|
Fifty years without free will| old_uid | 13972 |
|---|
| title | Fifty years without free will |
|---|
| start_date | 2017/05/29 |
|---|
| schedule | 11h |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| details | Invited by the AVoC team |
|---|
| summary | How are actions initiated by the human brain when there is no external sensory cue or other immediate imperative? Much is understood about how the brain decides between competing alternatives, leading to different behavioral responses. But far less is known about how the brain decides "when" to perform an action, or "whether" to perform an action in the first place, especially in a context where there is no sensory cue to act such as during foraging. More than fifty years ago, in 1965, scientists discovered a slow buildup of neural activity that precedes the onset of spontaneous self-initiated movements (movements made without any cue telling you when to move). This buildup was dubbed the "readiness potential" (RP) or bereitschaftspotential, and has since been confirmed at the single-neuron level. For decades it has been assumed to reflect a process of "planning and preparation for movement". In the 1980s the RP was used to argue that we do not have conscious free will, beca!
use it appears to begin even before we are aware of our own conscious decision to act. Now we and others have challenged the long-standing interpretation of the RP by showing that the early part of the RP might reflect sub-threshold random fluctuations in brain activity that have an influence on the precise moment that the movement begins. These fluctuations thus appear as part of the "signal" when we analyze the data time-locked to the time of movement onset. This insight leads to novel and testable predictions concerning both objective (brain signals and behavior) and subjective (the perceived time of the conscious intention) phenomena, and also exposes serious limitations of the age-old practice of working with movement-locked data epochs. |
|---|
| responsibles | Rämä, Izard |
|---|
| |
|