Well, that looks like its testing for the "instinct factor" then.


and here the first thing I think of is immediate physical reactions where information can sometimes go straight to and from the brain stem with no higher interaction. Though I don't where you draw the line on 'brain' in that situation.

Eh, well...Like I said, I can't claim to know much at all about any of this. For all I know, the test is right and our brain works six seconds faster than our conscious thought does. I wouldn't say it's a frightening or demoralizing prospect, though, since just like our conscious thoughts, our brains are all unique and function in different ways in a multitude of situations. I still think button pressing is a little on the simple side, though. Sure, it's easier to study, but it's also very predictable. When put in any sort of pressure situation where we must choose between two things that carry no personal meaning for us, there's going to be a pattern. Perhaps we favor right or left. Perhaps we'll decide to press left because we think we've pressed right enough times, etc.



Haha, yeah, I didn't exactly think that one through. Just excuse some of my ignorance. I'm trying my best to sound intelligent here. :whistling:

That can't be the case here because this is a delay of six seconds we're talking about. Reflexes don't take six seconds (they take somewhere between 0.3 and 0.6 seconds if my memory serves me right), if they did we'd all be long dead.


Not at all. Note the word "decision". He was asked to be concentrated on the task and to consciously decide which button to press, not to let his mind wander while his hands do the random button-pressing so to speak.

it wasnt meant to >_<

Is there any differentiation between buttons besides left and right?


And I don't particularly disagree with the results, I'm just wary that there is much more fine tuning needed.

[] and, with the reflex line of thinking, it takes longer and longer for initial reactions (such as A or B) to surface into their own cognitive decisions. So another interesting test would be sampling different time spans for the decision. Where a reaction might happen quick (baseball swing) and later you retract (more conscious) it

Have you watched the video I linked to? As far as I've gathered there isn't, but that is not important. What is important is that he had a feeling that he indeed is in the full control of which button he's going to press and that that is based on his own conscious decision and free will and that he presses a button as soon as he consciously chooses when and which one he'll press. What is shown here is that his conscious decision about when and which button to press has already been decided (at least) six seconds before he had the feeling of reaching the decision consciously and "of his own free will".

Ahh


Whatever the case, and completely unscientific here, I think choosing between an a and a b is a pretty unimportant decision for an exercise of free will, but maybe that is part of the point.

And therein lies my problem with the test. There appears to be no meaning behind either button. It may be true that we subconsciously make decisions before we consciously come to them, but things get much more complex on a personal level. This guy was asked to choose between two buttons. Outside of our neurons being faster than us, which is rather unsurprising, there's nothing really conclusive to draw from this. The test doesn't even come close to making me question free will at all. :shrug: In fact, the entire prospect of free will is the very reason we're even studying this. My brain is starting to hurt now, though.

Maybe I'm just putting too much thought into this. However, so is the documentary. I mean..psychology is such a confusing, endless expanse of things we may never understand that it seems nearly futile at times. It's like trying to focus on the broad side of a train as it passes directly in front of you.

Well every exercise of free will can be boiled down to choosing between an A and a B (and a C, D, E, F, etc.). I agree though that, as I've already said, choosing whether to press left or right button when neither one of them does anything and so there is not any kind of consequence no matter which of the two possibilities you choose is a rather mundane, unimportant decision and so the brain has no reason to do any serious "calculation" and assessment of which choice carries what kind of consequences with it - i.e., there's not much to base the decision upon except your pure whim.

Nevertheless, what is extremely interesting about the result of this experiment is that the impulse which happened six seconds before the action took place is not the impulse which signals "let's make a decision about which button to press". I wouldn't be at all amazed by the experiment if that were the case because that would only mean that the decision-making starts taking place six seconds before the action but those six seconds between that impulse and the button-pressing are the decision-making period. But no, that impulse is the impulse which signals either "let's press the left button" or "let's press the right button" - that impulse is the decision of which button to press and those six seconds before the button-pressing happens are just impulses going through the brain caused by that initial "decision-impulse" which eventually lead up to the decided action itself.



You've just pretty much hit the nail on the head there: "Our neurons are faster than us."

I don't see how that conclusion is not surprising for you because... well, aren't we our neurons (and our neurons us)?

It is strongly intuitive to think of your "self" as being separate from anything physical about you - including your brain and the neurons it is made of. That's why you (we) say "my brain", "my neurons", etc. But we are our brain and our neurons in it. So, how can they be faster than themselves?

Any experiment whose results make us draw conclusions such as "our neurons are faster than us" is a very interesting experiment with very interesting results in my book.

Wonder what happens if you have less then six seconds to think about it.

the world explodes

By all means, if it's a fascinating thing to you, that's fine. I just think the documentary is taking something simple and, IMO, rather unsurprising, and dramaticizing it too much. Documentaries tend to do that, after all.

And when I say it's no surprise, I mean..When we think, isn't it the neurons in our brains creating those very thoughts in the first place? The difference is, neurons behave in different ways for different people based on countless variables of life experience, how they were raised, how they themselves view the world around them, personal habits, etc. In no way does it make me question free will.

Also, I think trying to prove or disprove something like a "self" will get us nowhere, since even if we came to one conclusion or the other, will it really change how we as humans act and communicate with one another? It might upset some people, but getting worried about something like this is silly, and I don't like how the documentary tries to make those results look like something to worry about.

