Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 11 April 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.751
News
Brain makes decisions before you even know it
Brain activity predicts decisions before they are consciously made.
Your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it, according to researchers. By looking at brain activity while making a decision, the researchers could predict what choice people would make before they themselves were even aware of having made a decision.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
Without being able to read the full paper (it is not open access !!!) I am still wondering about the following: Can deciding between two buttons be called free will ? Isn't free will the freedom to refuse to choose any of the buttons (or choose to press something entirely different), - or even to refuse to participate in the experiment (or choose a different experiment to participate in) ? Thus, if the 10 second lag is the time the participants use to ponder whether to press anything at all, the experiment can be seen as a demonstration of the presence of free will rather than the absence of it. Sciphu (www.sciphu.com)
Hi, The brain is evolutionary just another organ, an organ a cumpus for orientation purposes to find food so as to reproduce. That in humans the brain has a conductor function of the body is just a product of evolution. Regards Dr. Terence Hale
It's amazing how Freud described these simptoms, that our inconscient acts before we make any decision. He further determined that our "concious" decisions were heavily biased by our inconscient. With all the new findings in the way our brain works, it is amazing how little credit is given to this brilliant man.
Amir, Freedom to refuse is usually considered free-won't. One way to save law from this experiment is to argue that there is free won't, which is probably true. As per the second question free will is about conscious decisions. Since the participants were consciously aware of the decision 7 seconds later this is a demonstration for lack of free will. In other words there is some unconscious process(zombie) that controls the decision making, not the conscious "I". The results are not surprising since, among the qualities required for survival and procreation, consciousness is one of the last ones. Even totally unconscious trees(no neurons) are surviving and reproducing.
Isn't the design of this experiment flawed? Wouldn't some people wait for a while to see which letters really stick in their minds, then press the button once they are certain they have no trouble remembering that particular letter?
我想那个实验åªèƒ½è¯´æ˜Žäººçš„记忆方é¢çš„工作，而ä¸èƒ½è¯´æ˜Žæ˜¯åšå†³å®šå§ï¼
This rather like the crossword experience where you cannot find an answer, leave it, not thinking about it, come back to it later , and find the answer quickly. I wonder if the expt knew anything about the personalities of the subjects. comments I remember made about an extrovert person were ' what they have thought they have already said ' Introverts take time to pronounce ?? david y
Maybe the lack of free will is associated with the banality of the decision. If somebody has to decide whether to press the right or the left button, pressing the right one might just as well be facilitated by the fact that they are right-handed. It's a bit early to deny any free will from an experiment that did not cover more complex decision processes based on argumentation.
Well, because they lacked free will, the researchers couldn't help for making the test this way and reaching the conclusions they did -- about other people's possible lack of free will. :) Bjorn Nilson
We need to sit back a little and wait (for ten seconds?)before jumping to conclusions about a concept as nebulous as free will. Since we really cannot define what that means in any rigorous way, we can hardly decide if it exists or not! Our knowledge of our own thought processes is too rudimentary to allow any sweeping conclusions at this stage of the game. Reality, as Paul Feyerabend pointed out, is a rather mysterious substance, of unknown properties, partly yielding and partly resisting our efforts to know it. This is a nice experiment, but its rather simple and open to many interpretations. Free will and self are onions we have only recently begun to peel in a scientific manner...lets not get carried away just yet.