Dear Dr Ash,

I have a teenage son who is just starting to show a very active interest in the opposite sex. In the wake of #MeToo and the recent allegations against Russell Brand, I am very conscious of trying to raise him to be respectful in his relations with women. I am really trying to impress upon him how important it is to always be sure that you have full consent before you pursue any kind of physical intimacy – even a kiss. But I can’t help being aware that when I was a teenage girl my desires were often quite muddled. I wasn’t always sure what I wanted and sometimes only ended up knowing because a boy was quite persistent; then I either did or didn’t enjoy kissing them. And actually that was probably true throughout my dating days. How on earth do we parents get our boys to be super considerate of people’s personal boundaries, without terrifying them that every move they make will be misinterpreted?

Anxious Mother,
Ledbury

You’ve stumbled into this gap between intention and action

Dear Anxious,

I realise that not everyone, when they imagine awkward fumblings in the dark, will immediately think of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but I do. Wittgenstein was unquestionably a genius, a contemporary of Bertrand Russell’s at Cambridge and perhaps the most renowned analytical philosopher of the early twentieth century. He was famously narcissistic, impatient and caustic, and not by any means widely described as “sexy”. But he did pose one of the most insightful questions about bodily awareness and responsibility I have ever encountered when he asked, “What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?”

Now, I am not suggesting that this is the most obvious or accessible way to start a conversation about consent, but it’s worth taking a moment to unpack what Wittgenstein meant. In the common-sense view, what happens when I move my body is that I intend to lift my arm and then I do it. There is a mental process that represents my intention and that results in an action. But Wittgenstein argued that most of the time when we move our bodies, we have no specific intention to do so. We may want to catch a ball or pull a book down off a shelf and our arm moves to do that, but our decision is about the ball and the book, not about the arm itself. Evidence from decades of subsequent neuroscience takes the argument even further: often the brain processes that represent intention seem to occur after an action is taken. Our body moves and our brain finds out about it an instant later. So to answer Wittgenstein’s question, what’s left when we subtract movement from the intention to move is what neuroscientists call the feeling of agency – the subjective illusion of free will.

Although Wittgenstein’s argument seems bizarre on its surface, it actually lines up well with familiar experiences. When I’m hungry I can find myself opening the refrigerator door, even though I was only vaguely aware that I was drifting downstairs towards the kitchen. When I was commuting regularly, I would sometimes find myself absent-mindedly driving to the hospital where I worked instead of to the grocery store where my wife had asked me to shop. The vast majority of what we perceive as voluntary actions are probably just habits and patterns; true volition and free will are relatively rare events in our mental lives.

While wrestling with how to teach your son to elicit consent, I wonder if you’ve stumbled into this gap between intention and action. You are aware, as a former teenage fumbler yourself, that a lot of what happens in an intimate encounter can only approximately be described as “on purpose”. This is just the nature of mental life, and it seems as if it would make consent impossible. However, consent doesn’t have to be something that only happens in the moment. Conversations about sex and sexuality can happen over time, and can develop when the people involved are comfortable developing them. Rather than teaching your son to only ask for consent during a romantic encounter, perhaps you could encourage him to talk openly about his feelings and desires with potential partners in advance, maybe even in a flirtatious way. At his age, the conversation may just be about how nice it might be to kiss at some point. When he’s older, the conversation might be more specific: what turns him on, what turns his partner on, and what they might enjoy together. Open conversations like this, well in advance of a romantic encounter, will set up patterns of communication that will enable him to have a healthy, fulfilling sex life when he’s older. If he can start in a small way now to express his desires and to listen to the desires of his potential partners, when the moment of first fumbling finally arrives, affirmative consent will be more like foreplay than a contract negotiation.

Best wishes,
Dr Ash

Dear Dr Ash,

I have a very good friend from school days who’s supposed to be my best mate. He was best man at my wedding, is godparent to my daughter and has been a constant presence in my life for decades. Yet, I often ask myself why I have placed so much trust in him when he is so unreliable. He is always late for our meet-ups – and that’s when he doesn’t cancel having clearly received a better offer. He forgets his goddaughter’s birthdays (though admittedly always gives some cash to her when they meet face to face) and he once managed to duck out of a drinks party I had thrown in his honour. Yes, he is very charming and will drop things when I’m having a crisis to get to my side. But this day-to-day carelessness is making me wonder if I should drop him altogether.

Fed Up,
Braintree

His internal clock’s different to yours because your brains are different

Dear Fed Up,

I read your letter early this morning, sitting with a cup of coffee at my breakfast table. On bright, sunny mornings I’ve sat here feeling like things are clicking along in a crisp, excited way but today, with the sun limply shadowed through a thick skein of grey cloud, things seemed slower. Time, to paraphrase the argument made by William James in his 1890 classic Principles of Psychology, is far more like an emotion than a measurement. Today that emotion is thick, almost lugubrious.

Substantially influenced by James, neuroscientists have spent the better part of the last century probing into the biological mechanisms of time perception. Ground-breaking work in the 1960s and 1970s uncovered a number of important “clocks” in the brain, rhythm generators in deep regions like the basal ganglia which enable us to walk, speak and coordinate our actions. More recent work has shown that, in addition to their role in movement, these rhythm generators are involved in the subjective perception of time, in somewhat paradoxical ways. Since the basal ganglia depend on dopamine to function, this means that in high dopamine states – when we are excited, when we encounter novelty – our perceptions of time speed up. On the other hand, in low dopamine states – on grey mornings, when we feel sleepy, or more extremely, with Parkinson’s disease – time seems to lumber forward with agonising difficulty. The effect of dopamine on the basal ganglia links emotional states with subjective time perception very much in the way predicted by James in the late nineteenth century.

These biological mechanisms help explain why time perception is so different to clock time, and may help to unravel some of the conflicts you are having with your friend. When he is late or when he over-schedules himself, it feels like he isn’t valuing time in the same way as you – and that’s because he’s not. The relationship between his internal clock and his emotional states will certainly be different to yours because your brains are different. You may feel very stressed when you are late, he may not. He may feel very stressed when he has to be somewhere on time, you may not. Layered on top of that are your differing social expectations around punctuality and predictability, the balance between your desires to live in the present moment or to uphold longer-standing commitments. You can be certain that things which seem one way to you probably don’t seem that way to him, even with things as seemingly objective as time.

Ultimately, though, there is very little in life more valuable than an old friend. Someone whom you absolutely know will be there for you in a crisis, who has been there for many years already, is probably someone worth putting up with. It sounds like your friend is a bit reckless, maybe even disrespectful. You should certainly tell him how you feel – your friendship can certainly take it – but throwing the friendship away would be careless on your part. It has, after all, stood the test of time.

Best wishes,
Dr Ash