Neuro-Food for Thought: Free Will and the Unconscious Mind

Happy winter break, Quakers! Hope you’ve enjoyed lots of food, family, and a long break from the countless finals hours spent cramming in Van Pelt. Relaxing over the break, I’ve finally had the chance to pick up a few books I’ve been meaning to read in my free time. On my reading list were two extremely interesting neuro-related books that I suggest everyone pick up when they get the chance! Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer are both two extremely well written books dealing with the popular topic of the true power of the human unconscious. Lately, there has been a vast amount of books, articles, and studies emerging focused on this rapidly growing topic, and I’ve definitely fallen subject to the craze myself. The volume of research in this topic is rapidly expanding as neuroscientists everywhere attempt to uncover the inner workings of the mind – the levels of the unconscious brain that work to form our decisions before we are even aware of them. As humans, we’d like to think that we are in control of our own decisions, consciously determining our own behavior and actions the way that we choose to. But what if this isn’t nearly as true as we think it is? Current research is aiming to expose the activity that occurs deep in the recesses of the brain long before we realize we’ve even made a decision at all. According to scientists, an actual decision occurs deep inside our brain before we realize it, and the consciousness of a decision is merely a biochemical afterthought, a result that has no effect on our choice to perform an action at all. So if we aren’t actually aware of our decisions, does free will exist? This is the core of the heated debate going on today between neuroscientists and philosophers alike.

John-Dylan Haynes, a researcher at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, performed an experiment in 2007 that forever changed his outlook on life. Haynes put subjects into a brain scanner in which a screen flashed a succession of random letters, and told them to press a button with either their right or left index finger whenever they felt the urge to. An fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) test was used to show brain activity in real time as the subjects used either their left or right fingers to hit the button. The results were so surprising that Haynes’ first thought was to question the reality of his data. Haynes and his team found that the conscious decision to push the button could be seen in brain activity about a second before the actual act, but the team also discovered that a pattern of unconscious brain activity seemed to predict the action by as many as seven seconds. This led Haynes and colleagues to challenge the idea that decisions are under our conscious control. According to their logic, they argue that free will is in fact an illusion. “We feel we choose, but we don’t,” says neuroscientist Patrick Haggard from University College London. For example, you may have thought this morning that you decided whether to have coffee or tea, but the decision might have been made long before you were even aware of it.
Just as well, Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book, Blink, an experiment performed by researchers at the University of Iowa in which individuals are placed in a simple gambling game. In front of them are placed four decks of cards, two blue and two red. Each card in any of the decks will cause them to either lose money or win money, and their task is to turn over cards in such a way that will maximize their winnings. What the subjects don't know is that the red cards are a minefield, and can cause them to win large sums of money, but likewise lose much more money than the blue decks. It's designed so that the only way to win is by taking cards from the blue decks. The question is, how long did it take for them to figure it out? The scientists found that after they've overturned about 50 cards, most people start to develop a hunch that they should avoid the red decks, and after about 80 have figured it out and can explain exactly why. But interestingly enough, the scientists also did something else: they hooked up each gambler to a machine which measured the activity of the sweat glands in the palms below the skin's surface. These glands respond to stress and temperature in situations when we get nervous. Interestingly enough, scientists found that gamblers began to generate stress responses in their hands to the red cards and avoid them by the tenth card -- forty before they were consciously aware of any kind of hunch. In other words, the subjects figured out the game before they realized they figured out the game, and behaved accordingly.

            Philosophers, however, aren’t convinced that findings like these can abolish the idea of free will quite so easily. Many question the results and interpretations, arguing that researchers haven’t quite grasped the ideas they are trying to disprove. A group of research projects bridging theology, philosophy, and natural sciences are currently being funded to (hopefully) fully identify the biological processes underlying conscious intention and better understand the brain activity that precedes it. If unconscious brain activity is found to predict decisions with perfect accuracy, the research will truly rattle the notion of free will.

            However, neuroscience experiments usually have a controllable input and output, a “push this button” or “watch this screen” that can easily be measured but are relatively basic actions. Many critics also question whether such simple actions can be comparable to complex behaviors – pressing a button is far removed from making a cup of coffee, running for president, or committing a crime. Just as well, many philosophers also believe that there doesn’t have to be such delineation and divide between mind and body. Sure, every process must have a neural basis, and many philosophers believe this research just proves physical basis that the brain has to first work through a decision before it is made. In particular, scientists tend to see preparatory brain activity as proceeding step-by-step to a decision, whereas neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga suggests that researchers view the processes as working in parallel. He views the process instead as a complex network with interactions happening continually. "I think if we do a new generation of studies with better design, we'll get better evidence about what goes on in the brain when people make decisions," says philosopher Al Mele. However, philosophers are willing to admit that one day in the future, neuroscience could definitely disturb the concept of free will. With further research, imagine a world where researchers could always accurately predict what someone would decide from their brain activity before the person was even aware of their decision. It’s a little bit unsettling. 

So, whether you buy into the research or not, it's simply some neuro-food for thought! Next time you choose coffee over tea, maybe your unconscious mind already knew you would.