It seems that researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin have come up with some interesting results regarding how the human decision-making process works.
“Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions, we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings,” says Professor John-Dylan Haynes, whose group used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made.
Contrary to what most of us would like to believe, decision making may be a process handled to a large extent by unconscious mental activity. As much as several seconds before we consciously make a decision, its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain.
In the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their minds. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take up to seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally, researchers look at what happens when the decision is made, but not at what happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is an astonishing finding.
More than 20 years ago the American brain scientist, Benjamin Libet, found a brain signal, the so-called “readiness-potential” that occurred a fraction of a second before a conscious decision. Libet’s experiments were highly controversial and sparked a huge debate. Many scientists argued that if our decisions are prepared unconsciously by the brain, then our feeling of “free will” must be an illusion. In this view, it is the brain that makes the decision, not a person’s conscious mind. Libet’s experiments were particularly controversial because he found only a brief delay between brain activity and the conscious decision.
In contrast, Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts — as much as seven seconds ahead of time — how a person is going to decide. But Haynes also warns that the study does not finally rule out free will: “Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed.
So how can I apply this information from a health standpoint, you may ask. Well, in my opinion, whether we make decisions based on our unconscious or not, in more complex decision-making requirements than whether we are going to use the right or left hand, the unconscious has to get information and training from somewhere in order to have a basis on which to formulate the pre-decision unconscious brain work. The application for this information is to train your brain as well as possible in a positive, ethical, life-affirming direction. That way, the “unconscious” decisions will take you in the direction you want to go.
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Disclaimer: The purpose of this weblog is not to dispense medical advice nor in any way is meant to be construed as diagnostic or prescriptive. Always check with your physician before beginning any new program or trying any of the items discussed in the posts that appear on this site.
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