The Imp of the Perverse

characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is in fact a mobile without a motive, a motive not motivert through its promptings we act without comprehensible object or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say that, through its promptings we act for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable. But in fact there is none more strong. With certain minds,

under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong sake admit of analysis or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse, elementary welcome to stuff to blow your mind, a production

of I Heart Radios, how stuff works. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And if you recognize that opening reading, you must be into the deep cuts of Edgar Allan Poe. The story didn't even have him burying anybody alive. Yeah, this is This is not like you said. This is this is not going to be a hit single from Poe by any means. This is this is

more of a deep cut. Uh. You're probably far more familiar with the Tell Tale Heart or the Black Cat, two stories that contains similar elements, and then we'll touch

on later in this episode. Yeah. So this is from Edgar Allan poet short story The Imp of the Perverse, And we start with this today because in this short story, Poe brings up this concept of the imp of the perverse or this, uh, this motive toward perversity, the idea of doing something exclusively for the reason that you know it should not be done and not for any other reason. And in this story the Imp of the Perverse, there is actually a murder. You don't get to the murder

for a while. Poe makes you wait before before any plot there's just this long musing complete with lots of references to the pseudoscience of phrenology. But it's amusing on this particular impulse of perverseness, the powerful urge to do what we should not and to do it simply for the reason that it should not be done. And so Pope goes on to analyze this concept throughout the sort

of s say section of the story. He calls it a radical primitive impulse uh, and he contrasts it with other types of drives that we have, which he frames in terms of the pseudoscience of phrenology. Again, he says it's different from mere combativeness because combativeness stems from an instinct for self defense. Right, It's rooted in the desire

to be well and to protect yourself from injury. So Poe writes, quote, but in the case of that something which I term perverseness, the desire to be well is not only not aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists. So I take that to mean he's trying to make clear he's not talking about any kind of self defensive combativeness or antagonism, but rather a kind of suicidal antagonism, a thwarting of one's own best interests simply because you

have a desire to do something that you shouldn't do. Now, the example that Poe uses here, of course, is one that I think most of us can't directly relate to, the idea of of of this impulse to confess a secret murder that you committed, but the the idea of being tempted to do something that you absolutely know you shouldn't do, like for for no logical reason interest, right, Like, I think we can all relate to that on some level. Like I often think about this kind of thing when

I'm in meetings. If I'm saying, like a one on one meeting with my boss, I say it's a you know, a performance review or you know, what have you, I'll suddenly I'll be sitting there nodding, listening, absorbing the information, and then like this random thought will occur, like what if I licked the desk right now? But if what if I started eating an ink pen, just chewing on it, but just like really uh, you know, showing down on it.

And I'm not logically tempted to do these things. But then once the ideas in my mind, uh, I just keep thinking about it. I mean it's different from like, they are two very different ways to have a desire to say something inappropriate during a meeting with one's boss

or something. One reason would be, well, maybe you've you know, you've got all these kinds of pent up feelings about your boss, and you're very angry and you think you've been wronged or something like that, and then that would be a sort of natural desire to express your feelings and rebel against some kind of injustice or get revenge by saying what you really think. That would be one thing.

You're talking about something different and post talking about something different when when all those feelings aren't even necessarily they're just wanting, having this impulse to say something or do something completely inappropriate for no good reason at all. I know exactly what you're talking about. I often have this thought when I'm in like a meeting or you have

something's going on. Sometimes something just flashes into my head, like I could utter the following sentence and it would destroy my career, yeah, or or just do you think, like, well, what if I, like crab walked out of this meeting right now? You know, it wouldn't be that difficult to do, and yet it would totally uh, it would it would totally change everyone's perceptions of how I, uh, you know, how I experience reality and you know, the seriousness with

which I take my job, that sort of thing. Um And and I guess, as as we'll come back to in this episode, a lot of it comes down to just that that weird dividing line between thought and action. Yeah. Yeah, it's almost as if whenever you do this, you're exploring what it means to contemplate an action without doing it. It's kind of the same way. It's almost like you're feeling the texture of something in those moments where you wonder what it would be like to swerve into oncoming

traffic or to jump off of a tall ledge. I mean, you remember a while back you did an episode with Christian about the idea of the call of the void, and I think this touches on some similar stuff. Right. It's not necessarily that people, I mean, people do have suicidal ideation that is more deeply rooted in in in ongoing problems they have, but there's also just the sort of like momentary fleeting impulses that don't even seem to

be connected to anything larger. Yeah, yeah, that was I definitely recommend listeners go back to that episode because we touched on not only know how that we get these ideas in our head, this weird temptation when we're saying, um, you know, a top of tall building or on the

cliff side. But in that episode, I shared how in the past I've also felt like this weird feeling like I need to press my wallet to the bottom of my pocket for fear that I'll take my wallet out and say throw it, throw it over the railing of the Empire State Building, And you know, which is something I definitely don't want to do. But then once the idea has entered my head, it does sort of feel

