On Film Noir

(I got the great pic from Kitsune Noir, whose website is now www.thefoxisblack.com)

I've always loved Film Noir - whether it's the old classics like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, or Sixties variations like Chinatown, or more recent takes on the genre like Blade Runner and Fight Club.

There are various important ingredients for a Film Noir. Firstly, bad weather. You can't make a Film Noir set on a bright spring morning. It needs to be mainly set at night, preferably in the rain or in fog. Poor visibility, in other words. Secondly, you need a hero whose surface cynicism hides a Romantic moral idealism. Though he pretends not to care about things, though he pretends just to be a cynical cop or private detective, the Film Noir hero is really a knight in shining armour.

Indeed, Raymond Chandler's hero, Philip Marlowe, was originally going to be called Philip Mallory, after the author of the Medieval romance, the Morte D'Arthur. Thirdly, there needs to be a dame. A belle dame sans merci. She should be beautiful, but potentially threatening to the male hero's moral order - like Sharon Stone's character in Basic Instinct, for example, or Isabella Rosselini's character in Blue Velvet. The hero is not sure whether to rescue her or arrest her.

Finally, and most importantly, you need an atmosphere of moral ambiguity. The hero, the shining knight, rides in to try and put the world to rights, but the more he investigates, the more he realizes that the crime he is investigating is not a one-off, but part of a wider environment of evil which he is, unfortunately, powerless to change.

And the really great Film Noir shows that the hero himself is part of this general milieu of evil. He realizes he is not such a shining knight after all. He is just as corrupted as the 'bad guys'. He may try to do good, but end up doing as much harm as the bad guys, because he is fallible, self-ignorant, and not fully in control of his actions or their consequences.

In a few of the more daring examples of Film Noir, the detective goes deep into the murky details of a crime, only to realize, finally, that he did it - but he was too morally blind to see what he was doing.

Poor visibility, in other words.

This is what happens in the first Film Noir - Sophocles' tragedy, Oedipus Tyrannus. At the beginning of the play, the king Oedipus is like an idealistic private detective, energetically investigating the crime of the murder of his predecessor on the throne. But as he investigates the crime and delves into the terrible secrets of the past, in true Film Noir fashion, he discovers the awful truth: he killed the previous king, who was actually his father, and, to make matters worse, he then married his mother. But he did it all unknowingly, by accident.

He realizes, to his horror, that he is the murderer he has been seeking, he is the monster he's been tracking down. It's a device that happens in a few other Film Noir, though never so effectively. It happens, for example, in Fight Club, where the hero tracks down the crimes and misdemeanors of Tyler Durden, only to realize that he is Tyler Durden - whenever he falls asleep, he becomes his alter ego and goes on the rampage.

It also happens in Christopher Nolan's great film, Memento, where the hero loses his memory every few hours, and has to piece together the details of a crime, only to realize finally (and then forget) that he himself committed it. It also happens, in a way, in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, where the hero is a cop who tracks down and assassinates runaway androids. At the end of the film, it is revealed that he himself is an android.

The idea behind these works of art is that we are not who we think we are, and our ignorance of ourselves means we cause great harm. We 'know not what we do', and until we wake up to ourselves, we are like a private detective who 'does good' during the day, then falls asleep at night and goes on the criminal rampage.

The psychologist Carl Jung had a suitably Film Noir-ish name for this part of ourselves that does evil without us knowing or intending it. He called it 'the shadow':

It is a frightening thought [Jung wrote] that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses- and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster's body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature.

To begin to 'know ourselves', we need to track this shadow side of ourselves down, to be the private detective of ourselves: collect the evidence, piece together the patterns, and build up a picture of the person we really are, rather than the person we think we are.

This is one of the challenges that philosophy sets us. Epictetus said:

Even a man, who has trained himself to the exercise of his rational faculties and has for a long time passed a blameless life, may in a moment when his vigilance is relaxed, when he is off his guard, be defeated by the enemy whom he always carries about with him.

So, like a good private detective, we have to be ever vigilant of the enemy within us, our doppleganger, our shadow, who goes around committing crimes in our name.

If you like this, you might enjoy my essay about animism and animation, called Everything is Full of Gods.

Why music moves us

Why does music move us? Why can it make us feel so alive, so human?

