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Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain

Nature Neuroscience volume 11, pages 543–545 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

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Figure 1: Measuring the onset time of conscious motor intentions.
Figure 2: Decoding the outcome of decisions before and after they reached awareness.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank D. Passingham and H. Lau for valuable comments and T. Mildner and S. Zysset for help with scanning. This work was funded by the Max Planck Society and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstrasse 1A, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

    Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass & John-Dylan Haynes

  2. Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Haus 6, Philippstrasse 13, Berlin, 10115, Germany

    Chun Siong Soon & John-Dylan Haynes

  3. Department of Experimental Psychology and Ghent Institute for Functional and Metabolic Imaging, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, Ghent, 9000, Belgium

    Marcel Brass

  4. Department of Neurology II, Otto-von-Guericke University, Leipziger Strasse 44, Magdeburg, 39120, Germany

    Hans-Jochen Heinze

Authors
  1. Chun Siong Soon
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  2. Marcel Brass
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  3. Hans-Jochen Heinze
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  4. John-Dylan Haynes
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Contributions

J.-D.H., C.S.S., M.B. and H.-J.H. conceived the experiment. C.S.S. and J.-D.H. carried out the experiment. C.S.S. analyzed the data. J.-D.H. and C.S.S. wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John-Dylan Haynes.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–9, Table 1, Methods and Discussion (PDF 488 kb)

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Soon, C., Brass, M., Heinze, HJ. et al. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nat Neurosci 11, 543–545 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2112

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2112

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