like I should take steps to keep it from happening. Yeah, And you almost feel like you wonder, for a second, am I going to be able to stop myself. In this long section where Poe talks about the idea of peering into an abyss in in the story, he says, quote, there is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge to indulge for a moment in any attempt at thought is not to be inevitably lost

for reflection, but urges us to forbear. And therefore it is I say that we cannot if there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backwards from the abyss, we plunge and are destroyed. So it's this weird thing where he's almost like saying, you've got to depend on some kind of part of you to suddenly be the guard. What if that part of you the guard, isn't paying

attention in some moment. I believe I mentioned this in the call the Void episode, but stuff like this always

makes me think of uh. The author Robert Graves his partial autobiography Goodbye to All that he talks about his experiences in the war, but also of a mountain climbing, and if memory serves, there's this one part where he talks about climbing scaling these uh you know, these cliff sides with some friends and how like the scariest moment was when birds were sailing close by and and having to sort of wrestle with this this weird illogical feeling

of love. What have I let go? What if? What if like the birds were sort of tempting them with this siren song of like, you know, let go and fly with us. I don't know if this is inspired by that, but I seem to recall a kind of stock scene and a lot of cartoons, like Wiley coyote type cartoons where a character, often the kind of bumbling, you know, prone to injury kind of character, would be out over allege on a precipice or on a tight rope or something and would be harassed by a bird

fluttering fluttering around nearby. There's something that does seem to go deep about you being vulnerable at the edge and then a creature that has powers that you can't just floating around as light as a breeze. Oh yeah, I've definitely experienced it. Say, standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, We're not the edge, several feetback, but still watching a bird traverse these to this drastic change in

elevation with without any issue at all. Now, personally, Robert, do you find yourself to be I think the term would be criminophobic and having a fear of sharp drop

offs and precipices. Yeah, at times, Yeah, like we we have another episode that we are currently researching and recording soon on mountains, and just looking at certain pictures of mountains, looking at um specifically walkways carved into the sides of mountains, at times, they made me cringe a little bit because and I could just imagine myself crawling upward down those stairs as opposed to you know, walking up and down them like a normal pilgrim or something. This is funny

because I have tons of fears. I'm full of anxieties about all kinds of things in the world, but not this I I do. I'm almost kind of drawn to sharp drop offs. I always want to go right up to them and look over. Yeah, well, not not me, but of course it's always it's always a challenge taking a small child to these places because because my son he definitely wants to go up and check out the edge, and it just that that annurbs me even more. Well, I can imagine that would change everything I I my

whole life. I've had the experience of being told to stay away from the edge even now. Yeah, well I I had this issue before a kid was in my life, for sure, though, it's just the the edge is too close. Well anyway, sorry, So to come back to the ed

Garland post story. Uh, the story goes on to tell of how the narrator he goes he gives this long essay, this kind of speech about phrenology and about the mp of the perverse, and then he tells a very brief version of his story, which is that he came up with an ingenious plan to get away with murder, and the way he did it was he murdered someone with a poisoned candlestick because he knew they would light a candle to read in bed at night, and so he

gets away with the murder undetected. But then years later, having totally gotten away with it, he is seized with this uncontrollable urge to confess in public, which he does kind of raving in the middle of a public you know, marketplace type area, which of course lands him in chains and sentenced to hang for his crime. And that's where

he is as he tells the story. But the story itself might not be all that remarkable as far as post stories go, but it does bring up this interesting idea personifies this imp of the perverse, the idea of wanting to do something simply because it is something that should not be done, either like morally, you know, maybe it's a violation of norms, or because it's against one's own interest. That there's just some compelling force telling you not to do it, and that's the very reason you

can't stop thinking about doing it. Yeah. I mentioned the tell Tale Heart earlier, and I think that's that's I think most would agree that's probably a better story that deals with with with with a very similar premise. The idea, of course, and that if you haven't read it, is that this guy killed an old man and buried him

under the boards, and is what is living room. I believe the police come to ask questions and he just hears the thumping of the heart until it drives him bonkers, and he just starts pulling up the boards right or or or telling the the investigators like, look, he's under there, pull up the boards. I killed him, and his you know, his heart is beating um uh. And in that he's dealing with the imp of the perverse as well, manifested as this this nagging beating heart. Now, it's been a

while since I've read The tell Tale Heart. Maybe you can answer this better than I, um, do you think that does guilt play a role in that story? Is he guilty for about what he has done and is a feeling of guilt driving him towards his confession, or is it more like the imp of the perverse where he doesn't even seem to feel bad about it, He's just got this urged to tell Well, you know, it's been a once since I've read it, or I remember

seeing like a stage adaptation of it as as a kid. Uh, it's been a while since i've I've I've interacted with either, but I remember I used to think it was more the guilt issue, because that seems like the the obvious trope, right, the idea that you're you're just you've done this horrible thing, and the weight of the thing you've done eventually pulls

