Sometimes consciousness can say no to the brain.
Are we moving our hand at will? In 1973, the American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet decided to test what seemed to be beyond doubt. He attached EEG sensors to the subjects' heads to record excitement in the cerebral cortex. And to the arm - wires of an electromyograph to measure muscle tension. And he gave them a simple task: to bend a hand at the wrist and mark on the timer the moment when they decided to do it.
If we make movements of our own free will, then the sequence should be as follows: a conscious decision - stimulation of the motor cortex - muscle contraction. But the devices recorded another: the motor cortex was ready for hand movement half a second before a conscious decision. Subsequent experiments using MRI increased the lag of consciousness to a second and showed that the parts of the brain responsible for making decisions begin to network into a network even earlier. Based on the activity of only 256 neurons, the computer can predict our solution with 80 percent accuracy seven seconds before we ourselves realize it.
Scheme of the Libet experiment: an increase in readiness potential (BP) in the motor cortex of the brain - awareness of the decision (W) - hand movement (Action).
“We do not know what kind of unconscious mental processes are hidden behind the preparedness potential. The position of conscious will on the timeline seems to suggest that the sensation of volition is a link in a causal chain leading to action, but in fact this may not be so,”psychologist Daniel Wegner comments on the results of this experience in the book The Illusion of Conscious Will. …
Consciousness does not command the decision-making process, but is the last to know about it. Where does the feeling that we decide everything comes from?
This is just an illusion that arises due to the fact that the processes prior to making a decision are hidden from us.
Explaining the phenomena of the external world, we are aware that their causes are for the most part unknown to us. When assessing the reasons for our actions, we always proceed from the false premise that we know everything about ourselves, says the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. The mere fact that your body made a movement is usually enough to take it for a manifestation of your own will.
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How this happens was shown by the experiments of the neuroscientist Roger Sperry. In the 1960s, he performed operations on patients with epilepsy to cut the corpus callosum, the plexus of nerve fibers that connect the right hemisphere to the left. The division of the hemispheres was supposed to prevent the spread of excitation from the epileptic focus throughout the cortex. This happened, but with one side effect: the divided hemispheres began to behave like two different personalities. A patient with a "split brain" could, like the hero of a silent comedy movie, quickly unfasten the buttons with his right hand, which he buttoned in parallel with his left. At the same time, one person did not suspect the existence of the second. Therefore, he explained to himself the actions of the left hand as a manifestation of his will. It's his hand.
It is not only people with “split brains” who are capable of such mistakes. There are two indicative psychological phenomena: blindness of choice and blindness to blindness. Participants in one study were shown two photographs of girls and asked to choose the prettier one. Then they imperceptibly changed it to another and asked how they liked it. It's not even surprising that more than 70% did not notice the substitution and, as if nothing had happened, logically explained their choice. And the fact that after the deception was revealed to them, 84% refused to believe it and stood their ground.
If consciousness is capable of such tricks, it costs nothing to convince us that we make all decisions. At such moments, as Freud believed, it looks like not even an illusionist, but a circus clown who distracts the audience from changing the scenery, pretending that the actions of the technical staff in the arena are performed at his will. Although in fact everything was decided behind the scenes of consciousness. But by whom?
In thrillers there is such a technique - anagnorisis. A moment of truth when an epiphany suddenly descends on the character: everything is not at all what it seems. Remember the movie "Others"? The heroine in the finale realizes: she does not live in a haunted house, but a ghost herself. This discovery produces approximately the same effect: it is not we who control the brain, it controls us. Consciousness is just a function of the brain. One of many. And not the most important one. So unimportant, in fact, that the brain turns it off every night and makes decisions for us in our sleep without any problems. Now 100 billion neurons in my brain, connected by a hundred trillion synapses, are typing this text on the keyboard with my fingers and already know the next thought, which I will realize in a second. And here she is: we don't want to feel like a helpless ghost in our own home. Maybe,with the illusion of free will, consciousness tries to save us from this reality.
But are there such obvious manifestations of will as the decision to quit smoking? You accepted it. Or not?
Robert Sapolsky jokes that free will can only be in the smallest issues: "If you insist that this morning you yourself decided to start brushing your teeth from the top row, and not from the bottom, so be it." The decision to quit smoking is not one of those. That the brain controls us is only half the truth. With the help of a relatively simple neuroimplant, it is possible to turn a living mouse into a biorobot, which, upon command from a computer, also makes one “decision” after another. You do not have a neuroimplant, but the most important thing in your life is controlled by millions of factors beyond your control.
“You have not chosen your parents, nor the time and place of birth, nor gender, nor genome,” says American neuroscientist Sam Harris. You did not create social pressure for yourself, did not evoke the fear of death in yourself, did not try to learn the warning on a pack of cigarettes, did not decide to feel tachycardia and remember that you are no longer twenty. In the endless chain of reasons that led to the decision to quit smoking, a tiny moment - 100 milliseconds - was reserved for the exercise of your will.
Exactly so much time we have after realizing the decision made by the brain to veto its execution. We cannot move our hand of our own free will, but we can not move it at our will. This one more Libet discovery confirmed at once two seemingly distant concepts. The theory of Freud, who believed that the main function of consciousness is to supplant unacceptable impulses. And the idea of meditation, according to which awareness is the ability to clear the mind of unnecessary thoughts.
Quitting smoking or starting to run does not mean saying yes to this decision, because the brain will accept it without your approval. It means being aware of that urge and not saying no to it. But the most important thing is to resist the thousands of urges to smoke or not to run, to which you cannot say no if you consider them to be a manifestation of your free will.
Author: Sergey Pankov