The under-appreciated power of involuntary muscle movements—a review of Herman Spitz
Herman Spitz’ Nonconscious Movements: From mystical messages to facilitated communication, published a quarter of a century ago, remains as relevant to facilitated communication today as it was back then. It’s relevant even to 21st century forms of FC like Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) and Spelling to Communicate (S2C).
Nonconscious Movements shows us how nonsconscious movements are everywhere. Indeed, such movements are evolutionarily adaptive: think of all the motor complexity involved in walking or climbing or pronouncing speech sounds. Our ability to perform these movements without conscious awareness allows us to focus on other, often more important, thoughts or behavior—e.g., to walk and chew gum while we talk about the coming apocalypse.
But our nonconscious movements have downsides. It turns out that some of them:
can cue others about our thoughts and goals and
are very difficult for us to suppress.
Particularly difficult to suppress are nonconscious movements that reflect our tendency to root for people to succeed in tasks that we’re watching them carry out, especially if these are tasks we ourselves have prompted them to perform. In particular, we tend to tense up as a person approaches success and to relax the moment they’ve achieved it. In tasks that involve locations (e.g., finding an object or symbol), it’s also hard for us to avoid moving our eyes towards the target location.
Both of these factors are evident in FC—specifically in the ways that the facilitator reacts to the person she’s facilitating (the “facilitatee”). As the facilitatee’s extended index finger wanders around the keyboard, the facilitator’s hand and fingers, whether they’re holding the facilitatee’s wrist or forearm or touching his shoulder or back, will automatically, even if she tries to suppress it, do two things. They will (1) tense up as the facilitatee’s extended finger approaches the correct answer and (2) relax once it gets there. And the entire time, even in RPM/S2C—where the facilitator holds up a letterboard and does not necessarily touch the facilitatee—her eyes will tend, willy-nilly, to look in the direction of the correct letter.
As Spitz explains, two factors increase the likelihood of such inadvertent cueing. First, prolonged muscle tension—including that which arises when we hold something up for a while—can reduce our sensitivity to the feedback we get from our muscles. Thus, RPM and S2C facilitators who hold up letterboards during typing, just like classic FC facilitators who hold up wrists or forearms, will have reduced sensitivity to any movements they might make—including movements that, say, result in the target letter moving closer to the facilitatee’s extended figure. Second, intense concentration—of the sort that’s often displayed on the faces of facilitators when they facilitate—distracts us from our nonconscious movements.
Another key point made by Spitz is how the very process of cueing trains, subconsciously, the people who cue. That is, cuers get implicit feedback from those they are cueing, as expressed by the accuracy of their selections or answers, on how effective their cues were. Subconsciously, over time, the cuers refine their cues. Outside of FC, we see this with Clever Hans, the horse whom people inadvertently cued to tap out correct answers to math problems. Generally, with each new questioner, Hans would do better the second time around—i.e., after the questioner had implicitly refined his cueing technique. This implicit learning happens even when cueing isn’t deliberate: people, Spitz points out, learn all sorts of things implicitly, without realizing what or how…—or even that their subconscious minds have learned anything.
Indeed, self-deception is key to the process. Facilitators have no idea they’re giving off cues; neither did von Osten, Clever Hans’ trainer. While aware of the large movements he was making and Hans’ responses to these, von Osten, Spitz notes, was completely unaware of the small movements, that tensing and relaxing, that told Hans when to stop tapping. Also unaware was Pfungst, the psychologist who investigated the Clever Hans phenomenon and who also unwittingly cued Hans. Pfungst was unaware that he himself was giving off cues—or what those cues were—until he observed the same cues in von Osten.
Spitz devotes an entire chapter of Nonconscious Movements to scientific studies even more rigorous than Pfungst’s. These involved instruments designed to measure head, neck, and hand movements, using mechanical tools like ball bearings (to pick up movement directly) and galvanometers and electrodes (to measure the electrical activity of muscles). Tools such as these consistently detected movements of which the subjects who made them were completely unaware.
Reading about these studies, I found myself wishing that an RPM/S2C facilitator would volunteer to have their nonconscious movements measured while facilitating. FC proponents say they resist testing because it’s psychologically harmful to the faciltatees. But what about testing that focuses exclusively on the facilitators?
One of Spitz’ recurring themes are the various rationalizations that help sustain belief in FC or related phenomena. First, there are the rationalizations against message-passing tests (tests in which the facilitatee is asked questions to which the facilitator doesn’t know the answer). Spitz cites Douglas Biklen, founder of the Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse University, on his now-familiar notion of presuming competence. Per Biklen, message-passing testing would convey to the facilitatee that his or her competence was in question. Less familiar is Biklen’s second claim: “If blindfolded, the facilitator would actually misdirect and throw off the communication user’s intended direction” (Biklen, 1993). This sounds like an unwitting admission that facilitators direct messages.
Then there’s the notion that some facilitatees have become independent of their facilitators. Biklen makes this claim despite admitting in his 1993 book that “for none of the students” facilitated during the past 1 ½ years at Syracuse “has physical support yet been faded completely.” (In his 2005 follow-up book Biklen also cites as independent typers those who continue to require a parent or other communication partner to sit next to them within cueing range while they type.)
