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Neuroscientists Have Isolated The Part Of The Brain That Controls Free Will (extremetech.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we've cracked the problem with an fMRI. Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins report in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that they were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision -- how activity in the brain changes during the deliberation over whether to act. The team devised a novel way to track a participant's focus without using cues or commands, avoiding a Schrodinger's-like dilemma of altering the process of choice by calling attention to it. Participants took positions in MRI scanners, and then were left alone to watch a split screen as rapid streams of colorful numbers and letters scrolled past on both sides. They were asked just to pay attention to one side for a while, then to the other side. When to switch sides, and for how long to look, was entirely up to them. Over the duration of the experiment, the participants glanced back and forth, switching sides dozens of times. In terms of connectivity in the brain, the actual process of switching attention from one side to the other was tightly linked with activity in the parietal lobe, which is sort of the top back quadrant of the brain. Activity during the period of deliberation before a choice took place in the frontal cortex, which engages in reasoning and plans movement. Deliberation also lit up the basal ganglia, important parts of the deep brain that handle motor control, including the initiation of motion. Participants' frontal-lobe activity began earlier than it would have if participants had been cued to shift attention, which demonstrates that the brain was planning a voluntary action rather than merely following an order. A report from Fast Company details how technology is making doctors feel like glorified data-entry clerks.
Somebody didn't get the memo about fMRI studies; fMRI right now is only about half a step away from being pseudo-science. What with sofware bugs rendering thousands of studies meaningless, and widespread methodological errors leading to voodoo correlations, any claim of a discovery based on fMRI right now should be taken with a bucket-sized pinch of salt.
The reason why free will is the province of philosophers (and theologians) is because it has nothing to do with neuroscience. What they're talking about in the summary is conscious thought, not free will. Free will is the ability to influence your environment by your own volition, independent from the inexorable march of time or destiny or god's plan. Consciousness is your ability to think about how you're influencing your environment as you do it.
A report from Fast Company details how technology is making doctors feel like glorified data-entry clerks.
To Slashdot editors: can we please stop with the unrelated crap?
Now, if we could only prove that free will actually exists, we would have something.
They really didn't show anything particularly new in the article. No important new information on brain function was gleaned. The interesting part was the involvement of the basal ganglia, which often get ignored when talking about higher brain functions. And you're right, it does not seem to have much of anything to do with free will. Just deciding to look at the left or right screen isn't free will, it is small-d decision making. Deciding to cut class and go fishing... that's free will.
Since everything we do is driven by our brain, free will, if it exists, must have something to do with neuroscience.
The idea that a part of the brain "controls free will" just because there is activity there when certain decisions are made is pretty dumb when you think about it.
Just because there is activity in my pants when I see pictures of naked women does not mean my pants control my sex drive.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Since everything we do is driven by our brain...
Is it? Or is the brain just the engine that something less tangible uses?
The science isn't in yet.