out the confession. But having become acquainted with the imp of the perverse now, which which I've before reached researching this episode I was not familiar with, I think it really makes me realize that Poe was probably thinking about other ideas here, and he was dealing with something a little more complicated in the human mind as opposed to this more cliched Uh. Imbalancing in the human heart. So maybe his his urge to confess was not a moral urge but more just kind of uh, the imp of

the perverse, it was a neuroticism. Yeah, So one thing I think about, especially given all the references to phrenology in this post. Sorry, I guess you know, before you had psychology, you had pseudoscience like phrenology, And it makes me think about me, you know, what's the kind of bridge between these two worlds, you know, getting getting to modern psychology, and that makes me go to Freudian is Um.

I don't know if your brain kind of goes to the same place there, but I mean you see echoes of things like the imp of the perverse in the writings in the psychoanalysis style of Freud, right, where he talked about things like a death drive or or a death instinct. Right, And would that be sort of related? Yeah, I believe so, and I've and I found you know,

a few authors that have chimed in on this. So Sigmund Freud, just to refresh it, lived eighteen fifty six through nine nine, and he's best remembered for his work on the unconscious mind, but he also theorized about the role of powerful instincts that energize the mind. And these instincts are numerous and varied, but he grouped them into two main categories. There's aros uh the the life instinct,

and then there's Thanatos, the death instinct. And these names, of course refer to the Greek mythological gods of life and death. So the sexual influence of the libido only concerns only connects directly to the instincts of aros of One of the instincts of Thanatos focus on aggression, self destruction, and cruelty. So I think it would be reasonable to situate the imp of the reverse within the Freudian instinct

family of Thanatos. Now, I was looking around for papers on this and I found a really good one from Laura Lai Carraman, and she explored this in a two thousand fourteen paper titled the Urge to tell Versus the need to conceal confession as narrative desire, impose the black Cat, the tail, tale Heart, and the imp of the Perverse, And this was published in American and British Studies Annual, and as the title indicates, um the author Karaman points

out that that Poe considered the drive to confess in not only The Imp but also in the more well known Black Cat and the tell Tale Heart quote. What is noteworthy is the nature of these confessions, their inexplicable, irrational quality, as if driven by a certain kind of urgency by a foreseemingly independent of their will. If the crimes committed appear more or less calculated, their confessions, by contrast,

are almost unaccountably impulsive. That's yeah, that's totally accurate to the actual writing of the story, the imp of the perverse. I mean, the author is cold and calculating and psychopathic about the crime. You know, he thinks it through, he plans it out, he doesn't appear to feel bad about it. But then the can the desire to confess comes on as just this kind of like obsession from out of nowhere that he can't keep his mouth closed. He's running

around thinking I'm about to blurt it out, and then does. Yeah. In this paper, the author points out that the past critics, such as Author Brown and Henry Sussman, have taken you know, all of this apart, with the latter Sussmen pointing out that the actor can of confession in these tales is a quote transgression of the boundaries between the private and the public kind of way. Again, that that that gray

line between thought and action of essence. Um. So you know, in these stories we see something that exists in the mind leaking out. Uh, you know, the desire to tell overpowers the desire for concealment. Um. Well, you know, one thing I wonder about with the references to phrenology in the story is that in the nineteenth century there could easily have been anxieties about the idea of an emerging science of the mind. Do you ever think about this

like that? You're so a person always has their private thoughts, their thoughts or their own or maybe there between them and the god they believe in or whatever, but their private in some way other people can't know about them.

But I wonder if you live in a world where there are all these burgeoning sciences, and the sciences are increasingly uh, intruding into domains like light and you know, in the social sciences and the mind itself, and you know, the emerging fields like psychology, you have to start to wonder, will people be able to read my mind with these sciences? Is there is there going to be a diminution of

the private privilege with one's own thoughts? How Yeah, when we see this kind of anxiety reflected in so many works of science fiction over the years, you know, the idea of of thought police, um, you know, determining what what's going on inside your head, of of passing through that boundary between action and thought. I was, in fact

just reading a Peter Watts short story about this very topic. Um. But but but in these stories, something that Carmen point points out and drives home and referencing the work of these other um scholars, is that, you know, it's ultimately it's not as simple as oh, this character is mad well and that's why they did their crime and or blurted it out, but that there's something going on in the unconscious that is by definition unreadable. And that's the

ultimate spooky, scary, mysterious part. That there's something, uh, there's something going on in there, that there are these contradictory drives in the subconscious and uh, and we don't really

know what to expect from them. Well, yeah, I can see this story situated again in kind of a bridge land between an old model that might often like an old model of the mind that might have often said, if you have drives or desires that don't feel like yours, that's a demon, you know, like that you could actually have the devil whispering in your ear, that it's an imp you know. And there then you've got devil possession

and all that. And then you've got this, uh, this new way of thinking about things where where well, maybe you don't consciously understand all of your own drives and desires and motivations. Yeah, absolutely, um, you know, and all of this I can't help but think back to Um.