Yesterday morning, I woke up very early, as the birds were beginning to sing. It was the day we had to move out of the house we moved into just a year ago - the landlady had decided to sell it. While I was waiting for everyone else to wake up so we could begin the move, I surfed YouTube, and came across the film A Room With A View, one of my favourites.

I watched the opening scene, which features the Puccini aria O Mio Babbino Caro, and the music moved me to tears. And it still does, when I watch a video of Maria Callas perform it today. The music is so beautiful that it makes me cry.

Why? What is happening in the mind?

Let me attempt an explanation - forgive me if it's crass - attempts to describe why music moves us are usually as ham-fisted as attempts to explain why humour moves us.

I think opera, in particular, moves us because it is an expression of the unique human condition - a sense of the sweetness of some aspects of our earthly existence, such as love and beauty, juxtaposed against an awareness of their transience, of time, death, break-ups, decay.

But, more than that, I think the true sweet grief of opera is a sense, a feeling, that, because we're aware of our predicament, because we're aware of the glory of existence and its transience, we somehow transcend the transience.

There is not just death and dissolution - there is a soul in us, greater than death, and it is from this soul that music comes. I think that's why opera moves us. It's the perfect expression of the thought - 'life is brief, things fall apart, humans are weak, frail prisoners of circumstances, and yet beneath that all, we are somehow greater than our circumstances'.

This is the mystery of being a human: sometimes, when we are weakest, when we are most defeated, when our limitations are most exposed, that is when we reveal our true invincible spirit.

Watch this clip of Callas singing in her final London concert, before she died at 53. What is the spirit, in her frail body? Where does it come from? Where did it go?

Sen on Layard

Amartya Sen's forthcoming new book, An Idea of Justice, takes aim at Lord Layard's emphasis on subjective reports of how happy we're feeling as a guide to public policy.

He says, in an interview with The Times:

I do think that by concentrating on all Bentham and no Mill, he does make a mistake. Freedom has many dimensions that are not captured in the pleasure statistics. We are not pleasure machines.

The problem with “happiness” as sole measure is that you may think yourself happy, but in fact be stymied. You may indeed adjust to your deprivation, as some slaves might have been “happier” on the plantation than free in the difficult outside world.

In his book, Sen instances the contrast between the Indian states of Kerala and Bihar. In Kerala morbidity is lower but concerns about morbidity are higher. Ideas and education that help to reduce morbidity in Kerala make the population more aware of it, so ignorance is bliss of a kind.

And the notion of income inequality being per se almost the sole measure of justice is problematic too.

These statistics have all kinds of impurities. If you’re asked how happy are you, the answer is exactly informative as to what you would say if somebody asked you how happy you are. It doesn’t tell anyone whether you’re really happy or not.

People can get very discontented when they’re very successful. And the sad thing is that people actually do adjust if they’re very deprived. I spent 15 years working on famine and it’s amazing how happy famine victims are when they ultimately get a meal. But that doesn’t mean people are generally more deprived than a famine victim having a first meal.

Palmed off

This is a funny story sent by a friend, Silvie Musialova, about a recent visit to a palm-reader's.

Last summer I felt there was a string of bad luck following me around like a bad gas does after having eaten too many baked beans. One evening half a bottle of red wine inspired me to give our lovely cat a bath and the teeth prints of his self-defence actions got infected.

I emerged from hospital with a supply of antibiotics, and noticed a poster. It showed a large picture of a palm, and promised that inside, you could discover your future. I’d seen it before, but now it stood out and called to me. There couldn't be a better time to find out about my life, to get an answer to the "How did I deserve this" self-pity question, I thought. Ten quid to discover your destiny. Bargain.

I walked in and was told to go into the room at the back. I was nervous. I followed the strong smell of scented candles and joss sticks into THE room. Very tiny as it was, it was also cluttered with a lot of garbage: all sorts of little kitschy statues, vases, wall cloths or whatever they were supposed to be, a plastic Jesus hanging on the cross, a smiling Buddha and framed pages of the Koran. Truly something for everyone.

The Arab gentleman sitting behind the small table covered with all sorts of spiritually inspiring objects could hardly speak English. Somehow, I didn’t feel in good hands.

