The Machine in the Ghost: Psychological Mechanisms of Conscious Intention

The sense that we consciously cause our own voluntary actions is something that varies in everyday life. A "feeling of doing" can indeed be lost entirely under certain conditions--in hypnosis, channeling, glossolalia, spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and in motor automatisms such as Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, dowsing, table turning, and the like. Recent experimental studies of the loss of such perceived voluntariness in the case of "facilitated communication" indicate, too, that the sense of our own causal agency is not a necessary part of voluntary action. The belief that we cause what we do may occur as a result of an illusion of conscious agency.