The brain and free will: how we actually make decisions

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

We are used to thinking that we are making decisions consciously. But what if our consciousness only states the fact of a choice? This is what the scientists have to say.

What decides: consciousness or unconscious

The existence of free will was questioned in the 80s of the XX century after the study Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Benjamin Libet.

Participants in the experiment were asked to spontaneously move their wrists while their brain activity was monitored. It turned out that his reaction was ahead of the conscious intention by an average of 350 milliseconds. That is, the person has not yet realized that he is moving his wrist, but his brain has already decided to do it. This preliminary brain reaction is called the readiness potential.

Libet concluded that there is no conscious choice. Any decision is made unconsciously, and consciousness only registers it.

Only 30 years after Libet's discovery did research emerge that cast doubt on his theory, namely that readiness potential is an unconscious decision about action.

The unconscious prepares, the consciousness decides

In 2009, scientists from the University of Otago tested Libet's Brain preparation before a voluntary action: Evidence against unconscious movement initiation theory, slightly modifying the experiment itself. In their version, the participants waited for a beep and then had to make a choice: press a key or not. It turned out that the action or its absence does not matter - the potential for readiness arises in any case.

The same was found in the Readiness potentials driven by non-motoric processes study. 2016: Strong readiness potential does not necessarily end with movement. Moreover, after the potential for readiness has arisen, a person can stop and not move.

Since there is a potential for readiness, but there is no action, it means that it does not indicate a decision to act.

What then does this brain activity mean? There are different opinions.

French researcher Aaron Schurger put forward the An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement theory that readiness potential is simply an increase in neural noise, random electrical fluctuations in neural networks.

Prescott Alexander of Dartmouth College suggested Readiness potentials driven by non-motoric processes. that this brain activity reflects a general expectation - the awareness that an event is about to happen.

Eric Emmons of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Iowa has linked Rodent Medial Frontal Control of Temporal Processing in the Dorsomedial Striatum with a sense of timing. The scientist suggested that this is how our brain encodes its own time intervals. Since in Libet's experiment, people had to track and roughly represent time intervals themselves, this theory may well turn out to be true.

Whichever option is correct, it turns out that free will still exists, and the potential for readiness only shows the processes that occur during decision-making.