He embarked on a five-minute-long ritual of singing in Arabic and waving around with the burning scented sticks (he almost poked me in the face at one stage as his eyes were firmly closed and he seemed very, very concentrated). The something's-not-quite-right feeling was growing stronger. Then he asked me to write down on a piece of scrap paper what my name and date of birth was. Having seen "4th May" he asked me if I was a Gemini. Bad start – I’m a Taurus.

He started doing some maths which from a spectator's point of view seemed highly peculiar, however, being a blond woman, I don't assume I know everything. I was then asked to shuffle a handful of porcelain sea shells concentrating on what I'd like to find out (I think that's what he was saying but honestly I am not sure). He looked at them scratching his chin and picked up a phone. He spoke to someone in Arabic for about 10 minutes, pausing every time I got up to leave to let me know he'd only be another minute.

Then he passed me the phone and asked me to speak to his god-knows-who-it-was friend. It turned out they got my date of birth wrong so we had to go through the whole procedure again, the details, the shells and of course the 10 minutes phone conversation I could not understand a word of. At that stage I was becoming fairly amused and curious about what was I going to find out. I was given the phone again and the moment of prophecy was about to come.

Burning with curiosity, I learned: "At the moment your life isn't very good and we're not sure when it's going to get any better."

I raised my eyebrows and carried on listening as surely I was getting more than THAT for my £10! The phone was quiet. In disbelief I looked at the guy opposite me and he shrugged his shoulders with the face of a cocker spaniel puppy. I asked the stranger on the phone if there was anything I could do to make my life better and he said: "Hmmmm, I don't know. Maybe we could pray for you but that would cost you money and there is no guarantee it would work." Well at least he didn't want to rip me of.

I was furious. Funny enough, as angry as I was I felt some respect to these charlatans which stopped me from causing a scene. What if they were really capable of doing something if I pissed them off? Never argue people that handle your food or claim to have CONNECTIONS. So I just paid the £10 and walked out.

Back on the sunlight, having left all the strong scents behind, I felt like someone's had hit me with a baseball bat. I looked at the poster and realized that not once they'd ask me to show my palm. So I went to look for the truth about my life situation at the bottom of a wine bottle. Somehow it made more sense.

The Landmark Forum

I went to a friend's 'graduation ceremony' from the Landmark Forum this week. He'd done their entry level course, which runs from 9am to 10pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then the participants come back on Tuesday evening and bring guests to watch them graduate.

The Landmark is a self-help / self-transformation organization, which aims to strip away individuals of all their baggage via intensive three-day 'encounter sessions', where people are encouraged to share their hang-ups via confessional monologues in front of the group; to be brutally honest with themselves and others (including calling up people in their lives to apologise for being unfaithful or admit they're gay or whatever); and to remove any obstacles standing in the way of them being 'extraordinary'.

'Do you feel your life isn't all it could be? Do you want to get more from your relationships? Do you have the job you dreamed of having when you were a child?' asked the Landmark leader, an Australian with a deep voice, who paced the hall, making eye-contact with us all as he spoke. Hey, I thought to myself, you know what? No, my life isn't perfect. Maybe I should sign up...

In some ways, the Landmark offers spirituality without God. You have the trappings of a religious ritual - the preacher calling the flock to righteousness, the confession (to the group, not to God), you have the idea of discovering the 'real you', you have the emphasis on epiphanies (they call it 'popping' - the group leader says something, and suddenly you 'pop' and realise where you have been going wrong all this time), and you very much have the emphasis on the possibility of being born again, on suddenly, after a mere three days, being able to neatly sidestep all the problems of the past, and to march forward towards your goals with new, righteous purpose.

The goals, in the Landmark, may well be materialistic - getting promotion, winning the girl of your dreams, setting up your own business. We heard from one guy at the graduation ceremony who stood up and told the group he'd been transformed by the course and had set up a new business with a friend. Wow, he'd only finished the course on Sunday, must have been a busy Monday.

The Landmark, like much self-help, takes its ideas from many different philosophical and religious traditions - there's some Stoicism in there (the idea that things depend on the perspective from which you see them), some existentialism (the heavy emphasis on being authentic and having integrity), some Buddhism, some Dale Carnegie. Perhaps the movement it's closest to is the Erhard Seminars Training (est) fad of the 1970s, which flourished for around a decade, particularly in California. And it puts it all together into a non-denominational, non-metaphysical package which anyone can buy. Smart.