I can't remember the exact biblical whole passage, but the basic idea that you see reflected in a lot of Christian theology that um, if you do something in your heart, it is is it is as if you did it in real life, as if you actually committed the act.

And um again like even that without getting into kind of like the you know, the theological discourse on it, that's kind of dealing in this this this thin line or this time seemingly thin line between thought and action, between contemplation of theological and and the you know, and committing the illogical. Yeah, and in in that whole thing. I mean, I can see arguments on on both sides of the whole like if you are whoever has felt wrath against his brother has committed murder in his heart.

On one hand, I mean, that seems like that's kind of almost kind of a very bad lesson to teach people, right like that, you know, it's it's just as bad to think about doing something bad as it is to actually do it. It kind of blurs the line of like resistance to evil, right, and especially as we proceed through the there's this episode, we're going to get into some areas where it really shows how problematic that is. Because I don't think that, you know, try to think

something else. But I mean it does highlights even if we can say that's maybe bad advice, it does highlight something. And what it highlights is that, um, you know, if you allow yourself to contemplate something that you know you should not do a lot, you may very well wear

down your resistance to doing it right. All right, Well, on that note, let's let's take a quick break and when we come back, we will chase the imp a little bit more through this subconscious than Thank alright, we're back, So We've been discussing this idea of the imp of the perverse that comes from this Ed Garland post short story from the eighteen forties, where there is this strong impulse to do something just because you shouldn't do it

and not for other reasons. So I was reading an article about this in Psychology today by Meal Bruno, who is a professor at u PEN, and it brought up a few interesting things. So this article tells an interesting story about the imp and inhibition and neuroscience. And the story starts when Bruno was in graduate school and he talks about how he witnessed a neuropathology examination of a

deceased patient. And so a neuropathology examination involves cutting open the brain and examining it and figuring out, you know it, was there any damaged tissues or a neural degeneration. And also present at this examination was a social worker who had known the patient before he died. And so the autopsy revealed degeneration in the prefrontal cortex, especially of the

dorso lateral prefrontal cortex. And this is the outer part of the brain, starting above the temples and sort of reaching up onto the outside of the forehead, and Bruno mentions that this area is important for cognitive control. I was reading about its role in cognition and behavior, and it's generally believed to have a lot to do with

many different kinds of executive function. This includes things like selective attention, choosing what to pay attention to and what to think about, things like working memory and meta memory. So meta memory is the cognitive management of memories, like judging whether a particular memory is relevant or correct. But this area also appears to have things to do with planning,

with regulating and overriding emotions, and crucially with inhibition. And the management of inhibition also appears to be a major function of the prefrontal cortex in general, which remember, showed damage all over in this patient. So because of this physical neuropathology, the doctor performing the autopsy asked the man's social worker if he had had any issues with impulsiveness and control, and the social workers said yes. In fact, later in life, this man had repeatedly had a problem

with jumping out of moving cars. Jumping out of moving cars, and I thought that's really interesting because that's not just something like, you know, taking food out of somebody's hand. Or or sexually inappropriate behavior, things that are certainly wrong, but that you can see how disinhibition would allow just sort of natural urges that people have otherwise to to come out without being mediated by the thought I shouldn't

do that. With jumping out of moving cars, you have to wonder more like, where does that urge come from to begin with? And in fact, this kind of thing is more common than we might normally imagine. Berno himself rights that quote. Fifty seven percent of people with fronto temporal dementia, which is neural degeneration that targets the frontal and temporal lobes violate social norms, engaging in sexual transgressions and public nudity, shoplifting in front of store managers, eating

out of the trash. It is common knowledge in the field of neuroscience now that these behaviors are due to a problem of disinhibition because of a deterioration of the cognitive control network of the lateral prefrontal cortex. And so I was looking into this more uh and I found even more support for the role of the prefrontal cortex and inhibiting imp like behaviors, and more evidence that when the prefrontal cortex is impaired, inhibition suffers, and we be

we begin to act out transgressive and inappropriate behaviors. So one study I looked at was called Diagnosis and Management of Behavioral Issues in front of temporal Dementia by Menu, Carry and Huey. In current neurology and neuroscience reports from and they write that behavioral disinhibition is a classic hallmark of the behavioral variant of fronto temporal dementia quote. Within the first several years of symptoms, patients can behave contrary

to social norms. They may inappropriately touch or aggressively approach strangers, or even engage in theft or other criminal behaviors. Patients may also disregard al or social norms to make offensive jokes or sexual remarks, encroach on the personal space of others, and exhibit childish behavior and a general lack of etiquette. Disinhibition may also be exhibited in the form of rash or impulsive actions like gambling or repeatedly falling for financial scams.

