How much control do you really have over your actions?

Michael Price
Sciencemag.org
Originally posted October 1, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Philosophers have wrestled with questions of free will—that is, whether we are active drivers or passive observers of our decisions—for millennia. Neuroscientists tap-dance around it, asking instead why most of us feel like we have free will. They do this by looking at rare cases in which people seem to have lost it.

Patients with both alien limb syndrome and akinetic mutism have lesions in their brains, but there doesn’t seem to be a consistent pattern. So Darby and his colleagues turned to a relatively new technique known as lesion network mapping.

They combed the literature for brain imaging studies of both types of patients and mapped out all of their reported brain lesions. Then they plotted those lesions onto maps of brain regions that reliably activate together at the same time, better known as brain networks. Although the individual lesions in patients with the rare movement disorders appeared to occur without rhyme or reason, the team found, those seemingly arbitrary locations fell within distinct brain networks.

The researchers compared their results with those from people who lost some voluntary movement after receiving temporary brain stimulation, which uses low-voltage electrodes or targeted magnetic fields to temporarily “knock offline” brain regions.

The networks that caused loss of voluntary movement or agency in those studies matched Darby and colleagues’ new lesion networks. This suggests these networks are involved in voluntary movement and the perception that we’re in control of, and responsible for, our actions, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The info is here.

Neuroscience of free will: Does reaching for beer with robotic arm mean free will doesn’t exist?

By Andrew Porterfield
Genetic Literacy Project
Originally published on July 21, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

But researchers at CalTech tried something different with him. Instead of hooking up electrodes to the motor cortex, they choose another site in the brain: The posterior parietal cortex is another part of the brain that controls actions like limb movements, but it does so on a far more sophisticated level than the motor cortex. The posterior parietal is involved in the planning of movements, and much of this planning is unconscious. So, when the CalTech team implanted electrodes in Soto’s posterior parietal, they found that they could predict movements before he actually made them. And once the brain signals doing the predicting were known, they could be used to smoothly move his limbs. Essentially, the electrode was helping him unconsciously decide to move his arms, hands and fingers. Which made beer drinking all the easier.

The fact that scientists can chart the brain’s behavior has led many to revisit an old argument over the existence of free will. If we can predict a person’s intentions just by picking up brain signals (and it took a computer two years to predict Sorto’s), then how free are our minds? How many decisions that we make every day are truly under our conscious control? Is there really free will?

The entire article is here.