By analogy, if I were to ask you what is the position of your tongue in your mouth right now, you can answer that question, it becomes part of your awareness when I ask it, but it wasn't there before. Narrator: So, if our brains control our version of reality and we're largely unaware of what our brains are doing, the question remains, is it us, or our brains that are making the choices?
That's what Patrick Haggard is trying to find out. He's a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in University College London. He studies how we make decisions and whether or not we have the freewill to control our actions check this website. I realize that we really understood very little about the higher levels of how the brain controls our movements and our actions. How does the brain decide when to make an action, when not to make a action? How does the brain decide which action to make? So, I began becoming interested really in how do you get thoughts into actions? Narrator: Haggard devised an experiment to see if our brains are influenced to make a choice. Hello, Aaron. Hi. Thanks for volunteering for this simple experiment where we're interested in the basis of the sense of control, the feeling of being in control of what happens. Narrator: Haggard wires his subject up to electrodes to monitor brain activity. When the subject sees a left pointing arrow, he presses the left button. If he sees a right pointing arrow, he presses the right button. And when he sees a double arrow, he can choose either button, but before the double-headed arrow, another arrow is flashed on the screen. It's so quick that the subject doesn't consciously see it. Here we've slowed it down, so you can see the small arrow called a "subliminal prime". Played in real time, the subject doesn't see it, but his unconscious brain does, and he is more likely to press the button in the direction of that subliminal arrow. We can introduce a bias, and we can encourage people to "freely choose", in quote marks, to use their left hand or their right hand on any particular trial. So, you're feeling that you are freely deciding what to do and controlling what happens is in some senses an illusion, so that then raises the question of whether we control our brains, or whether our brains control us. Narrator: To answer who is in control, Haggard does another experiment where the subject presses a button whenever she feels like it, and she indicates when she made the decision to act. The subject's brain waves reveal that there is a lot of neural activity over a second before she actually presses a button. So, what does this mean? Well it means that the brain begins to prepare the action long before you have the subjective experience that you are about to make it. It's your brain, which makes the decisions, which controls the actions, which produces, if you like, all of your individual repertoire as a behaving person. What I think we can conclude in the view of modern neuroscience is that if we have freewill at all, it is a very small player in the system, if it exists at all. And that's because we know so much at this point about unconscious decision-making, about the ways that our biology influences us, about the way that we are totally dependent on the integrity of our biology, and when things change even a little bit due to brain damage, or a coffee, or drugs, or anything like that, who you are and how you decide, all of these things change, so we are our biologies. Narrator: So, if freewill is largely an illusion and our decisions are made by our unconscious brain, why do some brains make good choices and others make bad ones? Narrator: In 2011, Sid Weidman was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and prescribed a drug for the tremors.
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AuthorTim Sobers is a famous traveler and blogger, passionate camping and hiking lover. Tim is from Washington, D.C., US. He is also a writer at Students QA platform. ArchivesCategories |