I came away from the session hugely impressed with the Landmark as a commercial organisation. Whether it really changes people - I don't know. But it provides an amazing product, and it markets that product amazingly hard.

Landmark has obviously formulated a very powerful format: the three day, super-intense encounter session. People want that sort of intensity. They want to feel they leave the outside world for a brief period, become cocooned in a place of intense and perhaps anguished self-scrutiny, and then emerge, battered but re-born, after epiphanies.

Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant description of the attraction of such sessions, in his essay, The Me Generation, which describes the joy of standing up in front of a large group, and talking about yourself:

The appeal was simple enough. It is summed up in the notion: 'Let's talk about Me.' No matter whether you managed to renovate your personality through the encounter sessions or not, you had finally focused your attention and your energies on the most fascinating subject on earth: Me. Not only that, you also put Me up on stage before a live audience. The popular 'est' movement has managed to do that with great refiniement...just imagine...my life becoming a drama with universal significance...analyzed, like Hamlet's, for what it signifies for the rest of mankind...

Wolfe says the encounter sessions are distinguished by a common assumption:

I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess babbage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me.

Landmark calls it being 'totally authentic'. The idea of somehow becoming authentic is, according to the philosopher Charles Taylor, the defining trope of our age, even the replacement of traditional religion. The idea of discovering God, or obeying the rules of God, has been replaced with discovering the Real Me, even if God has nothing to do with it - though the idea of discovering one's 'true nature' of course has deep religious roots.

The second reason for Landmark's popularity is that the encounter session, I think, encourages a sort of group hysteria. The phrase 'popping' ( like popcorn), which the Landmark uses to describe epiphanies, is revealing. The graduates who spoke all said they were waiting for their 'pop' moment: 'I didn't pop until the third day. I was wondering if I was going to. And then, suddenly, I popped.' I think there's a group dynamic going on: people are popping all around you. Do you want to be the one corn that hasn't popped?

Another reason for its success: the charisma of the leader. One of the secrets of charisma in spiritual settings appears to be this: be horrible to the participants. Ridicule them. Abuse them. Point out all their flaws. They will love you for it. That seemed to be the case at the Landmark. One guy said 'This guy here [pointing at the Leader, smiling benevolently on stage] gave us a lot of shit. He shouted at us for three days. But you know, on the last day, he had tears in his eyes. Because he really believes in what he does and he really wants to help us. I want to thank you, man.'

And perhaps the biggest reason for the success of Landmark: its marketing. I thought the graduation ceremony was about celebrating my friend having done the course. But from the moment I entered the Holiday Inn in Great Portland Street, I realized it was all about getting the guests of the graduates recruited.

I went up to a desk, where eight Landmark people were sitting in a row, smiling, handing out cards to the guests to fill in. I took one and began to walk away. 'Sir, could you fill it in here, please', said the smiling man. It asked for my name, number, email, and then said 'We would like to contact you to ask you about your experience of the evening. Would you prefer we contact you before or after 6pm?' And there were two boxes - one for before, one for after. And, of course, no box saying 'I don't want to be contacted.' Not an option!

The graduation ceremony was absolutely designed to bring in new recruits. Various members of the group stood up and said how incredible, how amazing, how transformative their experience had been. Let's not sniff at this - it did sound like many of the group members had had an amazing experience, which they felt was life-changing. It was genuinely intriguing. You thought 'wow, what would it be like for me? would I 'pop'? how would I change?'

But at the same time, they'd only just finished the course. They were all pumped up after three days of group confessional, for which they'd paid £350. They were all pumped to be transformed. They were all pumped up to share their incredible experience. But should they be put on stage, as marketing material, so soon after their experience? How can we know if their lives have been genuinely transformed, one day after the course finished? And who would dare stand up to say 'actually, you know what, the course didn't really do it for me'?

The evening ran from 7.30pm to 10.30pm (I left at 8.30), with the graduates eventually going off to one room and the guests going off to another, to hear more about the Landmark. And the graduates were encouraged, at one point, to turn round to tell their guests why they thought they, in particular, would benefit from the Landmark.

