Now how do people learn to be incongruent? Think of a young child who comes home and hands a piece of homework to his parents. The parents look at the homework and the father says (scowling face and shaking head "no," with harsh tonality) "Oh, I'm so glad you brought that home, son!" What does the kid do? Does he lean forward and meta-comment? "Gee, Dad! I hear you say you're glad, but I notice..." Not if you're a kid. One thing that children do is to become hyperactive. One hemisphere is registering the visual input and the tonal input, and the other hemisphere is registering the words and their digital meaning, and they don't fit. They don't fit maximally where the two hemispheres overlap maximally in kinesthetic representation. If you ever watch a hyperactive kid, the trigger for hyperactivity will be incongruity, and it will begin here at the midline of the torso, and then diffuse out to all kinds of other behavior.

Let me ask you to do something now. I want you to raise your right hand…. Did anybody notice any incongruity?

Man: You raised your left hand.

I raised my left hand. So did many people out there! Some of you raised your left hand. Some of you raised your right hand. Some of you didn't notice which hand I lifted. The point is that when you were all children, you had to find a way of coping with incongruity. Typically what people do is to distort their experience so that it is congruent. Is there anyone in here that actually heard me say "Raise your left hand"? Many of you raised your left hand. Some of you raised your left hand and probably thought you raised your right hand. If you didn't notice the incongruity, you somehow deleted the relationship between your own kinesthetic experience and my words, in order to make your experience coherent.

If there are mixed messages arriving, one way to resolve the difficulty is to literally shut one of the dimensions—the verbal input, the tonal input, the body movements, the touch, or the visual input— out of consciousness. And you can predict that the hyperactive child who shuts the right hemisphere out of consciousness—it's still operating, of course, it's just out of awareness—will later be persecuted by visual images: dead babies floating out of hot dogs in the air above the psychiatrist's desk. The ones who cut off the kinesthetics will feel insects crawling all over them, and that will really bug them. And they will tell you that. That is a straight quote from a schizophrenic. The ones that cut off the auditory portion are going to hear voices coming out of the wall plugs, because literally they are giving up consciousness of that whole system and the information that is available to them through that system, as a way of defending themselves in the face of repeated incongruity.

In this country, when we have gone into mental hospitals we have discovered that the majority of the hallucinations are auditory, because people in this culture do not pay much attention to the auditory system. In other cultures, hallucinations will tend to cluster in other representational systems.

Woman: I'd like you to comment some more because I stumbled into some of this out of talking with people about hallucinatory phenomena.

Hallucinatory phenomena in my opinion are the same thing you've been doing here all day. There's no formal difference between hallucinations and the processes you use if I ask you to remember anything that happened this morning, or what happened when I said "Ammonia" and all of you went "uhhhrrrhhh!" As far as I can tell, there are some subtle differences between people who are in mental hospitals and people who are not. One is that they are in a different building. The other is that many of them don't seem to have a strategy to know what constitutes shared reality and what doesn't.

Who has a pet? Can you see your pet sitting here on the chair? (Yes.) OK. Now, can you distinguish between the animal that you have here, and the chair that it is sitting on? Is there anything in your experience that allows you to distinguish between the fact that you put the visual image of the pet there, and the fact that the image of the chair was there before you deliberately put it there? Is there any difference? There may not be.

Woman: Oh, yes, there is.

OK. What is the difference? How do you know that there is a real chair and there's not a real dog?

Woman: I really can see that chair in my reality here and now. But I can only picture the dog in my head, in my mind's eye—

You don't see the dog over here sitting in the chair?

Woman: Well, only in my mind's eye.

What's the difference between the image of the chair in your mind's eye and the image of the dog in your mind's eye? Is there a difference? Woman: Well, one's here and one isn't.

Yes. How do you know that, though?

Woman: Well, I still see the chair even when I look away and look back. But if I stop thinking about the dog in the chair, the dog isn't there anymore.

OK. You can talk to yourself, right? Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you at the unconscious level that is capable of having the dog there when you look back? Would you make those arrangements and find out if you can still tell the difference? Because my guess is there are other ways you know, too.

Woman: The image of the dog isn't as clear.

OK, so that's one way that you make a reality check. Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you that can make it as clear?

Woman: Not while I'm awake.

I know your conscious mind can't do it. I'm not asking that question. Can you talk to yourself? Can you go "Hi, Mary, how are you?" on the inside? (Yes.) OK. Go inside and say "Is there any part of me at the unconscious level which is capable of making that image of the dog as clear as the chair?" And be sensitive to any response you get. It may be verbal, it may be a feeling, it may be something visual. While she's doing that, does anyone else know how they know the difference?