Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Find Brain Cells Linked to Choice
An anonymous reader writes "Scotsman.com is reporting that Harvard Medical researchers may have found the neurons, or brain cells, that play a role in a persons ability to choose between different items. From the article: 'Scientists have known that cells in different parts of the brain react to attributes such as color, taste or quantity. Dr Camillo Padaoa-Schioppa and John Assad, an associate professor of neurobiology, found neurons involved in assigning values that help people to make choices.'"
I personally feel that there are so many "disorders" these days, that people often find a crutch for every vice and desire. Instead of working tochange for the better, people say "That's the way I am... I can't change."
Some of these people may think this article proves that thought. I for one, feel it supports the opposite.
From the article:
"The monkey's choice may be based on the activity of these neurons," said Padoa-Schioppa. Earlier research involving the OFC showed that lesions in the area seem to have an association with eating disorders, compulsive gambling and unusual social behaviour. The new findings show an association between the activity of the OFC and the mental valuation process underlying choice behaviour, according to the scientists."
I think people still have choices regardless of the addiction they suffer from (OCD disorders, Serial Killer, Gambling, etc.) A person doesn't HAVE TO Gamble, but it feels that way. He doesn't HAVE TO wash his hands 5 times, but he thinks he does.
These abnormalities or "lesions" in our brains may make us feel we do not have a choice. In reality if we are honest with ourselves and we work hard to overcome these urges, we can overcome almost any adversity, vice or compulsion.
Funnypics
How about putting electrodes in these areas and forcing these macaque monkeys to choose grape over apple juice? That would really prove it.
First thing we do, we find out which cell is responsible for making guys choose to wear pink shirts.
Every guy who has an active pink-shirt cell then gets neutered (or would they technically requiring spaying?).
brain cells linked to choice Wow and I always thought it was the lung cells that determine choice.
Are these the same guys that linked a study of sounds to your ears? Simply Amazing.
Let me know when they find the part that makes stupid choices for me so I can have it removed
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
It's time for the age-old debate about man's free will. Does it exist, or are we just kidding ourselves? Is the consciousness an intact "entity" within the brain, or is it simply the end result of external stimuli influencing choices? One thing is for sure: neuroscience is making it more difficult for a spirit to hide in our mushy insides. Eventually, we'll know for sure how the brain works. For now, we are stuck with debating the definitions of words like soul, freedom, consciousness, etc...
For neurobiologist the debate is long over. IF they are scientific worth their salt they won't presuppose the existence of a "supplemental entity" like soul to explain our "selves", that is unless somebody bring the data which can't be explained without this so called "soul". hasn't happenned so far. Neurobiologist leave "soul" and other of those to religion and philosophy. As for free will, Since "we" are the sum of all our chemical reaction in the brain (again if you want to bring a 3rd identity in play like soul or conscience bring the data to prove it with), there is no such things as free will, only the illusion that those reaction give to the mass of neuron constituing that "we".
Bottom line is the debate is over, unless you bring data and evidence to the contrary, not explainable within current frame. Good luck on that...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Shouldnt memory play a role in this?
.. I thought that also could be expressed in the earlier way mentioned.
I was under the impression that memory (basically hippocampus and amygdala) was the reason we chose items.
For example -
Grape - Appropriate synapses of the looks of the grape colour,look etc all get burned up in hippocampus
Also, when we eat it - the synapses for amygdala set for pleasure also gets set up.
Also a combination path way neuron for both also gets hardened due to electrons going there - (in hippocampus).
Now next time I see a grape, this compination path gets a signal when we see a grape - so a signal goes to the other one (for pleasure also), thus the memory of pleasurable experience when a grape is eaten comes to me.
This is memory.
Now, for a choice, depending on the amount of pleasure, my synapses fire more and I go for that.
For example - if there is bittergourd and grape, I will go for grape only.
I thought the monkeys choice depended on these neurons rather than the one they speak about.
Or is this the intelligent choice they are talking about - where in I go for bittergourd instead due to the higeher nutrition content ???
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
The Y chromosome must have the directions for that portion of the brain. My wife can't decide on anything.
It seems to me that, for the average person, this would play a small part in actually making choices...most incorrect choices tend to be made due to incomplete information, selfishness (including refusing to hear others opinions or accept advice), or denial of what is known or true.
