Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking

WSJdpatton writes "Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision — an eternity at the speed of thought. Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice, writes WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz."

Comments

10 seconds.

[YttriumOxide]

I'm not sure I can accept this... Primarily because I generally make a decision less than 10 seconds after receiving the final piece of information that I will use to make the decision - often, it's even less than 10 seconds after I knew I had a decision to make. So, how can I have made it before I knew I had to make it? I think the article needs to clarify their definition of "decision".

Re:10 seconds.

[oodaloop]

Well, give yourself a little more time and think it over, then maybe you'll accept it.

Re:10 seconds.

[John_Sauter]

The major experiment uses a flawed definition of "decision". If I were the subject it might take me several seconds of unconscious cogitation to formulate a plan: when the next letter flashes I will press the left button, for example. The real decision is made below the level of consciousness, so the letter recorded is the one shown when the action is started, not the one shown when the decision-making process is started.

This is similar to driving a car. When you are driving to a well-known destination, when do you "decide" to turn the steering wheel to enter the parking lot? At the conscious level you decide when you see the driveway, and that there is no traffic in your way. The real decision, however, is made as part of the plan to drive to your destination, which may have been decided minutes or hours earlier.

The experiment is really about the unconscious part of the decision-making process. That is interesting, but it has nothing to do with free will, since our unconscious is as much a part of us as our conscious.

Re:10 seconds.

[kripkenstein]

I'm not sure I can accept this...

You don't need to, because it isn't true. The research is (shock!) misrepresented.

In a particular type of task, they could predict with 70% accuracy which hand would be used 10 seconds ahead of time. That's the evidence for the summary.

What this shows is that, in this sort of task, some 'unconscious impulse' precedes the action. In this particular task the impulse predicted correctly 70% of the time (note that even that isn't amazingly high, since 50% you get by random choice). Now, this might be very different with other decisions. For example, the impulse might be right only 55% of the time in other areas, perhaps because the conscious brain overrides it ("I shouldn't eat that; I'll order a salad instead.").

That said, it's very nice research (when not misrepresented), and important. We're only starting to figure out how the brain works, we'll probably change our theories about it several times before we hit it right.

A final note: The article is a little populist in treating it as 'surprising' that the unconscious is so important. But this was well-known in academia for a long time. The basic finding is that we are conscious of the products of thought, not the processes. That is, when you play Doom, you don't directly see what makes you decide to use a particular weapon at a particular time. What you do directly sense is that this is a good thing to do, and you do it. Now, sometimes you can make explicit the underlying process - e.g., "I should go over there because it's safer, and a weapon should spawn nearby also" - but this elaboration was not fully present before. There are few cases in which thought processes are entirely explicit, logic and mathematics perhaps the best examples (and even they are not 'purely' conscious).

Re:10 seconds.

[Jay L]

I'm very sure I can't accept it. Having studied various martial arts for the past 30 years, I can tell you with certainty that I can engage in action the instant I decide

I, too, am manly and decisive, with lightning-fast reflexes.

Re:10 seconds.

[mysticgoat]

I don't agree with several aspects of parent post, but I do agree that TFA's introduction of "free will" into the discussion is a red herring.

The experiments show some very interesting things about the mind's mechanisms, in particular about the relationship of the self-aware, language-using part— call it "ego"— to the parts that do not have direct access to language and might not directly interact with the world. But author of TFA seems to be working with an outdated, simple model that places the ego at the top of the decision hierarchy. Which raises the question of free-will since with this model it appears that the top of the pyramid is being dictated to by mechanistic events happening in lower parts of the mind.

Bob Newhart had a show in the 1980s (Newhart) which introduced the comedic trio of Larry, and his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl. Larry was the only one who spoke or directly interacted with the other characters: Darryl and Darryl were always hanging back, witnessing the action but never participating (although the audience was able to see their reactions to events). But when a decision was called for, the three would go into a quick huddle and then Larry would state what the decision was. IIRC, at least once in the series he said something like "I like the idea, but my brother Daryl didn't like it so we won't do it."

There are good reasons to believe that our minds are organized the same way: that the part of the self we are conscious of is the spokesman for very close siblings who happen to share a single body, and our decisions are all group decisions. There is no restriction on the possibility of free will in this: whether the group is constrained in its choices cannot be determined (at least at this time). The spokesman is of course constrained by the group's decision, and that part may or may not understand all the factors that led to a given decision. But that doesn't negate the free will of the group.

This model supports the research findings, where instrumentation was able to deduce something about the non-verbal deciders seconds before the spokesman had finished polling his sibs. It also can explain the way someone astute in reading non-verbal cues can make very good guesses about what an individual will decide to do, sometimes before that person is himself aware of his decision.

Re:10 seconds.

[Xyrus]

Yeah, you're girlfriend told me. The manly and decisive part is ok, but the lightning fast part, not so much.

~X~

I believe it.

[zippthorne]

A common trick I like to do to figure out what I'm thinking:

If I'm having trouble deciding something, I flip a coin. Then, I go with the side I was hoping would come up.

Re:I believe it.

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

And if your decision requires more than a yes/no answer? Do you use a 64-sided die and assign a choice to each side, and then memorize those assignments?

Re:I believe it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. Don't you? :)

Re:I believe it.

[trolltalk.com]

I used to do the same thing.

This study doesn't bring anything new to the table - we've known for a LOOOONG time that what we perceive as "consciousness" is really more akin to a "ghost in the machine."

