Australian scientists have confirmed that brain activity allows you to know the choice even before the person himself is aware of it.
The characteristic patterns of neural network activity in the brain have allowed scientists at the University of New South Wales to show that our brain makes the choice between the two alternatives long before we consciously make a decision. Roger Koenig-Robert and Joel Pearson write about this in an article published in Scientific Reports.
The authors conducted experiments with 14 healthy volunteers. They were placed in a tomograph, showing two images with patterns: one with red horizontal lines, the other with green vertical lines. Then the pictures went out, and the volunteers were given up to 20 seconds to mentally select one of them, signaling this by pressing a button, after which they were asked to represent the selected image as accurately as possible.
The resulting images did not interest the scientists: by registering weak changes in the blood flow, they tracked the activity of neurons during the very process of accepting activity. In several parts of the brain, patterns of activity were observed, corresponding to one or another choice. Moreover, based on the operation of these networks, the authors were able to predict a person's choice in advance, even before he realizes that he has made a decision. In the most spectacular case, neurophysiologists were able to predict the solution in this way in as much as 11 seconds.
It is worth noting that this is not the first work to show that our brain makes decisions before we ourselves realize it. However, the authors have not been able to achieve such impressive figures before. In the experiments of 2008, "predictions" could be made a maximum of four seconds before realization, and in 2011 - in 10 seconds.
Sergey Vasiliev