Sure, these neurons may be involved in the process of making judgements, but if the person does not understand or refuses to accept the choice, he is setting himself up for failure before the brain even gets to this step.
I agree with some of the other posters that this discovery may be misused as an excuse for poor choices and behaviors that the individual has an inkling may be incorrect. But, I hope we come to our senses and start taking personal responsibility for our lives, instead of making biological and societal excuses for everything that "goes wrong".
There have been many fascinating finds in this field over just the last couple of years, from the discovery that you can externally trigger feelings of volition to be associated with artificially stimulated actions (i.e. make you feel like you CHOSE to move your arm, when in fact it was the scientists stimulating your nerves), to the discovery that religious ecstasy can be likewise triggered.
In all of this, I've always been confused by those that suggest that human consciousness is better explained by a soul or free will. As far as I can tell, neither "Free Will" nor "soul" actually explain ANYTHING about conscious volition. Certainly, conscious experience is a philosophical mystery: what is it, and why is it? Nobody knows. But simply referencing some random word like "soul" and noting that it is supernatural doesn't explain anything. It's not that the rules of the natural world are too restrictive to allow "free will" or "conscious experience" to work. It's that we have no idea what they are or how they work at all. So positing some supernatural realm where anything is possible doesn't help, or advance our knowledge even a bit.
Free will is actually even more bizarre, because although many people claim we have it, no one seems able to actually define what it is or what difference having free will vs. not having it would make. In short, it appears that the concept is completely incoherent and self-contradictory. It's one thing to be free to make choices for yourself, according to your own volition. But that's not what the strong "Free Will" concept is: even computers can make choices for themselves. Strong Free Will posits that people somehow make choices independently of.... well what? Independently of their own natures? That makes no sense! If there isn't some underlying deterministic substrate to my choices, how can they be mine at all? How can I be responsible if you can't causally track my choices back to some "me."
In short, "Free Will" makes no sense as a concept, and offers no explanatory value for anything. It's SOLE purpose seems to be in theological arguments, a bit of handwaving to avoid having a designer be responsible for the nature of his own designs.
If this is valid, then the animals with the same neurological structure would make the same choices, right?
So far, all that's been shown is that damaging an area of the brain results in failures to react to certain distinguishing features.
Do monkeys with brain pattern X always choose apple juice? But monkeys with brain pattern Y always choose grape juice? And monkeys with brain pattern Z always choose orange juice?
The same with choosing to gamble. Why does someone choose ponies over blackjack?
Reading some of the /. comments on this story, I have to say that it's always interesting to see religious men trying too hard to associate Man with the divine as though we stand above and seperate from the natural world, but equally it's interesting to watch atheists try to find mankind wholly within nature as well. For as much as we want to call Man an animal (subject to an animal's exigencies and vicissitudes) we must admit that he is a curious sort of animal able to escape those forms of nature and create new configurations of need and choice.
I don't really have a point. I just find the whole matter of human will and spirit interesting.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
Are these the same monkeys that like Fritos?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you honestly believe you're not free, there are a number of things you might as well stop doing:
... why should the mere presense of any of these representations in physical instantiation imply any diminishment of your capacity to will? I'd rather say the more representations on the dashboard, the more the driver is freely in control.
1. Why do you consciously try to deliberate over any choices? If you are not free, that effort you're putting forth - to the extent, you know, that you have decided to try to deliberate, is at best an epiphenomenal waste. So why not save the effort? On the one hand, that epiphenomenal sense of your own agency can't really do anything in the physical world, right? On the other, for the epiphenomenal to exist it must be draining energy from the actually useful parts of the brain, which might be able to run their deterministic algorithm better if you weren't shunting that energy into the appearance of phenomenal consciousness, with its illusion of free agency and all that. So why not just give it up?
2. The next time you blame your girlfriend or boyfriend or boss for anything, why bother? After all, they have no freedom in what they do. It was all determined from the beginning of time (if not before). So why not just give it up?
3. When others of us say that we believe - no, we know that we are free agents, in ways that are beyond Newtonian causal physics (although not beyond some interpretations of quantum theory, e.g. Henry Stapp's or Roger Penrose's), it is absolutely determined that we will be saying these things. You could not possibly persuade us to freely change our minds through conscious deliberation on these questions. So why not just give it up?
