Posted on 04/17/2008 12:12:15 AM PDT by neverdem
Coffee or tea with lunch? Which pants to wear to work? Which movie to watch? Your mind might be made up before you know it. Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice.
In the 1980s, psychologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco, caught people's brains jumping the gun on consciousness. A few hundred milliseconds before a person thought he or she decided to press a button, brain areas related to movement were already active. The result was hard for some to stomach because it suggested that the unconscious brain calls the shots, making free will an illusory afterthought. But there was room for doubt. The time lag was so short that it might have been an error, and the brain activity might have reflected preparation for a decision rather than the decision itself. "It's possibly the most debated single paper in the whole of neuroscience," says brain scientist John-Dylan Haynes of the Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Germany.
To settle some of the doubts, Haynes led a team of researchers in a modern redux of the experiment. They asked 14 subjects to lie in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which allowed the researchers to track more brain regions for longer than Libet had. They instructed the subjects to decide spontaneously whether to press a button on the right or one on the left. The volunteers could decide at their own pace, but they had to report the moment of the conscious choice based on a clocklike device in the scanner.
The researchers scoured the brain for changes that correlated with the final decision. The earliest brain pattern that coded for a left or right choice was in the frontopolar cortex, right behind the forehead. The pattern predicted a left or right decision with about 60% accuracy and occurred about 10 seconds before the conscious choice, the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience. "We weren't expecting this kind of lead time," Haynes says. Even though the predictions weren't perfect, "there's not very much space for operation of free will," Haynes says. "The outcome of a decision is shaped very strongly by brain activity much earlier than the point in time when you feel to be making a decision." Haynes says the group hopes to extend the work to more realistic choices such as what to drink or what game to watch.
Dick Passingham, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Oxford in the U.K., says the paper clears up one of the major concerns about the original Libet experiment. "This activity that occurs earlier is ... not just general preparation, it really is a proper decision," he says.
Neurologist Mark Hallett of the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, says the study confirms his understanding of free will as a perception rather than a driving force. But he hopes the work may lead to practical applications for patients with schizophrenia or certain movement disorders who feel that their voluntary actions are not a product of choice.
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Well, the Pontifical Neuron does take a break now and then.
I was going to post a comment; but decided not to.
Oops.. to la-
And the authors of the study had no choice in reaching the conclusion they did, which would ruin its truth value. These behaviorist types always defeat their own argument.
“And the authors of the study had no choice in reaching the conclusion they did, which would ruin its truth value. These behaviorist types always defeat their own argument.”
LOL! Truer words were never spoken. If you knock down free will as a concept, you are also knocking down Christian religion as well, in fact most any monotheistic religion (exception being Islam). Free will explains why evil things and bad judments can exist in the world, even though there is a God. We make our own beds to lie in. No need for a God if everything is predestined, and what kind of God would it be if there was no free will. A good God and a very bad God at the same time. No free will means no judgment of people’s behavior, as human beings would bear no resonsibility for their chosen actions. The decisions were made for them, somewhere in their brain impulses. Sort of automatic pilot for any action taken. We are a bunch of puppets, but then, whose holding the strings? It is an excellent basis for the liberal philosophy of anything goes and moral relativism, as we are not responsible for our actions, we are programmed robots. Of course, who programmed us?
Gee, so much for evaluation and choice (ie, free will) being behind the big drops in violent crime in states passing concealed carry laws.
Can you imagine how much time we would waste, if every “everyday” decision we made had to be analyzed by us as if we had never thought of it before?
60%? Not a whole lot better than chance. But still...
If this pans out, then we shouldn’t be putting people in jail for crimes since they had no choice. Perfect liberal world.
I think what is really happening is that we are programming our subconscious in our daily lives and future choices are made based on that. It only seems as if we aren’t choosing.
Then, I guess you could argue that we had no choice in the programming itself.
So where does it all come from? Watching TV programs written by people who had no choice? Reading FR? Watching the Dem debates? Watching Oprah? Did God mischievously program all of us randomly?
Or are there a few masters out there who really DO have free will and who are manipulating all of us robots?
I don’t know which of these is right. YOU choose. Oh, I forgot. You can’t! I wonder who made me write this??
Now I will never again be able to watch a game of rock-paper-scissors. It’s rigged.
Bullfeathers. Some scientists spend all their energy trying to shake the foundations of ethics and morality. At the basis of their efforts is their materialistic world view - that everything is matter and can be explained by matter.
The goal is to “prove” that we are not responsible for our actions, and so there will be no morality, no right or wrong, no prison.
That’s a fair summary.
It has yet to be determined if the activity in the prefrontal area is related to preparing the muscles to fire "at all" ("let's start the car, we're going for a drive"), as opposed to choosing which arm to use.
Oh, and these fine folks did not mention the possibility that the circuitry of self-awareness ('recording' of one's choice in memory, if you will) is fired later than the circuits for 'making' the choice.
But if you don't constrain the experiment in this way, you really can't get a handle on much of anything.
Further experiments ought to say something like "either press the button or recite The Pledge of Allegiance" to see if different areas of the brain light up in advance of different activities.
Cheers!
