15 ms·
Unconscious brain activity predicts decisions 11 seconds before action
- benj111 8y agoIf I were to make a decision such as this, I would make a snap preliminary decision, then review it to see if there were glaring errors. That seems to fit with the results. The results don't seem to be stating anything new or non obvious to me. Am I missing something?
- jpalomaki 8y agoThe key thing is this "the researchers were able to predict which pattern participants would choose up to 11 seconds before they consciously made the decision" So this goes into the question of "free will". Is your conscious mind making the decisions or is just trying to justify the decisions made by the unconscious mind.
- nindwen 8y agoIs the assumption then that "you" means only the conscious part of your brain?
- TaupeRanger 8y agoIt doesn't tell us anything about free will other than the fact that the process of decision making happens prior to our conscious awareness, which we already knew.
- rightbyte 8y agoYe, it's is kinda obvious that the decision is made before you "know it". How would it otherwise work.
- amelius 8y agoWhat happens 11 seconds before the conscious decision can be part of free will, I guess.
- geofft 8y agoThe researchers did not decode it with 100% accuracy, so one interpretation is that the unconscious mind says "Instinctively, this seems like the right decision," 11 seconds later the conscious mind says either "Oh, yes, I agree with that" or less frequently "Actually I'll do something else", and the researchers are only tracking intuition.
- gus_massa 8y agoIf I understand correctly, the part that says > up to 11 seconds before they consciously made the decision should be interpreted as > up to 11 seconds before they pressed one of the buttons I can't imagine how they measure the time when the conscious decision was made but they definitively measure when the button was pressed.
- benj111 8y agoI suppose the problem for me is, there isn't really a decision for the conscious mind to work on, the question is trivial without a right or wrong answer, free will doesn't enter into it. This was choosing horizontal or vertical stripes, there isn't a rational reason not to go with my gut, although I could if I wanted to demonstrate free will.
- kzrdude 8y agoThat's the decision process that the current chess world champion has explained he also uses, for most moves.
- your-nanny 8y agochoice can be predicted with eye tracking. so what.
- Invictus0 8y agoThe researchers don't know if the choice was made in the first second or in the final second: it doesn't make sense to say that the brain activity predicted the choice 11 seconds beforehand.
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoN=14. This is a preliminary study, not something you should change behaviour or beliefs nor cast policy based on.
- taneq 8y agoEven N=1 would be interesting. Not everything has to use a cohort of thousands - when you're demonstrating the existence of a phenomenon, a single case will suffice.
- bluesign 8y agoOh thats not like this, if you give me N=1000, i can probably prove anything for N=10 (considering bad intentions) So basically for big N's, study is much trustworthy.
- eeZah7Ux 8y agoGive N=7.5 billion find me N=1 person that is 300 years old, or one that can fly.
- thatcat 8y agoFor a large N, the study is only less likely to produce a false positive. It is more likely to produce a false negative though. There is an optimal N where type 1 and 2 error are minimized which is not infinity.
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- bluesign 8y ago- They are showing 2 images. - maximum duration to choose is 20 seconds. So basically if you look one of them 10 seconds, seconds one 10 seconds. And make your choice. They can see your choice when they go back in your brain activity 11 seconds before. (If they can with MRI can see how much you like something while you are looking) So basically nothing much value here. (PS: when i see 'upto 11 seconds', this sounds like marketing talk)
- naasking 8y agoSure, and seeing some elecrical patterns in DRAM circuitry will predict changes before they show up on your monitor too. That's just how computers work. Similarly, unconscious activity is just how consciousness and choice work. That doesn't mean that free will doesn't exist. It's a complete misunderstanding of the concept.
- jacobmoe 8y agoNo one thinks that computers have free will. Not yet anyway. The idea that the conscious mind isn't the one making decisions seems to have implications for free will. Can you explain why it's misunderstanding of the concept?
- xfs 8y agoA radical implication is then to locate free will in the unconscious. The true acts of freedom are choices made unaware. The consciousness merely registers the choices that are already made.
- naasking 8y ago> The consciousness merely registers the choices that are already made. A point made in the Matrix movies: you're not here to make a choice, you've already made it. You're here to understand why you've made that choice. I think that's probably a pretty good analogy of how consciousness operates.
- adrianmonk 8y agoIt wouldn't necessarily have to push it to the unconscious. Free will could be an infrequently-exercised veto power. Which might not even be an unreasonable way to look at it. Many people make a contrast between habit and will. There already seems to be a common idea that much of the time, people do things the way they always have, and it is only at certain key moments that the will asserts itself and changes course.
- tomatotomato37 8y agoI think the idea in dispute is that the area scientists had called unconscious isn't just exclusively unconscious, but also takes part in conscious thought.
- edoo 8y agoIt seems pretty obvious that when confronted with a choice you generally take an immediate biased opinion and then spend some time reviewing the alternatives just in case. It wasn't 11 seconds until they made the decision, it was 11 seconds until the decision was confirmed and vocalized. It sounds like 'basic' image focus detection.