The largest autopsy confirmed study of b v F t D, or behavioral variant front of temporal dementia, found seventy six percent of patients exhibited behavioral dis disinhibition or impulsivity. So it seems like when something happens to this part of the brain, when you've got impairment of the front of temporal area. You see this almost all the time, that there is there is a problem with regulating one's behavior, and you see people acting out things that they might

think about but wouldn't normally do. And this is all quite an impt to consider because again we're getting back to the the idea that the choice is kind of being taken out of our hands, right, Um, in this case,

it's we're getting down to uh, essentially in a brain injury. Yeah, I mean, this kind of thing really always makes me consider stuff like criminal justice, you know, the the idea that um that okay, so we we say we want to live in a society where people are held accountable for their actions, and that that seems to make sense to me intuitively. You don't want people to just go around wantonly harming other people and getting away with it

and not facing any consequences. But then at the same time, it's hard to look at stuff like this and and think that it really makes sense to punish people for their behaviors when our behavior, you know, we can we can go out and hurt people because we have a tumor in a certain part of our brain, or because we're experiencing we're experiencing dementia due to old age or some kind of brain disease, or because we have a head injury, all kinds of physical facts that we would

agree people are not at all to blame for control tribute to them doing things that violate social norms and harm other people. And so if that's the case, also people didn't I mean pick the brain they were born with. Either you didn't, you didn't ask to be born with a brain that makes you more likely to be aggressive or invade people's personal space. And yet then again we can't like encourage those behaviors. I don't know it. This kind of thing leaves you in a real pickle in

thinking about how to deal with with human misbehavior. Yeah, I do feel like a lot of it does, kind of uh, you know, spring forth from older ideas about you know, in which you know, committing a you know, an improper act is a is a statement on a you know, a pure moral failing. Yeah, um, you know, some problem in the soul as opposed to something that

is you know more that is a medical issue. But I was also further wondering about the the idea of like impulses and impulse control, because Okay, so we know that certain parts of the brain are very corton for keeping the imp of the perverse from taking control of the wheel, right from the prefrontal cortex, the frontal temporal regions.

These play some kind of major role in inhibition, and if there's injury to them or something is wrong in there, you can suddenly start doing things that you normally would stop yourself before acting out. But I wonder about the first half of the equation, like the urges themselves, Where do the urges to do the wrong thing come from

in the first place? In this article I was talking about a minute ago, Bruno identifies the orbitofrontal cortex is a likely seat of impulses like this, and he he links this to the way that like tumors in the orbitofrontal cortex can sometimes cause people to suddenly start engaging

in criminal behaviors that they never would have before. And like the the awful history of of frontal lobotomy, you know that went into the orbitofrontal cortex and severed connections in there through the eye socket, and the idea that this would reduce aggression and inappropriate behaviors, which it often did, but also just did general damage to people's brains and personalities in many cases. And that's a that's a kind

of horrible story in the history of medical neuroscience. Absolutely, I mean, that's one of the real life horror stories kind of circling around all of this. Yeah. But but anyway, so I looked this up, and based on all the literature I was reading, it also seems like the orbit of frontal cortex placed some major role in decision making and emotions and behavioral inhibition, such that injuries or tumors or degenerative disease in the o f C can lead

to disinhibited behavior. Though I'm no neuroscientists, obviously, but reading around, I can't see quite exactly the reason that the imp would necessarily be there, except to say that, like the lateral prefrontal cortex, the orbit orbit of frontal cortex is generally important for value based decision making and behavioral control.

For example, I was looking at a paper in Social Cognitive of an affective neuroscience by Corpina at all, they just found a strange thing that it increases in the volume of the prefrontal cortex and intra prefrontal functional connectivity were related to impulsive and antisocial psychopathic traits. But anyways, multiple regions of the prefrontal cortex do appear to play a significant role in the generation of impulses to act out and in the control and inhibition of those impulses

when we judge them inappropriate. You want to do something bad, but you stop yourself from doing that bad thing. A lot of what's going on there seems to depend on

and happen in the prefrontal cortex. But I guess in any of these cases you do have to ask the question, is this the imp of the perverse or is this just a desire for something that you would normally be able to inhibit with your with you know, with your behavioral control, with your executive function, or is it really the perversity that motivates the action in the first place, Like they're all kinds of things we could do in order to get something that is an otherwise normal intrinsic desire.

