Came accross this paper at IO9 not being an academic blog it appears that IO9 have somewhat garbled the message but was wondering if anybody with access past the paywall could shed more light on this research.
I don't know much at all about the workings of the brain but, does anyone think Michael Schumacher waited up to 10 seconds between the need for a decision and the choice?We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness.
Perhaps he operated on trained reactions and not conscious decisions?
I don't know.
I don't have access to the full paper, but I suspect a typo. It's pretty well established that many, probably all, seemingly concious descisions are actually preceeded by unconcious brain activity. This is actually exactly what should be expected, since conciousness is simply an emergent property of the brain's functioning. However, everything I have read about it in the past suggests times in milliseconds, and since most descisions must take much less than 10 seconds, I suspect this abstract is just missing an "m".
From the science blog it says: "In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally researchers look at what happens when the decision is made, but not atwhat happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is a astonishing finding."
This is quite different from, say, reacting to a sensory stimulus which is much quicker. If something is about to hit you, your body will (hopefully) already have decided to step out of the way before you are even consciously aware of the problem. In that case your senses, which detect the problem, feed directly into an unconscious part of your brain where a decision is taken ('instinctively') quickly. Your consciousness is informed of what is going on almost as an after thought. If this didn't happen your reactions would be too slow, with possibly bad consequences.
Deciding which button to push, and remembering it, obviously goes takes much longer, according to the results shown in this paper. It appears that informing the consciousness of what is going on is even more of an after thought. I guess it is not such a survival issue.
Last edited by Mulder; 16th April 2008 at 10:15 AM.
That research may have some implications for Dean Radin's theories which got an airing on This Thread .....
I have to say, when I saw this pop up in my io9 RSS feed I was quite sceptical of the 10-second claim. My only background in this area was a few years ago at the start of my undergraduate degree, when I happened to read some research on intentionality (from the 80s I think) for an essay on artificial intelligence. The findings there were that there were detectable changes in the subject's brain around half a second before they became aware of the decision to move their finger.
After reading a few things on this new research that are far better-written than the io9 article, I think it's pretty kosher. The original io9 item was definitely misleading though - they do tend to get overexcited at some things and end up misrepresenting the research. I may give the full research article a read at some point if I have the time.
But in summary, I'd say Mulder's got it - the misleading aspect of the io9 article was that it seemed to suggest that this research applies to all brain activity, whereas it only to apply to such leisurely decisions as deciding which of two buttons to push.
Fair enough. To be honest, the part I find most surprising isn't that it takes so long for the concious mind to be informed what it's going to do, but that the brain ever takes so long between making a descision and actually acting on it.Originally Posted by Mulder
The whole concept of time lapses between the different bits of the brain and nervous system suggests interesting possibilities regarding pre-cognition. Could your brain sense something, and then when your conscious self catches up with the input, you have a "memory" of sensing the event and think the first sensing took place much longer ago than it did?
Does that make any sense? I don't think I expressed myself very well (chorus of agreement!)
A good example of the slowness of the nervous system we must all have experienced : you put your hand under a hot tap and you know damn well it's too hot and is going to hurt. Then, a fraction of a second later, it does. Or maybe I just have a very slow nervous system.
...but you've already responded by moving your hand.
There's a lapse between perception and awareness of perception. They're two different things. One of the dilemmas of philosophy, psychology and evolution, is: whaat purpose- if any- does consciousness serve? Does it actually exist or is it a perceptual illusion?
^^ I go with the perceptual illusion myself, but then again i did do a lot of acid in my teens
It is entirely possible conciousness is 10 secs behind reality if we go with einsteins model of a fixed unfolding universe, but why 10 seconds? why not five seconds?, or even five years?, sounds a bit to much like supposition IMO
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