention. In learning to join in this collective experience, we assume whatever twists that particular attentional pattern contains: self-deceptions operate among us as well as within us.

That is not such a farfetched assumption. In a sense, all communication is an attempt at such an orchestration. To share a mutual outlook, to have two minds "running on the same track," means that, to some degree, their schemas are at least somewhat similar and· operate more or less in tandem.

In a sense, all com­munication is an attempt at such an orchestration. To share a mu­tual outlook, to have two minds "running on the same track," means that, to some degree, their schemas are at least somewhat similar and operate more or less in tandem. Conversation is just such a calibration.

As John Seely Brown, a cognitive psychologist, put it to me: "When we talk, I'm slowly adjusting your mental model of me,,and you're adjusting my model of you. When you ask a question, there's a chance to correct some subtle miscommunications. By asking, you implicitly review your…”

Madness, said Nietzsche, is the exception in indi­viduals, but the rule in groups. Freud agreed. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud wrote, "A group is impulsive, changeable and irritable." With no little disdain for the ways of the crowd, Freud saw people in groups as regressing to an infantile state as a consequence of membership

A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association . . . and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable agency. The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated, - so that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. By "group" Freud meant something that bordered on a mob, but also any large organization like the Church or an army, both of which he uses as case examples to illustrate his theory. What sep­arates a "group" from a random crowd is shared schemas: some common understanding, "a common interest in an object, a similar emotional bias in some situation," as Freud put it. The more in common a group shares, and so the higher the degree of "mental homogeneity," "the more striking are the manifestations of group mind."

A hallmark of the person as group member, Freud saw, was the replacement of his self by a group self. The psychology of the group, said Freud, involves "the dwindling of the conscious indi­vidual personality, the focusing of thoughts and feelings into a common direction." That translates to the prepotency of shared schema over personal ones

The assemblage of such a group· depends on their sharing schemas for what to do in such situations. More exotic emergencies-say, the escape of an elephant from a zoo, or an unexpected delivery by a pregnant airplane passenger­ may not evoke so well coordinated a response. It is the activation of shared schemas that unites the "we"; the more such a common understanding is shared, the more stable the group.

Can be a two-tiered communication system, one overt and dealing with the ostensible work of the group, and the other covert, bearing on the unspoken?

The corresponding realities of these families vis-A vis their surroundings reflect these differences. For locals, the immediate vi­cinity is sharply defined by ample schemas that encode a rich history: a local store exists for them not only as it is now, but as it has been over the years. For cosmopolitans, the local vicinity is known more sketchily, with large uncharted areas, and so gives rise to fewer schemas. But the map of their world is much larger, with neighborhoods in other cities known as fully as their present one. Each pattern, local and cosmopolitan,. has its characteristic blind spots and highlights.

The parallel between the family mind and the individual is complete: the trade-off between anxiety and attention is at work here, too. Self-deception in its Happy Family guise keeps anxiety at bay. The implications of this parallel for understanding group life are great, for, as Freud saw, the family stands as a prototype for the psychology of all groups

Just as with defenses, the impetus for groupthink is to mini­mize anxiety and preserve self esteem. Groupthink describes the operations that the group mind employs to preserve the illusion of Happy Family.

Janis observes: Each individual in the group feels himself to be under an injunction to avoid making penetrating criticisms that might bring on a clash with fellow members and destroy the unity of the group .... Each member avoids interfering with an emerging consensus by assuring himself that the opposing arguments he had in mind must be erroneous or that his misgivings are too unimportant to be worth mentioning. The various devices to enhance-·self esteem require an illusion of unanimity about all important judgments. Without it, the sense of group unity would be lost, gnaw­ ing doubts would start to grow, confidence in the group's problem-solving capacity would shrink, and soon the full emotional impact of all the stresses generated by making a difficult decision would be aroused

The first victim of groupthink is critical thought.

Critical thinking and dissent are antidotes to shared illusions, ensuring that group sche­mas will be more in keeping with reality-or, at worst, honest mistakes rather than the product of groupthink.