People with disinhibition patterns. Violet norms and act inappropriately to get food, to get sexual gratification, to get revenge, or to get items, they want to express power over people, and they're they're good reasons for not doing all these things based on our morals, But the underlying motivations to do them exist independently. So I wonder what provides the impulse to act perversely in the true spirit of the

post story. Are there cases where we can only understand why the brain would act contrary to its awareness of norms for the reason that that action is contrary to norms with no identifiable other motivation. Cases where the perversity is clearly what causes the action in the first place. Fortunately, we have a very interesting theory to discuss about where a lot of this is coming from. Yeah, so we're gonna take one more break. When we them back, we're

going to discuss the ironic process of mental control. Thank alright, we're back. So, Robert, we're asking the question, have we ever been able to identify any cases where there is something like the imp of the perverse where the perversity of a thought or impulse or action actually does tend to cause the brain to favor it. And one place we can take this line of thought is to the Harvard psychology professor Daniel M. Wagner, who passed away in but who wrote about this idea of the ironic process

of mental control. That's right, and he actually begins the paper with a passage from Po from them of the perverse. But the first paragraph of this paper is just pretty spot on, I think, and in terms of like sort of you know, striking a chord with with something that we can all relate to quote, it sometimes seems that our desires to control our minds are met by an

inordinate measure of failure. Whether we want to stop a worry, concentrate on the task, go to sleep, escape a bad mood, distract ourselves from pain, be humble, relax, avoid prejudice, or serve yet other mental goals, we find ourselves faltering again and again. Indeed, our attempts at mental control falls short so often then we may stop to wonder, along with Po, whether there is some part of our minds, an imp of the perverse, that ironically strives to compel our errors.

The theory of ironic processes of mental control make precisely this claim, and so in his Ironic process theory which he presents in this paper. He argues that quote, the ironies of mental life or not just happenstance examples of the frailty of human endeavors, but rather are logically entailed by the nature of mental control. So he's arguing that the very nature of the way cognition happens tends to favor us thinking about things that we're trying not to

think about. Exactly. Yeah, he's saying that, you know, when we attempt to exert mental control via what he refers to as the operating process, to fill the mind with the desired array of emotions or thoughts, you know, like I'm gonna cheer up, where I'm gonna, I'm gonna get into a calm state of mind, whatever the desires worrying, Yeah, I'm gonna stop wearing UM. When we do that, the monitoring process kicks in to ask is this the case? Is this the is this working? Is this how I'm

actually feeling? Um? So it not only searches for failure, but quote tends to create the failure. Yes, yeah, so that's what he's saying. It's not just that we're not very good at controlling the contents of our brains. Often the attempt to control the contents of our not just our brains, our minds. The attempt to control the contents of our minds backfires spectacularly. Yeah. It's like we're saying,

I would rather not be sad right now. Um, I'm gonna go ahead and load happiness, and then the monitoring process says, let me check. Nope, you're sad. We're gonna schedule down for another hour of set. Uh. So this is this is a wonderful paper. The title is Ironic Processes of Mental Control by Daniel M. Vegner W E G N E R. Published in the Psychological Review in and if you if you search around, you can you

can find this one online pretty easily. Um. But he presents some other individuals work just to support this idea. One of them is UH is the work of French chemist Michel Chevroule, and he is UH known for Chevroule's pendulum. So he debunked a spiritualist illusion in eighteen thirty three in which awaited body suspended by a string from the fingers was found to oscillate back and forth when concentrated upon.

Similar to this is pretty well, it's the same the best way to explain it, because I think most of us have probably not manipulated this pendulum. But if you've ever played with Auiji board, well then you have experienced the same thing. It is a kinesthetic illusion. The you know, the the idea the causation of movement is is occurring without the perception of our own conscious muscle movement, also known as the ideometer phenomenon, and it's connected to automatic writing,

to dowsing, and other alleged supernatural acts. Anything that involves you not moving something, feeling like you're not moving something, but actually moving something. Yeah. Though it also reminds me of the psychomotor problem known as target fixation, which I'd read about years ago but just recently came to my mind. So this is something that occurs in driving and piloting. I've read about it primarily with respect to operating a

motorcycle for some reason. I don't know why a motorcycle specifically, and not other vehicles. But here's the basic idea. Robert, and you're steering a vehicle and you suddenly notice an obstacle or threat that you need to avoid, and then you steer directly into the obstacle and An example I've read about is that say you're on a motorcycle in a motorcycle race on a closed track, and then one

cycle veers off the track and crashes. UH. It's apparently, in this case not unusual for cycles going along behind it to steer off and follow the crashed motorcycle. And this is usually described as a panic reflex, Like you see an obstacle or crash or something threatening or dangerous, and you immediately, because it's threatening and dangerous, focus all your attention on that thing so as not to run

into it. But because you focus all your attention on that thing, you unconsciously steer your vehicle directly toward it. I am curious why this UH is mainly talked about with motorcycles and not so much with other motor vehicles. It could just be that the motorcycles and motorcyclists who talk about this are often operating at a faster speed.