What these experiments may show is that the weights of particular desires are represented in particular cells in particular regions. Did you think, for instance, that thirst wouldn't be represented somewhere in the brain? What they don't (and probably can't) show is that it is merely a certain "weight" of thirst, balanced against certain "weights" of other desires, that results in action in some deterministic way. Think of it like a dashboard. There's a certain "weight" of the gas running low, a certain "weight" of the speed you're going, a certain "weight" of the oil light coming on, and even the "weight" of how many miles are on the vehicle. None of these prevent your free operation of the wheel and pedals (until the gas runs out, or a cop stops you, or the engine blows a rod, or the transmission falls on the road). Why should a dashboard in the mind representing how thirsty you are, how horny you are, how clever you think you are with your doubting of the common sense about our freedom
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
We've known all along that there are brain cells linked to Choice. The question is whether there are any Pro-Life brain cells.
First I have to plug the Hofstadter books Godel, Escher, Bach, and to a lesser extent, Metamagical Themas. These books are as close to hard science as you're going to get talking about conciousness. Anyone with any interest in these topics really owes it to themselves to read these (sometimes challenging) books.
Anyways: I am a big fan of digging down and understanding everything we can about how our minds work. But I always had a fear that at some point we'd know that we were powerless machines who could do nothing but react deterministicly. And as a creative emotional person I didn't want that to be true. But after digging as far as I could, in I've come to peace with the idea that reductionism will not reveal the man behind the curtain, so to speak. Maybe I'll be proved wrong someday, but to me, loosely speaking, the combinations of uncertainty, incompleteness, chaos, and feedback effects result in the whole being greater than the sum of it's parts. I'm not saying that there's some magical soul that exists outside our physical selfs, but rather that there is some higher level network effect in complex systems such as our brain where something exists on top of the physical parts, is wholly made from them, but is only loosely determined by them. That is the "I" to me.
Cheers.
Mindware isn't soul IMHO.Soul is probably a bootloader for Mindware OS: skills are applications,data is knowledge,memory is storage,reflexes are drivers,etc.Soul could be in some EM field form attached to one of organs and/or bootup routine replicated in DNA.
I chose not to RTFA.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
According to some research consciousness is something that comes *after* the rest of your brain already made the choice. So you can't do anything consciously to begin with.
You're talking about Libet's well-known research, and mischaracterizing it. In his experiment people have already decided to move their arm, in cooperation with the researcher's request, at a "random" time. They're also watching a clock on a computer screen, and are to push a button at the time that they are aware of making the choice to move their arm. Meanwhile Libet is monitoring what he interprets as a "readiness potential" at a certain location in the brain, which is a good predictor of moving your arm. The finding is that the potential is there before the subject reports awareness of the volition relative to the clock. However, Libet also found that people can successfully decide not to move their arms even after the readiness potential was in evidence. These findings are still much debated. But what they do not show is anything about the efficacy of complex, conscious deliberations.
without defining "free" there is no way to talk about it in a meaningfull way
You're working from an old, bogus notion in philosophy that we must "define our terms" before we can talk about anything. It's a failed program. Terms don't get meaning that way. Rather, terms get meaning from context, and from overlay ("blending" is the technical term in modern cognitive linguistics) with other contexts. There are few if any things that we can define (1) without context, and (2) without being in some sense circular. Yet there are a great many things we can talk about in a meaningful way - although it depends who we're talking to. Still, most all of us know, from our contexts in life, what freedom is, and what it is to will something to happen. That you can befuddle yourself about what these words mean is nice; but we can befuddle ourselves about any word if we just repeat it to ourselves a few hundred times. And that's basically the whole trick about demanding a definition before allowing a discussion to proceed - with every repeated demand you're moving the word closer to that temporarily alienated state. But, since that can be done with any word, what you've done is just on the level of a psychological illusion, not a revelation of the ill-defined meaninglessness of whatever word you've targeted.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The converse is, you might have monkeys that are genetically different from each other, in different environments, always making the same choices (e.g., to always run away from the tiger instead of towards it). Would you conclude from that observation that the monkeys *don't* have "free will" (whatever that means)?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!