Horizon: Out of Control?, BBC Two

You know that kind of smoothly seductive but nonetheless ominous-sounding voice-over that loads of science programmes seem to love? You know, the kind that’s often used to lull us into thinking that what we’re about to hear is going to present us with some really seismic shift in our perceptions? Well, that’s what gets me about some science programmes. That, and the sense that the more dramatic the voice-over the less dramatic the content. That, and the graphics.

In this week’s Horizon we had both the ominous voice-over and the useless graphic. A stick figure popped up early on, a fuzzy blue interloper who bobbed up and down in the middle of a docile-looking crowd of humans, wearing big glasses and a sinister grin. You wanted to squish him with your thumb but we knew why he was there: he was meant to represent the devious and unruly unconscious mind, about which the programme set out to explore.

Some drew a line representing a tiny, tiny percentage of the conscious mind in a vast sea of unknowableness

But then the voice-over told us that, no, the unconscious mind isn't that unruly, primal thing at all – not just the thing of dreams and primal urges and Freudian desires and slippages (in fact, Freud didn’t get a look-in, which may have struck you, at least in passing, as a bit remiss, since Freud had invented the concept), but that, in fact,  it’s “one of the most sophisticated things”. In which case, we might have expected not a sinister-looking stick figure in shades with a passing resemblance to Bono, but an urbane sort in a dapper three-piece suit sitting in a darkened corner of the mind-room and sipping a martini. But that’s science programmes for you. They say one thing and then they try to illustrate it with some completely irrelevant and misleading graphic.

Better graphics, in my opinion, were produced by some reluctant scientists on request. What they produced was rudimentary. Presented with a blank sheet of A2, they were asked to represent a percentage of the conscious mind. One drew an itsy-bitsy cube in the middle of the blank sheet, whilst some drew a line representing a tiny, tiny percentage of the conscious mind in a vast sea of unknowableness. What they produced was guesswork, albeit educated guesswork based on some empirical evidence, but needless to say we’re all walking around completely unconscious of most of our actions most of the time (who knew?) The blank white space of our unconscious mind rules. And off we went to witness a number of experiments to undermine our hard-wired notions of free will.

We saw a bunch of fit twenty-somethings chasing a toy helicopter to demonstrate how we all harbour false assumptions about our behaviour, each of us imagining how we’re employing unique and clever strategies to get what we want, when really we're simply following a genetically predetermined path. And then we saw a colony of ants employing “crowd-think” to produce the best possible outcome for locating a new nest, and an neat analogy was drawn. The best bit was seeing an ant anesthetised so that it could have a radio microchip glued to its back – nifty work, but presumably you’d have to kill it to get the thing off again (or maybe the glue wasn't that sticky and the microchip was designed to just fall off at some point within the lifespan of the ant - to be honest, this question proved a bit of a point of distraction).  

Our sense of risk in most areas of life is usually way off beamThere was more seemingly prosaic stuff, too, like how much we take in when coloured objects are flashed before our eyes for about a millisecond (not very much), and why we seem to underestimate risk in everyday life (like getting cancer, or dementia by the time we reach a certain age). But the programme didn’t explore just why we seem to vastly overestimate risk in areas which are far less risky – like being, for instance, in a plane crash. This didn't seem to fit into the Optimism hypothesis promoted by the programme. In fact, our sense of risk in most areas of life is usually way off beam. We seem to both imagine our invincibility and harbour real terrors of impending extinction at any given moment. Living in this perpetual state of conflict we assume that nothing bad will happen to us while everything bad will happen to us. We're odd like that. I wonder if ants have these feelings as well.