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The concept of free will is very interesting, and a lot of ink has been spilled on it in the world of philosophy. From the perspective of the human brain, however, it is something that neuroscientists are really just starting to look into.
One new study, which was published in Imaging Neuroscience, found that there is surprisingly little difference in how the brain processes situations in which there are choices compared to those in which there really aren’t.
The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) scans that were taken when participants had to make decisions. To simplify the process, the participants were given two scenarios.
In the first scenario, they were shown balloons of two different colors and told to pick whichever one they wanted. They could use any criteria they wanted to in order to pick a balloon.
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In the second scenario, they were shown two identically colored balloons. In each case, they had to push a button as soon as they had made their decision. The researchers monitored teh brain scans to see what happened from the time the balloons were displayed until the moment before they pushed the button.
Lead author Lauren Claire Fong and the senior author, Daniel Feuerriegel explained what they found:
“For both free and forced decisions, the brain activity unfolded in a very similar way. Like a loading bar, it climbed steadily to the same peak level just before a choice was made. When people decided quickly, the signal increased faster. When they took longer, it rose more slowly.
That’s exactly what you would expect if the brain were tracking and weighing up evidence over time, rather than simply reacting to a decision at the last moment.”
The fact that in both scenarios the brain followed the same path indicates that the process is very similar. Those who made decisions faster had scans that looked more similar to each other, even across scenarios, than those who made decisions more slowly.
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This suggests that whether there are real options or not isn’t really relevant, meaning that whether someone is really making a decision or just reacting to stimuli is unclear.
The implications of this, if it holds true across various studies, will have to be debated among philosophers, but it does seem to lend some credibility to the idea that there really isn’t ‘free will’ the way most people understand it.
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