greater detail if he called. Now, here’s the catch: the woman approached some of these young men as they were crossing the bridge and others only after they had crossed it. As it turned out, the men who had met the woman as they were crossing the bridge were much more likely to call her in the coming days. Why? The men who met the woman in the middle of a shaky, swaying suspension bridge were experiencing intense physiological arousal, which they would normally have identified as fear. But because they were being interviewed by an attractive woman, they mistakenly identified their arousal as sexual attraction. Apparently, feelings that one interprets as fear in the presence of a sheer drop may be interpreted as lust in the presence of a sheer blouse–which is simply to say that people can be wrong about what they are feeling.5
Comfortably Numb
The novelist Graham Greene wrote: ‘Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love.’6 Indeed, research shows that physiological arousal can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and our interpretation of our arousal depends on what we believe caused it. It is possible to mistake fear for lust, apprehension for guilt,7 shame for anxiety.8 But just because we don’t always know what to call our emotional experience doesn’t mean that we don’t know what that experience is like, does it? Perhaps we can’t say its name and perhaps we don’t know what made it happen, but we always know what it feels like, right? Is it possible to believe we are feeling something when we are actually feeling nothing at all The philosopher Daniel Dennett put the question this way:
Suppose someone is given the post-hypnotic suggestion that upon awakening he will have a pain in his wrist. If the hypnosis works, is it a case of pain, hypnotically induced, or merely a case of a person who has been induced to believe he has a pain? If one answers that the hypnosis has induced real pain, suppose the post-hypnotic suggestion had been: ‘On awakening you will believe you have a pain in the wrist.’ If this suggestion works, is the circumstance just like the previous one? Isn’t believing you are in pain tantamount to being in pain?9
At first blush, the idea that we can mistakenly believe we are feeling pain seems preposterous, if only because the distinction between feeling pain and believing one is feeling pain looks so suspiciously like an artefact of language. But give this idea a second blush while considering the following scenario. You are sitting at a pavement café, sipping a tangy espresso and contentedly browsing the Sunday newspaper. People are strolling by and taking in the fine morning, and the amorous activities of a young couple at a nearby table attest to the eternal wonder of spring. The song of a thrush punctuates the yeasty scent of new croissants that wafts from the bakery. The article you are reading on campaign-finance reform is quite interesting and all is well–until suddenly you realize you are now reading the third paragraph, that somewhere in the middle of the first you started sniffing baked goods and listening to bird chirps, and that you now have absolutely no idea what the story you are reading is about. Did you actually read that second paragraph, or did you merely dream it? You take a quick look back and, sure enough, all the words are familiar. As you read them again you can even recall hearing them spoken a few moments ago by that narrator in your head who sounds astonishingly like you and whose voice was submerged for a paragraph or two beneath the sweet distractions of the season.
Two questions confront us. First, did you experience the paragraph the first time you read it? Second, if so, did you know you were experiencing it? The answers are yes and no, respectively. You experienced the paragraph and that’s why it was so familiar to you when you went back through it. Had there been an eye tracker at your table, it would have revealed that you did not stop reading at any point. In fact, you were smack-dab in the middle of reading’s smooth movements when suddenly you caught yourself…caught yourself…caught yourself what? Experiencing without being aware that you were experiencing–that’s what. Now, let me slow down for a moment and tread carefully around these words lest you start listening for the high-pitched tones of the indigo bunting. The word experience comes from the Latin experientia, meaning ‘to try’, whereas the word aware comes from the Greek horan, meaning ‘to see’. Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies observation of an event. The two words can normally be substituted in ordinary conversation without much damage, but they are differently inflected. One gives us the sense of being engaged, whereas the other gives us the sense of being cognizant of that engagement. One denotes reflection while the other denotes the thing being reflected. In fact, awareness can be thought of as a kind of experience of our own experience.10 When two people argue about whether their dogs are conscious, one is usually using that badly bruised term to mean ‘capable of experience’ while the other is using it to mean ‘capable of awareness’. Dogs are not rocks, one argues, so of course they are conscious. Dogs are not people, the other replies, so of course they are not conscious. Both arguers are probably right. Dogs probably do have an experience of yellow and sweet: there is something it is like to be a dog standing before a sweet, yellow thing, even if human beings can never know what that something is. But the experiencing dog is probably not simultaneously aware that it is having that experience, thinking as it chews, ‘Damned fine ladyfinger’.
The distinction between experience and awareness is elusive because most of the time they hang together so nicely. We pop a ladyfinger into our mouths, we experience sweetness, we know we are experiencing sweetness, and nothing about any of this seems even remotely challenging. But if the typically tight bond between experience and awareness leads us to suspect that the distinction between them is an exercise in hand waving, you need only rewind the tape a bit and imagine yourself back at the café at precisely the moment that your eyes were running across the newsprint and your mind was about to mosey off to contemplate the sounds and smells around you. Now hit play and imagine that your mind wanders away, gets lost and never comes back. That’s right. Imagine that as you experience the newspaper article, your awareness becomes permanently unbound from your experience, and you never catch yourself drifting away–never return to the moment with a start to discover that you are reading. The young couple at the nearby table stop pawing each other long enough to lean over and ask you for the latest news on the campaign-finance reform bill, and you patiently explain that you could not possibly know that because, as they would surely see if only they would pay attention to something other than their glands, you are happily listening to the sounds of spring and not reading a newspaper. The young couple is perplexed by this response, because as far as they can see, you do indeed have a newspaper in your hands and your eyeballs are, in fact, running rapidly across the page even as you deny it. After a bit of whispering and one more smooch, they decide to run a test to determine whether you are telling the truth. ‘Sorry to bother you again, but we are desperate to know how many senators voted for the campaign-finance reform bill last week and wonder if you would be good enough to hazard a guess?’ Because you are sniffing croissants, listening to bird calls and not reading a newspaper, you have no idea how many senators voted for the bill. But it appears that the only way to get these strange people to mind their own business is to tell them something, so you pull a number out of thin air. ‘How about forty-one?’ you offer. And to no one’s astonishment but your own, the number is exactly right.
This scenario may seem too bizarre to be real (after all, how likely is it that forty-one senators would actually vote for campaign-finance reform?), but it is both. Our visual experience and our awareness of that experience are generated by different parts of our brains, and as such, certain kinds of brain damage (specifically, lesions to the primary visual cortical receiving area known as Vi) can impair one without impairing the other, causing experience and awareness to lose their normally tight grip on each other. For example, people who suffer from the condition known as blindsight have no awareness of seeing, and will truthfully