Talk about the hard sell! Imagine if you went to a friend's wedding, and each guest had to fill in a card so the Church could contact you, and then during the wedding, the members of the Church turned round to tell you exactly what the Church could do for you, yes, you.

It's actually the most ruthless marketing campaign I've ever come across, religious or commercial. As one friend put it, 'it's a cross between self-help and a pyramid scheme'.

Still, not one but two of my friends now appear to be into it, both of whom I respect for their intelligence. And it does seem to have a very positive message - know what you want, and go out and get it. Does it work? Possibly. Is it a cult? Probably not, though it does use cult-like methods of social psychology. Is it a ruthlessly efficient, pushy commercial enterprise? Definitely.

Check out this vid to hear a guy's perspective after the 3-day initial course:

Interview with John Bargh

Further to my post below on John Bargh and automaticity, I got in contact with John through Yale University to ask for a quick interview with him about his ideas, and in the great tradition of brilliant yet accessible academics, he accepted.

Bargh is a professor of psychology at Yale, and one of the leading social psychologists of his generation. He is the leading thinker of a school known as the 'social intuitionists', who have challenged the idea that we are 'masters of ourselves' through our reason and free will, and suggested instead that a great deal of our judgements about and responses to the world are automatic and unconscious, and that our reason often acts as a sort of butler, or even a lawyer defending the decisions we have already automatically made.

This view obviously has great implications for philosophy and psychology, particularly Stoicism, which very much emphasizes our ability to become 'captains of our soul'. Now read on...

Thanks for your time, John. Could you give my readers a brief summary of what 'automaticity' means?

Well, the word itself has a long history. It comes from an engineering context of automatic guiding systems, things like thermostats, and from the idea of the obligatory nature of things: when x, then y, and so on.

In the 1980s, it was extended into social psychology, to the idea of humans' immediate, unintentional reactions to things. For example, our automatic racial stereotypes.

Tell us about your experiments in this area.

We did an experiment back in the early 1990s, where we flashed photos of African-Americans to Caucasian-Americans on a computer screen, for 13 milliseconds, so quickly they weren't consciously aware of them. We then put them into a mildly provocative situation, in a room with another Caucasian-American, where there was a chance of reacting hostilely, to test how they perceived that person and reacted to the provocation. And we discovered those that had been primed with the subliminal photo of the African-American were more likely to react with hostility in the following situation, though they didn't know why.

So it seems we have an automatic primer towards negative racial stereotyping?

Yes. Now, that primer could have come from different sources. It could be cultural, of course. It could also be evolutionary: there's new evidence, for example, that women are at their most racist when they're at their most fertile.

And automaticity is the idea that our minds are full of these sort of automatic primers?

Yes, they're ubiquitous. You expose someone to a subliminal stimulus, for example a picture of a clown, and they're primed to make more positive evaluations, it puts in an approach motivation, it even relaxes the muscles you use to approach something. And the person won't be conscious of why or how this evaluation has happened.

So if we agree that the mind does make all sorts of automatic evaluations and judgements based on primers, what's the theory to explain how and why this happens?

What we think is it's the default back-up system which existed in the days before consciousness. Alot of animals today still use this operating system. We also have a conscious, reflective system, but it's the automatic system that keeps us grounded in the present.

And is this older operating system the limbic system?

It's all over. I know very little about neuro-anatomy, so I'm not going to try and localize it.

So how much of our mind is the older system, and how much is the more recent conscious system?

The estimates are that 99% of all the things going on in body and brain are automatic. Gregory Bateson uses the example of a TV screen: consciousness is what's happening on the screen, but behind that you have all the machinery of the TV, and behind that you have the wires and cables connecting it to the TV station, and so on.

So we might have preferences - eating some potato chips, going for a run, calling a friend - but these preferences came from somewhere, it's not magic.

So what does this mean for free will?

Well, I'm in the middle of a big discussion about that with the psychologist Roy Baumeister, who does alot of work on self-control, on models of the self and so on. We debated each other at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention in Tamba Bay, and we're now continuing that discussion on our blogs on Psychology Today.

Sounds like you have a good rivalry!

He and I have always done that for each other. It's sort of a dialectic. It makes both of our arguments better. He's a very worthy opponent.