What is important, however, is that, despite all this, we can actually, with enough thought, make decisions based on logic, as opposed to "feelings" or "what we think is reasonable."

Most of what we do, we do on "autopilot", and our consciousness re-orders the stream of events so that we believe we "decided" to do what we did. Classic example - think of any time when you jammed on the brakes because of someone who rushed in front of the car ... and think back, and you'll realize that you already had braked before you even were aware of the person, because even the half-second lag between perception and stepping on the brake pedal would have been too long.

Re:I believe it.

[rnswebx]

What is important, however, is that, despite all this, we can actually, with enough thought, make decisions based on logic, as opposed to "feelings" or "what we think is reasonable."

That's a lot of commas.

Re:I believe it.

[trolltalk.com]

Your foot is on the brake well before you're aware that the person is there. Otherwise, they'd be road pizza.

It's possible to completely bypass any "consciousness".

One of the earliest reports was about a guy whose skull was cleaved open with an ice axe. They shoved his brains back in, and he "recovered." He would get up, wash, get dressed, go to work, etc. --- but there was "nobody home". All identity had disappeared. He was just an automaton.

Conscious decision-making, or even awareness, isn't necessary for most activities once they're learned.

Not a threat to sentience...

[Fustican]

The test the article discusses seems rather arbitrary -- letters streaming across a screen, and you decide when to press a button. Perhaps what they detected was the buildup of boredom? Analyzing complex inputs and reasoning to a decision is a far more complex thing. In any case, I'm not convinced that all my decisions are predetermined by fate or particle physics.

Re:Not a threat to sentience...

[Robert1]

From personal experience this is a very likely to be the case. In college when I participated in random psych experiments, as required by the class, I would notice gaping errors in testing that completely tainted the results.

Example: I signed up for 1/2 hour experiment, I get there and the tell me it's an hour long and I will be analyzing erotic art with a female student. They emphasized that, which I thought was pretty unnecessary and odd, and there was no girl in the waiting room with me before the experiment. Anyway I put all this together and figured it was just a fake-out and that I wasn't going to be doing any actual analysis. Sure enough the researcher comes in and says "ok she will be coming in soon, rearrange the tables and chairs how you like." Uhuh, yeah this isn't contrived. Anyway I intentionally put the chairs right next to each other just to be contrary, because at this point it was beyond ridiculous to keep playing along. Anyway then they came in, took pictures of the chairs, and told me it was all a trick to see how I would position them - WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED?!

Anyway, almost all the experiments I did had some kind of fatal flaw in it. I had another one - similar to what you're talking about - in which I was told to look at various numerical matrices which were then taken away and I was asked to answer 5 timed-questions about it. If I finished the question block a new matrix showed up, but the questions were complicated enough that I often could not even finish them before the timer ran out. This went on for ONE HOUR. After 10 minutes I was mentally exhausted and just putting in whatever for answers to get through all my blocks as fast as possible - I had totally stopped caring. At this point I also assumed that this must be the actual experiment - to gauge exhaustion. But no, when the researcher came in he thanked me and that's it - if it had been another experiment he would have had to tell me.

So unless we see the entire experimental procedure written down, it's impossible to determine if their findings were legitimately obtained. Unlike other disciplines, psych/neuro results are particular susceptible to improper experimental procedure. Like you say, they could have just detected boredom.

All women do this

[BenEnglishAtHome]

I've never met a sane woman who took more than 10 seconds to decide she'd NEVER sleep with me.

This is news?

Lag!!

[NovaHorizon]

Hah! I knew the gamers that complain about 500Ms lag were full of it!

They haven't even become aware of their decision to shoot within that space of time!

headline does not describe the conclusions

[petes_PoV]

The article states that the testers (only!) tested 14 people. The subjects pressed a button whenever they felt like it. The testers could see some tell-tales up to 10 seconds before the button was pressed.

All this really tells us that when we think we're making a random action, we really commit to it some time beforehand. It only tells when people make a random decision - not what the choice is

bad reporting.

Snip FTA...

[Anonymous Coward]

They monitored the swift neural currents coursing through the brains of student volunteers as they decided, at their own pace and at random, whether to push a button with their left or right hands.

But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of the researcher: are you the sort of man who would press the button on the left or on the right? Now, a clever man would press the button on the left, because he would know that only a great fool would press the button on the right. I am a great fool, so I can clearly not press the button on the right. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not press the button on the right.

Researcher: You've made your decision then?

Not remotely! Because these buttons come from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not press the button on the left.

Researcher: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

WAIT TILL I GET GOING! Where was I?

Researcher: Australia.

Yes, Australia. And you must have suspected I would have known the buttons' origin, so I can clearly not press the button on the right.

Researcher: You're just stalling now.

You'd like to think that, wouldn't you?

Sure..

[rickb928]

This explains hitting a 90mph fastball.

I know, the instantaneous response (Wait 10 seconds here please) is that you decided to play, go to the park, get suited up, report to the manager, select your bat, go to the batter's box, choose your stance, raise your bat to position, and then chose to swing it the pitch were where you expected or would accept it, etc etc etc.

Apparently this 10 second thing is for some decisions, those that require thought. Like whether to believe any of this 10 seond hooey.

Systems analysis. If you look far enough up the chain, it becomes one thing. Look too far down, and it gets all complicated and difficult, and can't be so easily understood. Makes you sleepy.