...The pattern predicted a left or right decision with about 60% accuracy and occurred about 10 seconds before the conscious choice,
A few problems with this. First, how accurate is the subjects determination of the time they made the conscious decision. The researchers act like that is a 100% gold standard in accuracy, but I could see that there would be a significant lag.
Second, is there any skewing of right-handedness versus left-handedness? Would I get 60% just by saying "Right, right, right" all the time, counting on the fact that most people are right handed and are more likely to pick the right button?
Third, if I am considering a button, I might be imagining myself pushing it as I think about which one to push. The scanner might just be picking up on the predecision evaluation actions. If my thoughts are "should I move right (twitch right arm) or left (twitch left arm). Maybe right (twitch), yes I have decided right (hit button)", then there are probably a lot more neurons firing in the part of my brain controlling the right side before I finally make the decision.
The interpretation of the findings is remarkably silly. Man being a unity of body and soul, the will has a material element as well. All they have recorded is the material correlates of free choice.
The assumption that the conscious reason is the person is an error which has afflicted Western Christendom since, well since the West consciouly called itself ‘Christendom’. A human being has a will, which is natively free, albeit usually bound by what the Fathers call ‘preposession’, the consciousness abstracted from the whole person does not.
There’s also the matter of deciding arbitrarily rather than for a cause. There are two things that come to mind immediately that would seem to fulfill their results...one of which is the calculation of the pattern the subject decides to use...and another is that when I make arbitrary choices, I tend to “project” a sensation in some direction as part of the decision-making process. Some people making left-right decisions bring their awareness to a certain part of their body for “left”, and another part for “right”.
No. It just means the bad stuff happened ten seconds earlier.
And this is the way the modern world has always wanted men to view life and God and existence -- we're on our own with occasional nudges from God.
Yet that reality is not the reality of the Bible, of the Jews, of the early Christians, nor of true Christianity. God's will is really all that exists, in one form or another, because God has created everything from before the foundation of the world, and what God has ordained is what happens.
Very strange concept for our linear brains to handle, but ultimately, that truth is the most comforting fact for a Christian. As Spurgeon said once, "During times of trouble, God's sovereignty is the pillow on which we lay our head."
"That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been" -- Ecclesiastes 3:15
"According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved." -- Ephesians 1:4-6 "Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure" -- Isaiah 46:10
The powers of this world want us to think we are masters of our own ship in order to better persuade us to hand over our lives and liberty to them. "You have free will, so freely do what I say."
Whereas the Christian has the assurance from Scripture that God guides His creation, every jot and tittle of it, and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Every hair numbered; every star named.
Do we understand this fully? Not at all. But we do understand it enough to recognize that God is in control, ultimately. Read the following link. It's all Good News for the Christian who knows whom he has believed.
And for some rainy weekend there is no better short book to read than Loraine (a guy) Boettner's...
Note especially the chapter on Calvinism in America which outlines that our entire system of representative government is patterned after the Calvinist model which began in the earliest Christian churches of the Bible.
Most of us who believe in God's will over all things once believed as you state. We very nearly idolized our sacrosanct free will, presuming as we had been told that it was a "gift from God."
Yet what does that really mean? What kind of "gift" has a 50/50 chance of sending a person to hell?
Nope, the gift is grace. All grace and only grace -- free, unmerited and given by God according to His good pleasure for His glory and the welfare of His family.
"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." -- Romans 8:28
"All things..."
We either believe it, or we don't.
Might I also suggest Martin Luther’s Bondage Of The Will.
No surprise that it actually takes time to go from making a choice to putting in motion all the complexities needed to act on or articulate that choice.
"Furthermore, I have the comfortable certainty that I please God, not by reason of the merit of my works, but by reason of His merciful favour promised to me; so that, if I work too little, or badly, He does not impute it to me, but with fatherly compassion pardons me and makes me better. This is the glorying of all the saints in their God." -- Martin Luther, "Bondage of the Will" -- (xviii) Of the comfort of knowing that salvation does not depend on free-will' (783)""I frankly confess that, for myself, even if it could be, I should not want 'free-will' to be given me, nor anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavour after salvation; not merely because in face of so many dangers, and adversities, and assaults of devils, I could not stand my ground and hold fast my 'free-will' (for one devil is stronger than all men, and on these terms no man could be saved) ; but because, even were there no dangers, adversities, or devils, I should still be forced to labour with no guarantee of success, and to beat my fists at the air. If I lived and worked to all eternity, my conscience would never reach comfortable certainty as to how much it must do to satisfy God, Whatever work I had done, there would still be a nagging doubt' as to whether it pleased God, or whether He required something more. The experience of all who seek righteousness by works proves that; and I learned it well enough myself over a period of many years, to my own great hurt. But now that God has taken my salvation out of the control of my own will, and put it under the control of His, and promised to save me, not according to my working or running, but according to His own grace and mercy, I have the comfort¬able certainty that He is faithful and will not lie to me, and that He is also great and powerful, so that no devils or opposition can break Him or pluck me from Him. `No one,´ He says, `shall pluck them out of my hand, because my Father which gave them me is greater than all´ (John 10.28-29). Thus it is that, if not all, yet some, indeed many, are saved; whereas, by the power of ´free-will´ none at all could be saved, but every one of us would perish.
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
To an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you,
Who are kept by the power of GOD through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." -- 1 Peter 1:3-5
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