Who makes the decisions for us? Neuroscientists say if there really is freedom of choice

Imagine that you bought a new headset online. There are many colors, brands, and features to look out for. You feel like you can choose the model you want and have full control over your decision. When you finally click the “Add to Cart” button, you assume that you are doing this of your own free will.

What if you were told that while you thought you were browsing the site, your brain activity had already highlighted the headphones you would choose? This idea may not be so exaggerated. While neuroscientists probably can’t predict your choices with 100 percent accuracy, research has shown that some information about your upcoming action is present in brain activity seconds before you realize your decision, Scientific American writes.

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Research in the 1960s showed that when people perform a simple spontaneous movement, they show a buildup of neural activity — what neuroscientists call “preparatory potential” — in their brains before they act. In the 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet reported that this potential for preparation precedes not just one’s action, but even one’s intention to act. In 2008, a group of researchers discovered that some information about an upcoming decision resides in the brain 10 seconds before people report that they have made a decision about when and how to act. These studies have led to questions and debates. For many observers, these discoveries disproved the intuitive concept of free will. After all, if neuroscientists can understand the timing or choice of your movements long before you make your decision, perhaps humans are just puppets controlled by neural processes that occur below the threshold of consciousness.

But researchers who study will from both neurobiological and philosophical perspectives believe there’s more to the story. They work collaboratively with philosophers and scientists to provide more subtle interpretations, including a better understanding of the potential for preparation and a more fruitful theoretical framework to embed them. Their findings show that “free will” remains a useful concept, although people may need to rethink their definition.

We are asked to start with an observation: Much of what people do every day is arbitrary. When we start walking, we put one foot in front of the other. Most of the time, we don’t actively think about which foot to put forward. Not important. The same is true for many other actions and choices. They are largely meaningless and unresponsive.

Most empirical research on free will, including Libet’s, has focused on this type of voluntary action. In such activities, researchers can actually “read” our brain activity and track information about our actions and decisions without realizing we’re going to make them. But if these actions mean nothing to us, is it so remarkable that they are initiated unconsciously? More important decisions, such as getting a job, getting married, or moving to another country, are far more interesting and complex and are made completely consciously.

If you start out with a more philosophically based understanding of free will, you may conclude that only a small subset of our daily activities are important enough to worry about. We want to feel that we are in control of the decisions that change our lives and that we feel responsible for. In the context of decisions that matter, The question of free will is most naturally valid.

In 2019, neuroscientists Uri Maoz, Liad Mudrik and colleagues explored this idea. They offered participants a choice of two nonprofits to donate $1,000 to. People can specify their preferred organization by pressing the left or right button. In some cases, respondents knew their choices mattered because the button determined which organization would receive all $1,000. In other cases, people deliberately made stupid choices because they were told that regardless of their choice, both organizations would receive $500. The results were somewhat surprising. As in previous experiments, the potential for readiness preceded pointless selection. However, it was not an important choice. When we care about a decision and its outcome, our brains behave differently than when the decision is arbitrary.

More interestingly, ordinary people’s intuitions about free will and decision-making do not match up with these findings. Some of the scientists, including Maoz and neuroscientist Jake Gavenas, recently published the results of a large survey of more than 600 participants in which they asked people to rate how “free” a choice made by others seemed. Their ratings showed that people did not understand that the brain could process meaningful choices differently from more arbitrary or meaningless ones. In other words, people tend to imagine that all of their choices are equally autonomous, from what socks to wear first to where to go on vacation, even if neuroscience says otherwise.

This suggests that free will may exist, but not work the way we intuitively imagine it to be. When experiments showed that brain activity, such as readiness potential, precedes the conscious intention to take action, some people immediately conclude that they are not the “final decision makers.” They do not have free will, they reason because they are somehow subject to brain activity.

But this assumption misses the broader lesson of neuroscience. “We” — this is our brain. The combined study clearly shows that people can indeed make informed choices. But this freedom of action and the accompanying sense of personal responsibility is not something supernatural. They occur in the brain, whether or not scientists observe them as clearly as preparatory potential.

So there is no “gray cardinal” inside the cerebral machine. But researchers argue that this mechanism is so complex, incomprehensible, and mysterious that the popular notions of “free will” or “me” are incredibly useful. They help to reflect and imagine the functioning of the mind and the brain, albeit imperfectly. Provided these assumptions continue to be questioned and tested, they can deeply guide and inspire ongoing research.

Previously Focus wrote about a clouded mind. Why sometimes thoughts can not be collected “in a heap” and how to deal with it.