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- satori99 8y agoHasn't this been known since Benjamin Libet's experiments in the 1970's? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet Or am I missing something here?
- thunderbong 8y agoI had heard of this as a factoid about 30 years ago. Although I didn't know about Libet's experiments. From the Wikipedia article - That is to say, researchers recorded mounting brain activity related to the resultant action as many as three hundred milliseconds before subjects reported the first awareness of conscious will to act.
- Memosyne 8y agoIt's not as if they completely disregarded the existence of Libet; he is referenced many times in study and even the article posits that the research is supplementary to previous work done in the field.
- nbeleski 8y agoI am speaking from memory, but iirc Libet's study wasn't without flaws and it was contested many times during the years. More researchs like this are positive, as this is a far from solved field.
- anongraddebt 8y agoIt's primarily the significance of the amount of time before the action (or whatever). Prior to this new study, arguments purporting to show that the relevant notion of free will was undermined by experiments such as Libet's were unsuccessful. Al Mele (FSU) wrote the definitive work on this issue in "Effective Intentions" (2010, Oxford University Press). Mele convincingly showed that the ~500ms time delay in Libet style experiments was not long enough for the skeptical argument to go through successfully. In the last part of the book Mele commented on the implications of any studies of this type (perhaps heading off arguments based on future experiments such as this one). For sake of length I won't quote the semi-formalized version of Mele's argument in the last part of the book, but rather the analogy he uses to elucidate it: "Consider an analogy. Max struck a log with his red ax, thereby causing the log to split. If Max’s ax had been green, it would have split the log just as well. But he was under strict instructions to split wood only with red axes, and he was committed to following the instructions. If his ax had been green, he would not have used it; in fact, he would have looked for a red ax and split the log later, after he found one. In this scenario, the fact that the ax is red is causally relevant to Max’s splitting the log when he does and therefore to the actual log splitting action he performed, an action that has a specific location in time. Similarly, in the imagined experiment, the fact that at t, Sam made a conscious proximal decision to press seems to be causally relevant to his pressing when he does and therefore to the actual pressing action he performs. I should add that although we do know that, other things equal, red and green axes split wood equally well, we do not know how effective unconscious decisions are. Nor do we know whether unconscious deciding (as distinct from unconscious nonactional intention acquisition) is something that actually happens. Also, for all we know, if there are instances of unconscious deciding, they are far too rare for there to be more than a glimmer of a chance that if Sam had not made a conscious proximal decision to press at t, he would have made an unconscious one." ---- It is worth pointing out that Mele is famous for remaining agnostic about free will (and certain fundamental questions surrounding it).
- justanotherjoe 8y agoI don't think this paper is related to free will, or if they even claimed it is. It's just sensational title. The choice is completely non-consequential, it's picking between 2 patterns. The brain choose based on it's initial biases. It's like when you are turning off your brain watching youtube videos, it's likely that you will open another video after that instead of going back to your work because there is a strong pre-existing brain activity related to whatever you're watching. What I'm saying is it isn't like some directive from the subconscious that you cannot go against, it's more like one room is filled with sweets and the other is filled with nothing. The choice is still taken at the moment.
- nabla9 8y agoThis is just one of the many studies. You can detect the choice from the brain up to seven seconds before when people are asked to push a button any time they feel the urge. https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.h... > The choice is still taken at the moment. There is no reason to expect that 'the moment' is the same as when we become aware of it. It's questionable if we can make make any choices within two or three seconds. We just have behaviour that feels like it's our own volition.
- raverbashing 8y ago"Time between when a decision was made and the awareness of it" != "Not having free will" Given that we have to make decisions all the time it's natural an unconscious heuristic could exist, but that, again, doesn't mean "not having free will".
- nabla9 8y agoThe feeling of being in control and acting on your free will on the spot is demonstrably not connected to actual decision making will. The whole concept of free will is so vague that debating if it exist or not is useless. If you think that "free will" is becoming aware of your decisions just when you make them, consider the fact that the human perception of "Now" spreads over 3 seconds or more. The ordering of two events can swap up to 5-7 seconds in some cases (ever feel that you are thinking about somebody and then they call you). There is some evidence that your brain does stuff parallel and out of order and then marshals them into stream of consciousnesses where causality of internal processes seems right.
- trixie_ 8y agoMaybe we just experience our brain making decisions. Everything else might be ‘unconscious’. Implying that our conscious experience of the world has no control over our brains. Otherwise conscious/unconscious implies some sort of duality in your head. Like the homunculus..
- csomar 8y agoMore like experience a "subset of the environment". We can barely handle more than a few digits at a time, a particularly small square of vision, or a particular song. We can focus our mental effort at really only one thing (the other has to be learned/unconscious so that it can go parallel). I think the question becomes: Why are we conscious in the first place?
- trixie_ 8y agoUnless there is something special going on.. experience seems to be a property of matter itself. Which could mean everything is aware to some extent. People, dogs, rocks, etc.. But because of our big complicated brains that can hold memories and all that - we are aware of being aware.
