The impression of being capable of
freely choosing between different opportunities is one of the strongest certainties
we have. However, every day more new experiments show us that
in reality this feeling of freedom is nothing more than an illusion, given
that many of our decisions are determined by stimuli that come to us
from the surrounding environment and, above all, from the mental process at the level of unconscious.
Now, John Dylan Haynes, researcher
at the University of Leipzig, states that our decisions are codified
from the unconscious long before we realize our intentions.
In other words, our unconscious already knows what decision we will make even though
however, we ourselves do not perceive it on a conscious level. To reach these conclusions Haynes
performed an experiment in which he recorded the electrical activity of the brain
while subjecting people to a very simple test: they had to
simply press a button chosen at random between two. When they received the order
to act, people had to freely choose whether they wanted to press the
right or left button. The curious fact was represented by the
the fact that the conscious decision to press the button was preceded (in
terms of milliseconds) from a negative potential in the brain called “preparation
potential ", which originates in the complementary motor area (a region of the
brain involved in the preparation of motor action). In other words, our brains do
prepared for action long before the person consciously took the
decision to do so, which leads Haynes to hypothesize that ours
unconscious makes some decisions for us, perhaps many more than it does
we are willing to accept. Obviously, this experiment has
raised many questions. For this reason the researchers continued,
developing new studies that purport to shed new light on this
phenomenon. Predicting decisions is no longer an unattainable dream Haynes performed a second experiment
whose goal was to determine which brain regions are involved
in conscious decisions and at what specific moment the response is triggered
physical education. Subjects were asked to relax
while they had to stare at a screen on which a series of
letters. At any time, when they wanted, they could press one of the
two buttons (the decision which button to press was free). In the same
time, people had to remember the letter that appeared on the screen
when they made the decision. Obviously, they were later asked to point out
what the letter was and then the exercise was repeated once more,
letting a lapse of time pass between one test and another. The curious side was
that nearly 90% of conscious decisions were reported only 1
millisecond before the button was pressed. That is, people decided
and they only needed 1 millisecond to act accordingly. Anyway, the researchers
they spotted another fact. In practice, they discovered two brain areas that
they could "reveal" with great accuracy whether people would press the
right or left button, even before the same person
announced that he had made his decision. The first region was the fronto cortex
polar who warned 10 seconds in advance, long before the person
make his conscious decision. The second region is located in the
parietal cortex and is like a band extending from the precuneus to the cingulate cortex
rear. Furthermore, these zones were activated long before the motor area
complementary. But… what does all this mean? These results show us that behind
to conscious decisions, there is a brain process that we could call "unconscious"
and that anticipates the answer up to 10 seconds before we know it ourselves.
Furthermore, the researchers are confident that this brain activation does not
corresponds to a period of preparation for the activity or response but
rather that it is a real decision-making form (or at least one
sort of decoding of the decision already taken). Finally, maybe our decisions don't
they are so conscious and maybe we should re-evaluate Freud's work.
