Are we in control? And if so where is God in this picture?
A distorted awareness of our capacities and capabilities is often a sign of serious mental illness. Take this teen, lets us call him ‘Mo’, an Iraqi teen who killed his father in Calgary, Alberta and dispose his body in the City of Okotoks.
Mo said in the court that God told him to kill him, later blamed the devil and the voice who talked to him. His father divorce his mom and the mother went back to Iraq with her daughters, while MO stayed with his father in Calgary.
Many like him in the grips of a delusional episode developed the bizarre belief that God is talking to them (psychosis, schizophrenia) and that they can fly or walk on water. Some do jumps from high places and plunged to their death, some was saved by others and some hesitate to do it. Some do that for extreme need of attention, and recognition.
Mo story is very unnerving because we take for granted that our insight into our actions and their consequences is accurate. This intuition is deeply embedded in many of our formal institutions.
When a jury finds a defendant guilty of a crime or a tribunal disciplines a doctor for malpractice, we tacitly assume that the blameworthy party had a good awareness of their actions and the outcomes that ensued.
We always assume things because there are many fake and false stories and many good actors who get away with crime because they have a good lawyer who can make you believe that his client is suffering from delusions caused by stress, depression and mental illness.
The same thought seems to guide our personal and social relationships. When we praise someone for a thoughtful gift or admonish them for a hurtful comment, we do so because we believe those who are close to our family and friends are well aware of how their actions can affect us – and perhaps that they should have known better.
However, evidence from the cognitive sciences suggests our subjective awareness of what we can and cannot control is not always reliable.
A Psychologist named Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson using a fiendishly simple piece of equipment, a button wired up to a light bulb. Alloy and Abramson asked student volunteers at the University of Pennsylvania to play around with the button, and to judge how much their press influenced the flashing bulb.
Unbeknown to the students, sometimes the button was disconnected from the bulb, and all the flashes were programmed to occur at random. Surprisingly, perfectly healthy volunteers still reported feeling that they could influence when the flashes would occur, even when those flashes were completely uncontrollable.
Psychologists have termed these kinds of experiences ‘illusions of control’ – where we feel a sense of agency over events in the world that we can’t truly influence. And examples of these illusions crop up in our everyday lives, if you know where to look.
For instance, in the 1960s the sociologist James Henslin observed American cab drivers as they gambled away their profits on curbside games of craps. Henslin spotted that when one of the cabbies needed a higher number on the dice, he’d superstitiously throw them harder against the curb ,even though this can’t possibly affect the outcome.
Those of us who live in cities might often experience illusions of control, since many of the mechanical buttons we interact with , from pedestrian crossings, elevators or office thermostats ,have become obsolete, with the underlying systems controlled by centralized computers and automatic timers. Nonetheless, every day, thousands of us push the ‘placebo buttons’, not realizing that they do nothing at all.
I usually circle my finger 3 times before I reach a red light so it can turn to green and many times it does! Wow I said, I know I am not in control.
I started to study myself as it works in many times, then I noticed that I make myself slow down or speed a bit to reach at the exact time when the red will turn to green, or yellow then green. And then I noticed its only 40 % of the time I was wrong .It is coincidence but I use to say may be it was the prayers that I was saying when I turn my fingers 3 times, and laugh about it.
I used to play a game with my friends when we used to be in college and they all come to my apartment to study together in winter time .One night it was raining very heavy with loud thunder and bright lightning.
I used to count the seconds between the light and the sound , the light faster than sound so we see it before we hear the thunder and I know that it comes every 7 seconds or 8 second it depends on the cloud height , so I used to say with loud voice NOW , pointing my fingers to the window and the sound of the thunder comes exactly at the time when I say the word and I repeated this many times and I was right on so my friends started to call me the thunder man, lol later I told them how I did the trick. But for some people without knowing they think they have control of some events.
Illusions of control have led scientists to claim that human beings have a fundamentally grandiose picture of how much they can influence the world around them. Some perspectives see the problem through an evolutionary lens, and suggest that exaggerated beliefs about our actions, while false, could be a useful product of natural selection. Thinkers in this camp reason that creatures with overly optimistic beliefs about their chances of success will seize more of the opportunities that the environment offers up.
On this reading, we descend from those plucky primates who were overconfident about their ability to snatch food from a rival or seduce an attractive mate, and were thus more likely to survive, multiply and pass on this disposition to us.
These evolutionary ideas are complemented by perspectives from social psychology that suggest an exaggerated sense of control is a key ingredient to healthy self-esteem.
One striking demonstration of this comes from studies of people with depression – who do not experience illusions of control in the same way. This observation led Alloy and Abramson to suggest that depression gives us a ‘sadder but wiser’ view of our capabilities.