There is some evidence that strong business leaders inadvertently encourage groupthink. In a simulation of corporate deci­ sion-making, volunteers role-played executives of "Modern World Electronics" discussing whether to manufacture a microwave oven. Each group member had valuable information to contribute that was known to him alone. The pseudoboss in each group, who led the discussions, was rated on how much he was motivated by a desire for power. People high in this motivation do things for the sake of making an impact on others, rather than to meet an inner standard of excellence (the hallmark of the achievement motive) or t'o enjoy the company of others (the affiliation motive). As leaders, those high in power mo­tivation enjoy exercising authority solely for the taste of power. They have little tolerance for interference and bristle at challenges to their opinions. High-power leaders respond well to ingratiating subordinates. In a group with such a leader, the axis of cohesiveness shifts toward the vertical from the horizontal: rather than feeling close to their fellow members, people in the group tend to form a bond of loyalty to the leader

The more often the symptoms crop up, the worse the resulting illusions, and the poorer the decisions that group will make.- The healthy - alternative, of course, is a group that balances a sense of unity with an openness to all relevant information – even at the risk of a fracas from time to time.

As within, so without.

In the social realm, a notion similar to that of schemas is Erving Goffman' s concept of "frames." A frame is the shared definition of a situation that organizes and governs social events and our in­volvement in them. A frame, for example, .is the understanding that we are at a play, or that "this is a sales call," or that "we are dating." Each of those definitions of social events determines what is appropriate to the moment and what is not; what is to be noticed and what ignored; what, in short, the going reality involves. When the frame is a nursery school carnival, the "S-word" is off limits. A frame is the public surface of collective schemas. By sharing the understanding of the concepts "play," "sales," and "date," we can join in the action, enacting our parts in .smooth harmony. A frame comes into being when its participants activate shared sche­mas for it; if someone does not share the going schema, the results can be embarrassing

A script codifies the schemas for a particular event; it directs attention selectively, pointing to what is relevant and ignoring the rest a crucial factor for programming computers.* A computer program has the capacity to make endless inferences about and responses to a situation, almost all of them absurd. A script allows those inferences to be channeled along paths that intake sense for a given event. Indeed, there are scripts for every frame and a 'frame for any and all events in which people interact with some degree of shareO understanding. Those events can range from the simple act of walk­ing past someone coming toward you (Do you· pass to the right or left? Do your eyes meet? I f so, for how long? Do you speak?) to a procedure as complex as launching the space shuttle, with count­ less major and minor routines.

Goffman's approach has its roots in William James's often-cited chapter on "The Perception of Reality," in his Principles of Psy­chology, in which James posed the question "Under what circum­stances do we think things are real?" In his answer, James pointed to the crucial role of selective attention in creating sub-worlds of reality, each with "its own special and separate style of existence." "Each world," James noted, "whilst it is attended to, is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention."

In this manner language marks the co-ordinates of my life in so­ciety and fills that life with meaningful objects.

The language used in everyday life continuously provides me with the necessary objectifications and posits the order within which these make sense and within which every­ day life has meaning for me. I live in a place that is geo­graphically designated; I employ tools, from can openers to sports cars, which are designated in the technical vocab­ulary of my society ; I live within a web of human relationships, from my chess club to the United States of America, which are also ordered by means of vocabulary. In this manner language marks the co-ordinates of my life in society and fills that life with meaningful objects.

If Berger and Luckmann were to dig deeper, to explore what it is that organizes language, the answer would be: schemas. Lan­guages are schemas made audible; social acts are schemas made visible. If for "language" and its equivalents in the above passage the concept of schemas were used instead, the meaning would be unchanged. The implications, though, would be different.

The reality of everyday life, Berger and Luckmann note, is an "intersubjective world," that is, one that can be shared with others. The medium of that sharing, I suggest, is the mutual activation of commonly held schemas-a frame. It offers a reference point, a shared perspective for the business of the moment.