Third, there’s the dismissal of problematic data—e.g., wrong answers by the individual being (unwittingly) cued. Spitz’s examples of this center mostly on Clever Hans; where FC is concerned, the most systematic dismissals of wrong answers post-date Nonconscious Movements. In the newer, held-up letterboard variants of FC, namely RPM and S2C, what’s typed is neither electronically stored nor displayed on a screen. Instead, it’s up to the facilitator to detect and record each letter selection, and in videos of RPM and S2C sessions we find facilitators routinely ignoring facilitatees’ incorrect letter selections (as well as recording letters that clearly weren’t selected).
Fourthly, and most remarkably, there’s the invocation of magic, specifically telepathy. Telepathy, Spitz notes, was invoked to account for the behavior of another clever horse, Lady Wonder, as well as for instances in which facilitatees typed out messages that everyone agreed seemed to be originating with their facilitators. Purportedly, the facilitatees weren’t responding to cues from their facilitators, but instead were reading their minds.
Rivaling the impossibility of mind reading is the near-impossibility of mind changing. Spitz gives numerous examples of the difficulty involved. He cites, for example, an experiment in which more than 60% of college students, despite being explicitly informed that a certain performer was a magician doing tricks, concluded that the performer was actually psychic. As Spitz puts it in connection with scientific demonstrations of physical explanations for table-turning and the Chevreul pendulum illusion, “Objective proof that challenges the validity of a belief system rarely persuades committed believers to relinquish their beliefs” (p. 67, italics his).
Even when people recognize the truth, Spitz notes, they “simultaneously accept the fable simply because the fable is so much more satisfying, like a drug” (p. 172). Here Spitz cites parents who “want to believe that their children are finally speaking to them through facilitated communication.” The tendency to hold onto such beliefs even while recognizing the truth explains, in part, the uniform unwillingness by today’s FC communities to engage in rigorous message-passing tests. Deep down, Spitz would predict, even those most committed to FC know how these tests would turn out.
There is, of course, some individual variation, some of it governed by external factors. Spitz proposes that minds are least likely to change if 1 and 2 are true:
1. The belief is held with deep conviction and influences the believer’s behavior.
2. In general, the more important the actions taken for the belief, the greater the believer’s commitment.
And most likely to change if 3 and 4 are true:
3. The commitment must be amenable to unequivocal disconfirmation.
4. The undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must be recognized by the believer.
(p. 165).
Among parents who’ve spent any significant time under FC’s spell, Conditions 1 and 2 are clearly in force. The impression that their children are finally expressing themselves in full, intelligent sentences is extremely compelling and has a pervasive effect on parental behavior, including major decisions like aborting traditional language therapies and basic education (because their children have purportedly mastered language and advanced academic skills). And while Condition 3 also holds—message-passing tests would provide unequivocal disconfirmation—only rarely, within the FC community, is there someone for whom Condition 4 holds. Our Janyce Boynton is one of them. And it’s nice to see Spitz quoting extensively from Janyce’s 1994 piece, “Personal thoughts from someone who’s been there—Experiences with facilitated communication”.
Spitz also cites Janyce in connection with attempts to form support groups, e.g. , for former facilitators, noting that “loss of support from one group is alleviated by the substitution of another.” Unfortunately, we continue to desperately need support groups, not just for disillusioned facilitators, but for disillusioned parents, as alternatives to pro-FC family and facilitator groups like this one, which is practically in my backyard. The few people I know of whom I suspect no longer believe in FC/RPM/S2C are, as far as I can tell, mostly keeping it quietly to themselves. For them, giving up on FC means giving up not only on fantasy versions of their children, but also on entire social networks. For those who’ve gone public about how miraculous the FC methods were, posting testimonials and/or videos of their children typing, it also means retracting a whole bunch of (unwittingly) faulty claims, misleading anecdotes, and deceptive videos. All this, for most people, amounts to an impossibly tall order.
But it’s not just desperate parents and well-intentioned facilitators who have fallen for FC and similar phenomena. Those duped include people who you’d think would know better: Spitz cites New York Times journalists, psychologists, and other scientists. Their numbers have grown considerably since 1997, as we noted in an earlier post, but even 40 years ago the phenomenon was quite evident. As Spitz notes, quoting science writer Martin Gardner:
In fact psychologists (and other scientists) have no special talent for detecting duplicity and would do well to take a professional magician with them when they explore the source of extraordinary demonstrations. “Most people assume that if a man has a brilliant mind he is qualified to detect fraud. That is untrue. Unless he has been trained in the underground of magic, and knows its peculiar principles, he is easier to deceive than a child” (Gardner, 1981, p. 92). We should now add that misperception and missed perceptions can occur even when there is no intentional fraud, because few people have a thorough understanding of the power of involuntary muscle movements. (pp. 42-43).
Few people have a thorough understanding of the power of involuntary muscle movements—that remains as true today as it was back in 1997 when Nonconscious Movements was published. Many more people need to read this book.
REFERENCES:
Biklen, D. (1993). Communication Unbound: How facilitated communication is challenging traditional views of autism and ability/disability. New York: Teachers College Press.
Biklen, D. (2005). Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone. New York: NYU Press.
Boynton, J. L. (1994). Personal thoughts from someone who’s been there—Experiences with facilitated communication. The IARET Newsletter, 2-4.
Gardner, M. (1981). Science: Good, bad, and bogus. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.
Spitz, H. (1997). Nonconscious Movements: From mystical messages to Facilitated Communication. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