On this view, the feelings of powerlessness associated with the illness arise because the scales have fallen from the patient’s eyes, and they see how little they can shape the world around them. To be healthy is to be deluded.
Maybe when people are hallucinate control over some event in the world; they could be noticing something that everyone else is missing.
This idea was partly inspired by a longstanding puzzle in studies of human perception: why do we often see or hear things that aren’t really there? For more than a century, a branch of experimental psychology called ‘psychophysics’ has investigated the limits of human perception using tightly controlled laboratory tasks.
For example, a volunteer in a typical psychophysical experiment might be placed in a dark, soundproof room and asked to find degraded black-and-white patterns embedded in ‘visual noise’ , similar to the television static you see when the signal fails. Such studies reveal that observers often raise a ‘false alarm’, seeing patterns even when the experimenter hasn’t embedded one in the noisy display.
For a long time, it was thought that these ‘false alarms’ were strategic guesses: observers know that sometimes there’ll be a pattern in the noise and, if they have a lapse of attention, they might guess and hope they’re correct. However, a study led by the cognitive neuroscientist Valentin Wyart in 2012 suggested that observers really do detect patterns in the random noise.
In particular, this study revealed that false alarms were more likely to occur when (just by luck) the noise spuriously looked like the pattern they were looking for. These hallucinations were also exaggerated when observers strongly expected the pattern to be there.
I remembered when I went to apply for aviation school overseas they subjected me to so many tests, one of the tests was the low and high frequency beeps that we can hear in 10, 20 or 30 thousand feet in the sky.
I could hear the first 11 sounds and I clicked a button on the table that I can hear that, but after the 13 sound I couldn’t hear the beeps even I was in a soundproof room, and I started pushing the buttons indicating that I can hear those sounds .
To my surprise I passed and they controller told me that no one ever reached to this number 20. He didn’t know that in the first 13 bleeps I was counting the seconds between each test signal using my fingers and after that I was able to predict when to push the button.
I didn’t make it to be a pilot even though I passed all the test ,but they told me because I don’t know how to swim !!! What I said, who cares, I am not applying to be in the navy or marine I told them.
They just don’t care because I wasn’t part of the elite party; I was nobody from nowhere trying to compete with well connected people. That was in Baghdad, Iraq back in 1973.
These findings put pressure on the idea that humans have hardwired delusions about their actions, ignoring the evidence in front of their eyes and instead relying on exaggerated beliefs about the kinds of things they can influence.
They suggest illusions of control could arise because we are very sensitive to how the world changes when we act, and can sometimes spot spurious relationships between our behaviour and changes in the environment.
While the beliefs are false (we don’t actually control things), the inference might still be a rational one in an uncertain and changeable world. In other hand I am not talking about the butterfly effect when a small action like an act of kindness can bring a larger reaction of bigger action of kindness like domino effect.
This could also give us cause to think differently about the links between feelings of control and mental health. Illusions of control are a counterintuitive sign that we are sensitive to the relationship between actions and outcomes.
The same disposition that sometimes make us hallucinate , control and equips us to spot weak but genuine correlations between what we do and what we see. If this is true, the absence of illusions of control in illnesses such as depression would mean that these patients don’t necessarily have a ‘sadder but wiser’ view of their capabilities. Indeed, real insight might know that our control over our environments is almost never.
Only if it is a miracle that God sent to his prophets and those who experienced these miracles part of God control everything and that he allowed some of his creations to control and heal illness, make natural disasters, raise the dead, open the sea, bring a food table from heaven, and walk on water etc. To show that God is control and only with his permission those human who were granted these power can act and show the masses that these miracles are from God.
In Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, the supplicant asks for the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It has been tempting for scientists to think that illusions of control mean the human mind is rich on courage and lean on wisdom. But this might be premature, and new tools will allow scientists to reveal how our beliefs about our abilities are calibrated to the world around us, and whether the illusion of control is an illusion after all. But most scientists do not want to hear about God, or those people who selected to carry his message and show his miracles, or those regular human who are living among us with sensitive abilities to detect and see ghosts and to use the power of the prayers to control them and remove them. to the scientists these are all placebo effects.
To me I do believe that we reach some control when we are toned to God in faith, more faith we put in him more he can positively control and change us, improve us as we can be inspired by the holy spirit to walk in faith, talk in faith, act in faith and live in faith, as God is in total control and he gave us a choice, if we choose the wrong road we only have ourselves to blame , an if we walk in the right path it is only because of God blessing , mercy and grace who inspired us to do so.
Steve Ramsey, PhD-Public Health, PgD- Natural Health
Paranormal expert, investigator and researcher.