Who Really Makes Your Decisions?

Raise your hand, whenever you want. It feels like you just made that decision yourself. Your brain began the movement before you found out about it. When people were wired up to electrodes and the real order of events was examined, it turned out to be the reverse of what your entire life assumes. The act comes first. The feeling that you chose it comes after. SOURCES: Libet et al. (1983) — readiness potential precedes conscious intention; the "free won't" concept Fried, Mukamel, Kreiman, Neuron (2011) — single neurons predict movement before awareness Soon, Brass, Heinze, Haynes, Nature Neuroscience (2008) — choice predicted up to 7s early (~60% accuracy) Johansson, Hall et al., Science (2005) — choice blindness; 84% missed the swap Gazzaniga — the "interpreter" (split-brain research) Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002) — artificially inducing the sense of authorship Schurger, Sitt, Dehaene, PNAS (2012) — readiness potential as noise, not decision Schultze-Kraft et al., PNAS (2016) — veto works up to a point of no return ~200ms Maoz, Koch, Mudrik, eLife (2019) — the signal vanishes for decisions that matter #freewill #brain #psychology #neuroscience #consciousness #darkpsychology