The frame gives the context. telling us how to read what is going on. When lips meet, is it a kiss or mouth-to-mouth resuscita­tion? A frame provides an official main focus for attention, in accord with the business at hand: if the business is artificial resuscitation, enjoying the feel of skin on skin is out of bounds. The world offers a vast amount more than we might attend to in any given moment. The frame is highly selective; it directs attention away from all the simultaneous activities that are out of frame

Any frame at all, in fact, defines a narrow focus where the relevant schemas direct attention, and a broad, ignored area of irrelevance.

This regulation of workers' time, Zuboff shows, was a tidal switch from centuries before. In the sixteenth century, time was imprecise, seasonal; the notion of measured time was thought cruel. One of Rabelais's characters says, "I will never subject my­ self to hours. Hours are made for man, not man for hours." Al­ though there were some public clocks, the minute hand was thought unnecessary.

By the late eighteenth century, the frame of work was bounded by minute hands: the market for clocks and watches boomed as the demand for a synchronized work force grew. With the purchase of workers' time, employers also set to managing attention. The de­sired state was nothing less than diligent, silent attention to the work at hand-an absolute about-face from the casual routines workers were used to.

There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.

Like Sartre's "soldier thing," he, too, figuratively averts his…

The "portcullis crashing down" is simply the withdrawal of attention. Such snubs have the effect of dehumanizing the recipi­ent, of shifting focus from the person to the role. This keeps things at the surface: the role is not penetrated to the person inside. This failure to penetrate the role, to notice the person, can be in the service of a low-order anxiety-attention trade-off. When we'd rather not see-preferring to ignore rather than confront the person­ attending only to the role offers an easy out, if not outright solace. It is, as Zuboff says, a civilized process.

The well-mannered depl_oyment of attention is a large part of What we call "tact." We all depend on each other to employ tact, so that we can maintain our course unruffled.

The socializing of a child, in these terms, is tantamount to recruiting him into the going frames: "any social system, in order to survive, must socialize new recruits into its attentional patterns (of perception, belief, behavior, and so on). This task requires en­ergy, that is, attention.Thus, one might say that the survival of social systems depends on the balance in the ledger of attention income and expenditure

The slow evolution of social custom and proprieties is the history of the rise and fall of frames.

The truth is replaced by silence, and the silence is a lie.

Censorship-an essential tool of political control-is the social equivalent of a defense mechanism. The authoritarian regime, though, represents the extreme…

The nature of schemas is to guide attention toward what is salient and away from what is not. By establishing a notion of what is salient, and how to construe it, the schema is biased from the start

The dynamic of information flow within and among us points to a particularly human malady: to avoid anxiety, we close off crucial portions of awareness, creating blind spots. That diagnosis applies both to self-deceptions and shared illusions. The mal­ady is by no means new: Buddhaghosa, a monk who wrote a fifth­ century Indian text on psychology, describes precisely the same twist of mind as moha, "delusion…

The cure for delusion, says Buddhagosa, is panna, or insight-seeing things just as they are. In terms of our model of the mind, that means a comprehen­sion that is undistorted by the defensive urge to avoid anxiety.

…should open his own unconscious to the patient's, free of any selec­tion and distortion: The technique… Consists simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same "evenly-suspended attention''… in the face of all that one hears. In this way… we avoid a danger which is inseparable from the exercise of deliberate attention. For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point will be fixed in his mind with partic­ular clearness and some other will be correspondingly dis­regarded, and in making this selection he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This, however, is pre­cisely what must not be done. In making the selection, if he follows his expectations he is in danger of never finding anything but what he already knows; and if he follows his inclinations, he will certainly falsify what he may perceive.

Indeed, in a study of parent-infant interactions, Kenneth Kaye, a developmental psychologist, concludes that "a baby is more organism than person, has neither a mind nor a self until late in the first year, but ... adults are tricked info treating babies as communicating partners.”

The beauty of whistle-blowers and watchdogs is that they act as a counterbalance to the inertial pull of collective denial.