The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(37)

How did these unconscious processes work? How could a person understand a word well enough to distort it, without first having perceived it in some fashion? Was there perhaps more than one mechanism inside the mind at work? Did some part of the mind perceive incoming signals, say, while another part of the mind blocked them? “I was always interested in the question: ‘Are there other ways to understand your experience?’” Danny said. “Perceptual defense was interesting because it seemed to get at unconscious life with proper experimental techniques.” Danny designed some tests himself to see if, as he suspected, people were able to learn subconsciously. He showed subjects a series of playing cards or numbers, for example, and then asked them to predict what would come next. There was a hard-to-detect sequence in the cards or the numbers. If the subjects were able to sense the sequence, they would guess the next card or number more frequently than they would by chance—and they wouldn’t know why! They’d have perceived the pattern without being aware of it. They’d have learned something subconsciously. Danny abandoned his experiments after he decided that his subjects had learned nothing.

That was another thing colleagues and students noticed about Danny: how quickly he moved on from his enthusiasms, how easily he accepted failure. It was as if he expected it. But he wasn’t afraid of it. He’d try anything. He thought of himself as someone who enjoyed, more than most, changing his mind. “I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking,” he said. His theory of himself dovetailed neatly with his moodiness. In his darker moods, he became fatalistic—and so wasn’t surprised or disturbed when he did fail. (He’d been proved right!) In his up moments he was so full of enthusiasm that he seemed to forget the possibility of failure, and would run with any new idea that came his way. “He could drive people up the wall with his volatility,” said fellow Hebrew University psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel. “Something was genius one day and crap the next, and genius the next day and crap the next.” What drove others crazy might have helped to keep Danny sane. His moods were grease for his idea factory.

If Danny’s various intellectual pursuits had a common theme, other than his interest in them, it was hard for others to detect it. “He had no ability to see what is a waste of time and what is not,” said Dalia Etzion. “He was willing to accept anything as possibly interesting.” Suspicious of psychoanalysis (“I always thought it was a lot of mumbo jumbo”), he nevertheless accepted an invitation from the American psychoanalyst David Rapaport to spend a summer at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Each Friday morning the Austen Riggs psychoanalysts—some of the biggest names in the field—would gather to discuss a patient whom they had spent a month observing. All these experts would have by then written up their reports on the patient. After delivering their diagnoses, they would bring in the patient for an interview. One week Danny watched the psychoanalysts discuss a patient, a young woman. The night before they were meant to interview her, she committed suicide. None of the psychoanalysts—world experts who had spent a month studying the woman’s mental state—had worried that she might kill herself. None of their reports so much as hinted at the risk of suicide. “Now they all agreed, how could we have missed it?” Danny recalled. “The signs were all there! It made so much sense to them after the fact. And so little sense before the fact.” Any faint interest Danny might have had in psychoanalysis vanished. “I was aware at the time that this was very instructive,” he said. Not about the troubled patients but about the psychoanalysts—or anyone else who was in a position to revise his forecast about the outcome of some uncertain event once he had knowledge of that outcome.

In 1965, he went to the University of Michigan for postdoctoral study with a psychologist named Gerald Blum. Blum was busy testing how powerful emotional states changed the way people handled various mental tasks. To do this he needed to induce in his subjects powerful emotional states. He did so with hypnosis. He’d first ask people to describe in detail some horrible life experience. He’d then give them a trigger to associate with the event—say, a card that read “A100.” Then he’d hypnotize them, show them the card—and, sure enough, they’d instantly start to relive their horrible experience. Then he’d see how they performed some taxing mental task: say, repeating a string of numbers. “It was weird, and I did not take to it,” said Danny—though he did learn how to hypnotize people. “I ran some sessions with our best subject—a tall, thin guy whose eyes would bulge and his face redden as he was shown the A100 card that instructed him to have the worst emotional experience of his life for a few seconds.” Once again, it wasn’t long before Danny found himself undermining the validity of the entire enterprise. “One day I asked, ‘How about we give them a choice between that and a mild electric shock?’” he recalled. He figured that anyone given a choice between reliving the worst experience of his life and mild electric shock would choose the shock. None of the patients wanted the shock: They all said they’d much rather relive the worst experience of their lives. “Blum was horrified, because he wouldn’t hurt a fly,” said Danny. “And that’s when I realized that it was a stupid game. That it cannot be the worst experience of their lives. Somebody is faking. And so I got out of that field.”

That same year, a psychologist named Eckhard Hess wrote an article in Scientific American that caught Danny’s eye. (What didn’t?) Hess described the results of experiments he’d done measuring the dilation and constriction of the pupil in response to all sorts of stimuli. You showed a man the picture of a scantily dressed woman and his pupils expanded. The same thing happened when you showed a woman a picture of a good-looking man. On the other hand, if you showed people a picture of a shark, their pupils shrank. (Abstract art had the same effect, curiously.) If you gave people something tasty to drink, their pupils dilated; if you gave them something unpleasant (lemon juice or quinine), their pupils shrank. If you gave them tastes of five subtly different orange fizzy drinks, their pupils registered the degree of pleasure they got from each. People reacted incredibly quickly, before they were entirely conscious of which one they liked best. “The essential sensitivity of the pupil response,” wrote Hess, “suggests that it can reveal preferences in some cases in which the actual taste differences are so slight that the subject cannot even articulate them.”