The Winter Bed
Ideo-Motor Action and the Mechanics of Getting Up in the Cold
Frost coats the inside of a New England bedroom windowpane on a January morning while the iron stove downstairs sits cold and unlit. Tucked beneath heavy wool blankets, a sleeper knows that the clock has struck seven and that he ought to throw back the covers and dress. Yet for ten, twenty, or thirty minutes, he remains stretched beneath the quilt. The resolution to rise repeats inside his head without moving a single limb. How do we ever end up getting out of bed when the bedroom air is freezing?
In the twenty-sixth chapter of The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James used that familiar domestic predicament to dismantle the orthodox psychology of the human will. Earlier theorists had assumed that a thought or mental image is motorically inert on its own. In their view, between the idea of a movement and the contraction of the muscle there must always intervene a separate mental command—a conscious fiat of the will—that pulls the neural trigger.
Building on the clinical physiology of Hermann Lotze and Wilhelm Griesinger, James demonstrated that for ninety percent of waking human behavior, no separate volitional fiat exists. Because the nervous system is organized as a continuous sensorimotor arc, every mental representation of a movement awakens the motor cortex neurons that execute that movement to their maximum degree. Discharge occurs automatically provided no competing idea simultaneously blocks the pathway. James named this rule ideo-motor action: wherever movement follows unhesitatingly and immediately the notion of it in the mind, we have ideo-motor action. Sitting at a dinner table talking with a friend, we pinch nuts and raisins from a dish without ever issuing a distinct volitional decree. The fleeting visual perception of the nut passes straight into the motor grasp because no antagonistic thought opposes it.
Why, then, does the sleeper remain paralyzed under the warm blankets on a winter morning? Consciousness is simultaneously occupied by two antagonistic neural representations that cancel each other out in a tug-of-war of reciprocal inhibition:
- * The Impulsive Motor Idea: The memory of the day's duties and the visual image of standing dressed beside the bed excite the premotor pathways for rising.
- * The Inhibitory Antagonist: The acute kinesthetic sensation of the warm blankets and the vivid anticipatory image of bare feet touching the freezing floorboards simultaneously fire competing inhibitory circuits that block the motor discharge.
- * The Moment of Unopposed Release: Describing his own mornings in Cambridge, James noted that we suddenly find ourselves standing on the floor after a fortunate lapse of attention: we momentarily forget both the warmth of the quilt and the chill of the room, drift into a reverie about the day's duties, and entertaining the unopposed thought that we can lie there no longer, our limbs execute the movement automatically before any paralyzing counter-suggestion can intervene.
- Attention as the Sole Seat of Effort: When two competing ideas remain deadlocked—as in the clinical pathology of abulia* (paralysis of the will) or when a person fights an addictive impulse—the entire work of voluntary will consists in the effort of attention: holding the fainter, harder representation steadily at the center of consciousness until it fills the mind and discharges the muscles by ordinary ideo-motor law.
In 1983, Benjamin Libet's readiness-potential electroencephalography experiments at the University of California, San Francisco, confirmed James's 1890 model. Premotor cortical activation begins hundreds of milliseconds before a subject reports a conscious decision to move, leaving conscious attention the exact veto role James had assigned it.