Cognitive Dissonance

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The Thing is non-corporeal, in the sense of not being a virus, or a discrete organism that hides inside its victims [5]. An imitated victim contains no bodily trace of the attack whatsoever, down to any level imaginable, including genetic, atomic, electromagnetic, etc.. The evidence for its existence simply will not be there. Given this assertion, the question arises, if it’s not bodily, and the victim’s mind is really the victim’s mind, then how does an imitated person differ from a non-imitated person? For if there is no difference, what governs a person transforming into a monster, as to attack, or defend? It really does seem an insoluble paradox, doesn’t it?

The place to start looking, is at the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. This is when a person encounters a terrible fact, which conflicts with his belief system, and results in such an awful emotional reaction, that he suppresses the potential for realizing the significance of that knowledge, by shutting down part of his mind, or else goes insane. Now, for a person attacked by the Thing, this dissonant "break point" is generated by the inconsistency between the physical occurrence of the attack, and the resulting amnesia induced as a side-effect of the attack.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t pose much of a problem for the Thing’s mimicry. People forget things that happened to them all the time. The difference lies in the characteristic curvature of the situation itself. For any given attack, is part of a chain of previous attacks stretching back to some as yet undetermined original. These attacks change the physical states and processes that surrounded them. These changes are qualitatively identical, in terms of the acting principle, as the changes surrounding the present attack. The danger for the Thing lies, therefore, in the assimilated victim suddenly experiencing a cognitive leap of awareness, and realizing that he is the Thing.

Should such a realization take place, the Thing would have to induce in him, again, what amounts to selective brain damage. This brain damage is something that only an ultra-sophisticated before-and-after brain scan could reveal. But, the more, and more radical, such surgeries take place, the greater the chance of re-cognition, and over a shorter interval, forcing yet more surgery, which raises more questions, and so on, in an ascending logarithmic curve. Soon, the person would be unable to maintain the disguise well enough to avoid suspicion, and the game would be up.

To avoid this, the Thing follows the scientific principle of Least Action, by naturally minimizing cognitive dissonance in its victims. It does this, by attacking them (1) when they are sensually incapacitated, as in the dark, and (2) when they are mentally incoherent, as while asleep. This maximizes the attack’s resemblance to a nightmare or hallucination, and so minimizes the space which the amnesia of the absence of the memory of the attack, occupies in the mind.

To greater or lesser degrees, then, this would create a subconscious "shadow" in the mind. It is this which Charles Hallahan, in his interview for the DVD release, recognized as necessarily existing, when he spoke of how Norris "subconscious knew he was the Thing." The true revelation, is that it is this shadow, this singularity [6], which is the Thing. In other words, the Thing is literally this non-material "thing" occupying a hole in one’s mind (among other places). Norris being in the paranoid circumstance he was, would have unformed suspicions regarding the surrounding evidences, and these suspicions would resonate with that shadow in his subconscious, and so make him uneasy. This unease, contributed to his developing angina (which he would have rationalized it as), and to that extent, indeed cause him to forsake the offer of command.

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