1 82 Information Storage and Neural Control 



and is told to find the correct way to press these buttons. He is 

 told that when he presses them correctly, a bell will ring. The 

 subject proceeds to press buttons, and after he has pressed, say, 

 fifty buttons, the bell rings. The experimenter now asks him if 

 he knows how to do it and if he will do it again. The subject 

 again presses buttons, and after he has pressed about forty-five 

 buttons, the bell rings. He is again asked to repeat the task, and 

 this time after about forty pressings the bell rings. The subject 

 is doing better and better. When the subject has reduced the 

 number of pressings to about twenty, Bavelas stops the experi- 

 ment and tells him that there is no connection between the buttons 

 and the bell, that the bell is only geared probabilistically to a 

 hypothetical learning curve. 



The subject will then look Bavelas firmly in the eye and tell 

 him he is lying. This, of course, is true except that the subject is 

 wrong as to which lie he is attributing to Bavelas. The truth is 

 that Bavelas was lying initially when he told the subject there 

 was a connection between the bell and the buttons, but he is 

 now telling the truth. The subject, however, cannot be convinced 

 of this and will reassert his theory of the interrelation between 

 the buttons, usually quite a complex theory with a lot of paren- 

 thetical cautions in it: "At this part of the sequence you should 

 not go too fast"; "If you go too fast, you can only correct it by 

 going back to the beginning of the sequence," etc. The subject 

 is perfectly certain that what he was doing was related to the 

 theory he built up and that his experience has validated this 

 theory. He has been, after all, well reinforced in this belief by his 

 steadily increasing success. 



There is, I understand from Bavelas, only one way of dis- 

 illusioning the subject in regard to his theories about these buttons. 

 This is by asking him to perform the experiment upon a second sub- 

 ject. As he does this and sees the second subject develop analogous 

 but dissimilar illusions, he realizes the nature of the situation and 

 the process through which he has gone. 



The point I want to make is that these impressions, illusions 

 at the third level, are held very deeply and are exceedingly difficult 

 to disturb; the same must be true of knowledge and wisdom at 

 the third level. I have mentioned that the subject trained in an 