So anyway, to get back to your question, what this means for free will. Personally, I don't believe it exists. But that's a personal belief. We can at least say that the scope, range and domain of it is much less than people thought 20 or 30 years ago, when people like [sorry, I didn't get the names of the people he mentioned] asserted that we're always aware of the reasons why we do things.

That's obviously not true. Clearly, through these primers, we're being played by the world.

And in some ways, the problem is this idea that we have free will, that we're the masters of our soul.

Tim Wilson has shown that people's theories of why they do what they do are pretty far off. People are worried about subliminal adverts playing them, for example, which have been shown to have a minimal effect, but they are not worried about the effect of regular TV on them, or of negative campaign adverts, for example, which do have a real effect on people.

OK. But the idea of being 'master of the soul' comes from ancient philosophy, from Plato and the Stoics in particular. And they never said that all humans were masters of their soul - on the contrary, they said the vast majority of humans sleep-walked their way through life. They said that we could become masters of our soul, but only through years of training, Socratic self-enquiry and struggle. The same idea is found in, for example, the idea of Buddhist or Christian monks, training themselves over years to become more aware of what they're thinking and whether their automatic responses make sense. So this idea that we can develop free will is at the heart of the spiritual aspirations that have guided humanity for millennia. What do you think of this idea?

I'm a social psychologist. I'm interested in the normal, the mundane. And the normal is for people not to challenge their automatic thinking. It doesn't mean people can't change it, but whether they will make the effort is debatable.

If you do change your automatic behaviour, it will take alot of training. Will most people do it? Probably not. Why? Because they're busy surviving, and it requires the realisation 'I'm not in full control'. Most people don't learn that theory.

So you accept we can consciously change our automatic responses?

It's not as simple as conscious versus automatic. We're often motivated by goals that can be unconscious. A lot of good things can come automatically, for example, pursuing goals or projects. We can do this outside of our own awareness.

But I'm interested in whether we can consciously change our automatic responses. Let's say you suffer from depression or anxiety, and your automatic responses to the world are obviously serving you badly. In that instance, do you accept you can consciously change your automatic responses?

Well, it could be your conscious thinking that is serving you badly in that instance - it could be your conscious thoughts and ruminations that 'I can't do it' which are making you depressed.

So let's say you have a belief - conscious or unconscious - along the lines of 'I can't do it': can we consciously change that belief?

Yes. This is the nice thing about the way we keep approaching the true nature of the will and agency. Thirty years ago, consciousness was seen as a bottleneck for everything. It was clearly too much for the system to do. By taking some things off the table, it helps us to know what it is for. There are only a few things left on the table. We're beginning to understand the ability of the mind to change, the plasticity, the ability to adapt to new circumstances.

So the mind can re-programme itself to some extent?

Well, often it comes from outside the mind. In earlier stages of our history, for example, we took our orders from the elders. We weren't free agents. Change came from top down. When we came out with our research on racist stereotyping, one psychologist tried to show how you can change people's negative stereotypes through cognitive training. But you can't cognitively change each individual. Change has to come from the top down. An African-American is elected president and then things change. [To which one might reply, yes, but the people elected him, so that was still the free choice of individuals.]

But at the individual level, do you agree that people suffering from emotional problems can learn to change their automatic responses?

Yes, I think that's definitely true. Beck and Ellis [the two inventors of CBT] gave us one of the original models of automatic thought. CBT really influenced me in the 1970s. Aaron Beck, for
example, talked about the chain of human thinking, how it moves too fast for us to follow it. It's like a rubber band snapping. But Beck insisted that, if you listen carefully, you can hear it. I actually tried this, in the 70s, and he's right, you can hear it, you can follow it, if you slow it down.

It's the speed that's the problem. You have to listen right after an external stimulus, and you can still hear it, and try to follow the chain.

Mindfulness, in a word.

Yes. Ellen Langer talks about this in her book, Counter-Clockwise - the idea of taking control over automatic things. It's even being made into a film, where she's played by Jennifer Anniston!

So this top down system of ours allows us to do this, to chart a course. We're still not sure where this ability comes from, or why. But we know how we can use it to adapt to circumstances.

It's been fascinating, John. Thanks very much for your time.

Thank you. It's useful for me too.