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Consciousness And The Two-Track Mind

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Consciousness can be a funny thing. It offers us weird experiences, as when entering sleep or leaving a dream, and sometimes it leaves us wondering who is really in control. After zoning me [DM] out with nitrous oxide, my dentist tells me to turn my head to the left. My conscious mind resists: “No way,” I silently say. “You can’t boss me around!” Whereupon my robotic head, ignoring my conscious mind, turns obligingly under the dentist’s control.

During my noontime pickup basketball games, I am sometimes mildly irritated as my body passes the ball while my conscious mind is saying, “No, stop! Sarah is going to intercept!” Alas, my body completes the pass. Other times, as psychologist Daniel Wegner (2002) noted in The Illusion of Conscious Will, people believe their consciousness is controlling their actions when it isn’t. In one experiment, two people jointly controlled a computer mouse. Even when their partner (who was actually the experimenter’s accomplice) caused the mouse to stop on a predetermined square, the participants perceived that they had caused it to stop there.

Then there are those times when consciousness seems to split. Reading Green Eggs and Ham to one of my preschoolers for the umpteenth time, my obliging mouth could say the words while my mind wandered elsewhere. And if someone drops by my office while I’m typing a sentence, it’s not a problem. My fingers can complete it as I strike up a conversation.

What do such experiences reveal? Was my drug-induced dental experience akin to people’s experiences with other psychoactive drugs (mood- and perception-altering substances)? Does the mind going elsewhere while reading or typing reveal a split in consciousness? And during sleep, when do those weird dream experiences occur, and why? Before considering these questions and more, let’s ask a fundamental question: What is consciousness?

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