Do we have free will?

What we do may not really be our own doing

It is a commonly held belief that humans have the ability to take decisions and act on their own volition. For long, neuroscientists such as Vilayanur S Ramachandran have argued against the validity of this notion of ‘free will’; and now, a new study in America suggests that the consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, striking only after a person has acted.

The study, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience by researchers of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, reports that the decisions or choices an individual makes can actually be predicted by observing patterns of brain activity even before a choice is made. What is popularly taken as ‘free will’, the researchers contend, could well be the outcome of ‘background noise’ or electrical activity in the brain.

For the study, the researchers sat 19 volunteers in front of a screen and asked them to focus their attention at its centre. The participants— wired to an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine to record the electrical activity of their brains—were then asked to decide whether to look left or right when a cue symbol appeared on the screen. This symbol appeared randomly, and since the participants had no knowledge of when or where on the screen the cue would appear, they were unable to consciously or unconsciously prepare for it. The researchers found that the pattern of activity in the second or so before the cue symbol appeared, which was even before they knew they were going to make a choice, could accurately predict the outcome of the decision.

The result of the study raises profound questions about what constitutes human volition and how much of a decision is predetermined. The authors write in the journal, ‘This finding provides evidence for a mechanistic account of decision- making by demonstrating that ongoing neural activity biases voluntary decisions about where to attend within a given moment.’

The lead researcher, Dr Jesse Bengson, told the website IFLScience, “A broader implication of this finding is that the appearance of free will, as manifested through seemingly arbitrary cognitive decisions, may be a consequence of the role that inherent variability in brain activity plays in biasing momentary behaviour.”

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