I don't know. It does seem to line up with a number of the principles we're talking about here right in Vegnar's theory, And now Vegnar also brings up Freud's counter will to bring it back to segment freud Um Freud's read on what's happening here is that we can't do the thing we want to do sometimes, uh, as if there's another will within us countering the will to do the thing. Uh. And he employed this in his

consideration of hysteria. He also brought up the law of reversed effort by Charles Bodwin from and this is kind of an early hit on the same ideas of involved in the ironic process theory, but but in the ironic process theory paper, Vegner lays out a model of how this goes down, for first with the effortful operating process

and then the effortless monitoring process. And that's part of the maddening thing about it, right, It is like you can, you can, you can exert so much will to try and change your mind state, but then the resistance is just it's it's it's like it's an alien force that has its own reserves of energy to draw on limitless even and then he goes on to consider the evidence

from experiments into movement, prejudice, self presentation, belief, disbelief, sleep, wakefulness, pain. Uh. It's it's really a robust paper in this regard, and he did a bunch of empirical research in this area, I mean doing experiments to show directly uh. And in fact, in some ways it is not hard to demonstrate. For example, by asking people to verbalize a stream of consciousness, you can find quite easily the people are who are told to try hard not to think about something end up

thinking about it a lot. And in this section on chronic production of ironic effects, he discusses how all of this can potentially lead to a positive feedback loop of ironic effects, wearing you down with increased mental load as everything quote is magnified toward uh, psychopathological extremes um which you know, even though you know he's talking about something, he's talking about this in the sense that you know this is how our minds seem to work. But on

the other hand, this sounds just completely awful. This sounds like like a terrible system right where you just keep running up against, you know, a potential positive feedback loop of of you know, increasingly worrisome effects like this. It reminds me a lot of you know, of what is referred to in psychology as catastrophic thinking, you know, where you end up obsessing over extreme and or irrational worst

case scenarios. Yeah, catastrophizing. Yeah, this is a tendency to always look out for and your loved ones or when you catch yourself doing it, because I mean, it can be a sign that something's really wrong with your thought patterns when you you're always trying to imagine what's the worst way things could possibly go. Yeah, I mean it brings me back again to something we've discussed in the

show before. You know, we talked about chronosthesia mental time travel, all right, as well as theory of mind and uh, and how both of these playing in our ability to uh sort of run uh simulations of how the future might go. Uh. And so when we're going into that meeting with our boss, you know, we have various simulated ideas of how things will go. Uh. You know, probably some that are very reasonable, but then you're gonna have

some that are extreme. Maybe you're you're overly optimistic, and there's one that's just a fantasy where you get like, you know, the the billion dollar raise or something. And then there are the ones that are more catastrophic in nature, uh, ones that are maybe getting into the territory of the the imp of the perverse. What if I look at the table or eat a pin, that sort of thing. But then aren't we not like wasting our efforts on these models when we should be using our mental energy

towards the models that are more possible. I mean, on one hand, yeah, it does seem like it. There is adaptive value in being able to simulate future events, but it does seem like we waste a lot of this uh potential, we have this ability, we have to simulate future events in our minds on yeah, just just ruining ourselves and ruining our emotional state by obsessing with things that are not helpful. And yeah, it can be hard to understand exactly why that happens. Anyway, back to Wagner here,

he yeah. He ultimately argues that the ironic process theory could explain a lot of about our mental control, but he also brings it back to the imp saying quote. The theory also accounts for one further class of effects, the class that cries out for explanation and from which we often cry out for relief. The theory suggests that the ironic monitor is responsible for the instances in which we find that we do, say, think, or feel precisely

what we least intend. Yeah. I mean I think when you consider, like the model we were talking about earlier, that clearly within the brain there are probably there are subsystems for generating impulses to action, and then there are other systems that provide inhibitory control. You know, executive function of the brain says, to some impulses, no, let's not

do that. But when there is a when there is say a thought that you were repeatedly returning to, especially because you're trying to avoid thinking it due to the ironic process of mental control, you keep thinking, am I not thinking about it? And every time you think that you think it that that's bringing it constantly to mind.

And then if there's ever a failure of inhibition for whatever reason, you know, either just a kind of like momentary glitch or because you've got a neurodegenerative disease or a tumor or whatever, that impulse generated by the ironic process by checking on your own mind to make sure you're not thinking about the thing you're not supposed to think about, turns into an action. Now all of this sounds overwhelming really, Uh, Like, OK, I guess the MP wins like you know that what what can one do

against this? Uh, this kind of situation? How can we possibly? It's depressing to think that we would we have such a difficulty in in changing our mind state, even though we we obviously put a lot of energy into trying to do so. Um. So it might lead some of you to wonder, well, Okay, well what did Wagner have to say about this? Did he have any advice for

dealing with these forces? Yeah? And so Wagner actually gave a presentation about the imp of the perverse and about thought suppression to the American Psychological Association in two thousand eleven where he reviewed his research over his career on

this subject. And there was an article discussing this presentation in the A p A Journal by Leah Weinerman uh, and it discusses how Wagner said in his presentation that is clear from the research that attempting not to think about something not only doesn't work, it makes you more likely to think about that thing. But what people always

want to know is what you're just asking about, Robert. Okay, if the imp is there, and simply attempting not to think about something will make you think about it more and maybe even make you more likely to do it. Possibly, is there anything you can do to defeat the imp There does not, unfortunately, appear to be a fool proof method, But Wagner laid out several methods that he and his colleagues had discovered which had some degrees of success and