- wildermuthn 8y agoMichael Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory of consciousness (AST) provides an interesting perspective on this study. Although the study is limited and predicting a decision only implies a correlation rather than a causation, it is worth thinking about how brain activity and conscious action are related. AST distinguishes between neuronal activity (attention) versus conscious experience (awareness), and postulates that awareness is both a model of attention and a director of attention. Essentially, consciousness as a simulation that has the startling ability to influence the simulator itself. Example: we experience seeing an apple (awareness) and consciously focus upon it, which amplifies the neuronal activity for sensing and processing vision (attention). Due to this amplification, we then gain a sharper experience of noticing more details about the apple. Awareness both models attention and directs it. In terms of predicting decisions based on brain scanning, it would be easy to see how as a person’s awareness focuses attention on a particular image, even without quite realizing it, that the brain patterns of such attention would be clearly amplified. This study seems to suggest that our conscious feeling of making a decision is a false experience. That we are simply watching a pre-ordained movie and are being given a false sense of agency. In AST, even though our consciousness is a synthesized model of our brain activity, and even though decisions may be made in neurons not part of that modeling, there is little meaningful difference between the model we experience of making a decision and the brain activity of the decision itself. Although there will always be a lag between a model of activity and the activity itself, we generally experience no lag. it would be interesting to see in what edge-cases lag would really matter. I believe there are some odd experiments with buttons and blinking lights where the decision to press a button is experienced after the experience of seeing the light from pressing the button. All the same, if AST is on target, then conscious agency is real, and this paper doesn’t have anything to say on the matter, even if the headline is highly suggestive that it does.
- PButtNutter 8y agoWhere can I learn more about this?
- wildermuthn 8y ago“Consciousness and the Social Brain,” by Graziano is a great place to start.
- zappo2938 8y agoAre the action potentials spinning up like a turbo in a car engine?
- fmli 8y agoBig deal, because I can react to some things almost immediately, as they happen sometimes, so where's your science god now? Case in point, the door opens suddenly, and without warning. The otherside of the door is soundproofed, so footsteps in the hallway cannot be heard. In walks in so-and-so. I can tell who it is without looking, by the footsteps (jangling spurs, or what have you), and it's someone unexpected. In less than a second, I say hello to them by name. There would not have been any unconscious brain activity, since I was not expecting that person to walk through the door, although I was able to recognize and react within a smaller window of anticipation. Here I am minding my own business. I see a bullshit headline, and in less than 11 seconds, I able to summon a cogent rebuttal to its hypothesis. Predict that with your fMRI. Argue with me some more. Tell me my brain had already queued a cluster of event loops upon waking from my bed that morning. That's fine. Are to going to fMRI that too? And then what?
- almost_usual 8y agoIt’s interesting how many comments immediately defend the evidence of “free will”. I’m not saying this article comes close at all to invalidating “free will” but it begs the question how will humanity react if we do invalidate it one day? Seems on the same scale as “the world is round” or “Earth revolves around the sun”.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoSeems nonsensical to me. You can predict 99.999% of our behaviors... as long as you make one decision your whole life that bucks the model, you are not the model.
- root_axis 8y agoWhat does "free will" even mean in this context?
- ardy42 8y ago> I’m not saying this article comes close at all to invalidating “free will” but it begs the question how will humanity react if we do invalidate it one day? It (or more precisely, the people who fully internalize the result and who have the power to act on it) will probably start treating other people a lot more like we currently treat machines.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y agoWhy would you assume that "Free Will" is something that can be proven/disproven? Something that is in the domain of science? To clarify the question, what kind of scientific experiment would you even imagine that would even resemble something producing evidence for or against free will? (These experiments talked about in this topic do not at all fit it: they just show that there are conscious and subconscious parts of our experience of life and our experience of the process of choice. In what world would that be related to the degree of "free-ness" of that choice is beyond me. I thought we all knew already that there are conscious and subconscious parts of the brain and that many of activities of "I" are subconscious.)
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- xenophon 8y agoThought I'd share one of my favorite short stories (written by Ted Chiang, most recently of Arrival fame) that bears on this: https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
- vagab0nd 8y agoWait. This device can be fooled easily: At any point in time, I can look at the LED. If it's off, I press the button exactly 1 second later. If it's on, I do nothing. What am I missing?
- vfinn 8y agoYou're simply missing the fact that by definition there won't be any case where you see the LED being turned off 1 second before you push the button. If you see the LED being turned off, you won't be pushing it the second later.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago> "In, other words, if any pre-existing brain activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will be more likely to pick that option as it gets boosted by the pre-existing brain activity.”" We have biases. Sometime we are aware of them. Sometimes, evidently, in trivial situations, we don't notice such patterns. "Be mindful of your biases" just took on a wider scope.
- onemoresoop 8y agoIf feels pretty obvious to me to think that internal mood has something to do with decision making. It could take a couple of seconds for a reaction to cook up in order to become a decision.
- ozy 8y agoI would want a study that focuses on the opposite: what is the lowest bar a person trying to deliberaty foil such a system can reach. My bet: around 50-150ms.
- pvaldes 8y ago11 entire seconds is a life for brain activity. Superslow.