What This Cool Illusion Can Tell You About Yourself

Have you got a wire coat hanger? If so, get ready to have your mind blown. Take the hanger and place it over your head like this:

Be sure that the hanger is not too loose, and that it is only touching your head in two places: above your left eye, and at the back of your head on the right side.

If you did it correctly, the result is immediate. Did you feel it? (96% of people do, so if you didn’t, grab a couple of friends and try it on them. Don’t try it on your dog, though; I can confirm that it’s somewhat dangerous and plenty confusing for your furry friend.)

Pretty weird, huh? It also works with the hanger in the opposite position (over your right eye and at the back of your head on the left side). Try it as many times as you need to, until you’re convinced that it works.

It’s called the “hanger reflex,” and what happens (in case you’re one of the 4% who don’t have this reflex) is that your head spontaneously turns in the direction of whichever side of your forehead is under pressure from the hanger. The “illusion” is that you’re not turning your own head, but that it’s being turned by some mysterious force outside yourself. The reality:

There’s no mysterious external force. You’re doing it yourself. You.

Clearly, the hanger is the catalyst, but it’s just sitting there; we can agree, can’t we, that it’s not pushing your head in one direction or the other? Scientists are just beginning to study this reflex and why it happens, but for now, it’s definitely a cool party trick. More importantly, it’s a great metaphor for the way your brain works a lot of the time: There’s much more going on under the surface than you can possibly be aware of, and those “under the surface” things can absolutely affect your behavior, sometimes in bizarre (or at least unexpected) ways.

When we do things that surprise us, in a positive or negative way, we are often oblivious to the forces that are pushing those behavioral buttons. In interviews with people who’ve rushed into dangerous situations to save a stranger’s life, when asked why they did it, they usually say something like, “I didn’t think; I just did it.” But surely we don’t believe that there isn’t some deeper set of values or impulses at work; otherwise, everyone would jump in front of the speeding train or race into the burning building to rescue someone they’ve never met. But the fact is that, when push comes to shove, some people act, while others stay safely on the sidelines. And the reasons are all inside of us.

On the more practical side, when we put off doing what we know needs to be done (the difficult phone call, the breakup, the career change), it isn’t always for the reasons we recognize on the surface (now isn’t a good time, things aren’t that bad, let’s see if I get that raise this year). Sometimes — I’d go as far as to say most of the time — that reluctance comes from something deeper, something unseen, unless we look with the skilled eye that a scientist would use. Is there self-doubt tightening its hold on us, keeping us bound to what we know, instead of letting us branch out to the scarier (and perhaps ultimately more rewarding) realms of things we’ve never done? Is there guilt about being seen as a quitter? Is that guilt really deserved, and is it possible that we need to reframe our “quitter” persona as an “adventurer” or an “intelligent decision maker”?

Sometimes we need the help of a professional to look deeply into those hidden motivations and the emotional bullies within us that accompany them. Sometimes we can do it ourselves, if we’re really earnest about it, and not too afraid of what we might see. Another option could be a close friend or family member, to whom we can say, “I’ve been meaning to do X for so long now. You know me pretty well; why do you think I haven’t done it?”

If you did the hanger trick, you know that the sensation of having a wire hanger around your head and feeling like you aren’t in control of said head aren’t very pleasant, so you would probably not choose to walk around with that hanger on your involuntarily sideways-turned head all the time. It’s nice to realize that you can disable the thing that was controlling your behavior, isn’t it?

It’s the same with those impulses that hold you back from going out and getting what you want from life. They may not be as obvious as a wire hanger on your head, but once you see that they’re the source of the problem, you do have the option to remove them.