empirical support. UH Number one is, instead of trying not to think about the thing you don't want to think about, think about something else. Busy your mind with other contents. Wagner and colleagues found in at least one other study that when they asked people to think about a red Volkswagen instead of a white bear, the people were somewhat more successful than when they were just told not to think of a white bear. Trying not to think about

something is a losing game. But if you positively think about something else instead, then you then you have a better chance. And I'd say this is one case where the empirical research he does seem to line up with UH. With I don't know, at least the what seems to be reasonable conventional wisdom. Right, you can't just obsess about not wanting to feel what you're feeling. You should find

something to do. Right when you find something to do when you find another project, then your mind become sort of full of other things rather than just like avoid or a vacuum that you're trying to keep the bad stuff out of. Next thing he recommends is mentally postpone unwanted thoughts. I thought this was kind of interesting. Apparently, some research has found that if you just give people a designated period of thirty minutes to worry about something,

they worry less about it at other times. So if the imp of the perverse is continually turning your mind to an unwanted subject, Wagner suggests telling yourself, I'm going to think about that, uh sometime next Wednesday, and I won't think about it until then, And somehow this is actually or at least apparently this is somewhat effective. Another strategy he recommends is lighten your mental load or avoid multitasking. Quote.

One study found that people under increased mental load show an increase in the availability of thoughts of death, one of the great unwanted thoughts for most people. Uh, though, I mean I kind of wonder about this one. I mean, this could be seems like it could be resulted distress and a lot of different things. Next one apparently is exposure therapy. You think about the unwanted thought deliberately in controlled ways, in controlled settings, and it may become less

intrusive at other times. And this strikes me as perhaps one of the benefits that benefits of something like traditional talk therapy. It provides a positive and controlled setting to pay attention to unpleasant and unwanted thoughts so that they become less persistent and intrusive at other times. And then finally, the last one is he recommends mindfulness meditation, learning how to manage your attention and consciousness through mindfulness meditation practice.

That this does appear somewhat helpful, and this makes sense to me. If you've never tried mindfulness meditation, it's worth I think everybody should try to give it at least one shot and see what you think about it. There are many different kinds of meditation practice. Mindfulness specifically is about attention and experience. It's usually done by having an object of focus. Your own breath is a common one, and you just try to pay intense, unbroken attention to

a thing. Now, of course you will, you know, your mind will wander, and then you just sort of continually notice your own mental experiences and return your attention to the object of focus. It tends to make you calmer and better at understanding the way your own attention works. Yeah, and of course what we've we've discussed meditation on the show before. Uh So, if if anyone wants, you know, a deeper dive into that, certainly look back in the archives for this show. But this gives us a little

bit of hope. It it does provide hopefully we can we can close out this episode with some hope for all of us dealing with our own personal imps totally and especially feel for for me, and I think for a lot of people these days, their internet imps, the internet imps come in at us all the time. I feel like our brains are especially vulnerable these days because of social media and online headlines and all that. Our electronic connectedness has made us all the more vulnerable to

uh to, to impish behavior from the information world. Now, in this episode we talked about intrusive thoughts a good bit. We talked about, you know, the call of the void, etcetera. So I think it is good to to to a close out by just reminding everybody that if you know, if you're dealing with intrusive thoughts of of say suicide. Um, you know, a sympathetic ear is only a phone call away.

In the United States, consider calling the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at one eight hundred to seven three, eight to five five, and visit UH Suicide Prevention Lifeline dot org for additional resources tailored towards general and specific needs, such as those of youth, disaster survivors, Native Americans, veterans, lost survivors, l g B, t Q, and attempt survivors. You'll find a list of international suicide hotlines at suicide dot org. But to close things out on a lighter note, Joe,

the imp of the perverse? Did you imagine it looking like a googley, a gremlin, a hobgoblin, or some other cinematic diminutive monster. Oh, the imp of the perverse is job of the huts. Little buddy. What's it called? Oh? Yes, Oh goodness, I'm blanking on his name. Something like a little beak dog, Yes, yes, uh, something like scarlets fudge, but not scarlets fudge. Why what did you picture? Robert?

I pictured a hobgoblin from the movie hob Goblins. For sure, that's very, very good choice, but a Gremlin or Google would also be acceptable. I know you're partial to Googley's. Yeah, I mean Googies are pretty terrifying. Uh that yeah, that's probably what came to my mind when I first imagined the MP of the perverse. Alright, so we're gonna close it out. If you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mother ship.

That's where we'll find all the episodes. H and also be sure to check out our other show, Invention. It's an invention by invention. Uh, exploration of human technoe history. Are you not subscribed to Invention yet? If not, get on that go right over. It's called Invention. You can get it anywhere you get podcasts. Go and subscribe now. If you like this show, we think you'll love that one. So anyway, huge thanks to our excellent audio producers Alex

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