

The ancient debate over free will cen­ters on whether it’s an il­lu­sion to be­lieve our thoughts and de­ci­sions are in­de­pend­ent, since our brains really con­sist of atoms bouncing around ac­cord­ing to their own rules. The new study suggests the questioning many be justified.

April 15, 2008
Courtesy Nature Journals
and World Science staff


Infographic Illustrating Free Will Experiment (Nature Neuroscience)

Infographic Source:

Re­search­ers tracked brain ac­ti­vity while peo­ple viewed a stream of let­ters on screen, and then pressed a but­ton. Each par­ti­ci­pant was asked to de­cide freely which of two but­tons to press and when to press it.Scan­ning the brains with a tech­nique called func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance im­ag­ing, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors used a sta­tis­ti­cal meth­od known as pat­tern rec­og­ni­tion to ex­am­ine brain ac­ti­vity as­so­ci­at­ed with each choice. Ac­ti­vity in two brain re­gions, called the pre­fron­tal and pa­ri­e­tal cor­tex, pre­dicted which but­ton the per­son would press, they found. These ar­eas have pre­vi­ously been linked to self-re­flec­tion, se­lec­tion amongst choices and ex­ec­u­tive con­trol.This ac­ti­vity oc­curred up to 10 sec­onds be­fore sub­jects were con­sciously aware of hav­ing made a de­ci­sion, ac­cord­ing to the re­search­ers. The find­ings, they added, sug­gest high-lev­el con­trol ar­eas start to pre­pare an up­com­ing de­ci­sion long be­fore it en­ters con­scious awareness. The stu­dy, by John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Hu­man Cog­ni­tive and Brain Sci­ences in Leip­zig, Ger­ma­ny and col­leagues, is pub­lished on­line this week in the re­search jour­nal Na­ture Neu­ro­sci­ence.


Bob Butterfield

Radical Utilitarian
Before I die, I will abolish all unnecessary suffering on earth by replacing our corrupt governmental institutions with a system of crowd-sourced direct democracy described at This rational resource allocation system will redirect money currently spend on various types of warfare to positive endeavors such as commercial in vitro meat and life-extension technologies. However, in order to take control of the levers of world power from the psychopaths and idiots which currently wield them will require that we first eradicate mental illness by crowdsourcing positive psychology research In order to abolish suffering, we much first abolish politics. In order to abolish politics, we must first abolish mental illness.