Awesome doc Veeno, thanks.


I don't understand what you and a few others think free will is. Please explain, because if you don't think it's your brain that decides stuff you do, then what is it?

We have to know ourselves so we may know what to improve, or what not to. I would say anything to do with the brain is important on some level and it's important for us to understand it. Mainly because of what we don't know, if we understand this it might lead to new ways of thinking. Who knows maybe someday with this information we can design a replacement for a neuron which reacts even faster (totally pulled this idea out of my ass). My point is, to simply say something is pointless is foolish. Everything but survival was pointless, and yet here we are with so much things we don't need for survival.

Edit
Freewill is trickier... much much trickier. Though I suspect with the new and emerging field of practical quantum mechanics we will learn a great deal more than we ever thought possible. It seems so far off though.

I know the brain controls everything we do, including the very thing we describe as "free will". If you want to get purely technical, free will does not exist. We make decisions



Wow, that's the first time I've quoted myself. Anyway, yes, the brain does it all. It keeps us alive, it makes us wonder, it gives us sixual desire, it makes us hate others. I just have a beef with the documentary making some gigantic deal out of something that should not only be unsurprising, but also nothing to worry about. What could we possibly gain from figuring out that we all follow some mathematical formula in our heads? I think it's more important to study why we do what we do, not how we do it.

Your trivializing the gains we have made. It seems trivial now after the fact, just like the knowledge of neurons is trivial, and the concept of a mind prior to that. All trivial now, but look at the gains we've made, already catching up to us. You have no idea what may or may not stem from this discovery, so please don't side line it. There's been tons of "trivial" findings out there, but the whole is more than the sum of its part sin this case.

You're welcome.


Precisely, thank you.

People seem to generally respond with sentences similar to "our brains are faster than us" or "our neurons are faster than us", without even realising what such claims exactly mean. There's nothing about your self, your personality, your thoughts, your decisions, your feelings and anything else of yours that happens in your mind which is not something that happens in your brain and the neurons of which your brain is composed. Hence, claims such as "our brains are faster than us" are completely meaningless and senseless oxymorons.

The point of this whole experiment (and this whole documentary) is not to see whether our mind is something that happens in our brains and our neurons - we know it is - but to try to see how it happens in our brains and neurons and to try to explain why it happens the way it happens. The results of this experiment are confusing and strange because they show that we basically make a decision long before we think we've made it. We have a feeling that we've made a decision consciously and that we've made it at one moment, when it was actually directly caused by a completely unconscious process six seconds ago.

There are a lot of reasons. Namely computer programs that can act as researchers so we can become a galactic superpower. Also, if I'm understanding you correctly, the how will give us the why.

And yet we still make those decisions, and our decisions still vary. The fact that the decision making is done on a subconscious level does not mean we aren't in control. It just means that our brain runs in Ludicrous Speed. This whole thing is speaking purely technical, but humans often don't like to think in purely technical means. We like to think we're somehow separate from our physical body, but we're not. But then documentaries come on and almost literally come out and say "Well, you're not. Sorry, guys." It's interesting, yes, but it's also knowledge that, quite frankly, does us little good. How will we fix the minds of broken people by knowing that their neurons move fast? How do we study behavior patterns from the speed at which they make subconscious decisions?

I'm not trying to offend anybody, so if I appear to be taking the field of Psychology for granted, then I apologize. I admit I have some problems with its study and the methods that we use to study it, but this is just what I think of the whole matter. :shrug:

Edit:



I don't quite believe so in this case. We find results that indicate we make decisions on the subconscious level before we actively even think about the decision. But how does that explain psychological disorders? Okay, we know those neurons are moving fast. That...doesn't help at all. So the patient is acting crazy on a subconscious level. Didn't we already know that?

What if neurons are firing off too fast or too slowly? What if we can work out a treatment for Alzheimers disease by speeding up the rate at which neurons fire off enabling memories to stick more strongly? It's all about your imagination at that point, dark mysterious waters where here be dragons and you have to have more than a little faith some crazy crack pot idea might pay off through an experimentation. Human's can't know the future. Hence our need to codify what we observe. We can't magically look ahead in time to see if there's ever a cure. We have to find it, and since we can't know if anythings going to work it's all a leap of faith to some degree. I'm sorry, but scientist aren't super humans handing down judgment from upon high. They're human like everyone else, your expecting just a little too much at this point.

Human brain is by far the most complex natural structure we've ever come across and you're trying to say that how it works is not worth finding out? I have to disagree.


I think you've got it backwards there - you keep saying that our neurons are fast. In what aspect? In that our neurons make the decision long before we do? Again, that is nonsense because we are our neurons, so the moment "our neurons" have made a decision, "we" have. What this experiment shows is not that our neurons (we) are fast, but that they are slow, and in two aspects:

1) They are slow because it takes them six seconds to execute an action which has been decided to be executed, and
2) They are slow because it takes them almost as long to realise that they've made a decision at all.

Heh, you got me there with the treatment possibilities. I apologize for my ignorance yet again. However, I still think this discovery, when pertaining purely to the field of psychology, does not help us understand human behavior (Which is a very major part of the subject). But yeah, I suppose it would help for some medical reasons. The question is, how effective would we be at controlling something as delicate as the mind itself? It's like that new finding of the cure for AIDS. It's there, but it's not quite the most effective solution to the problem.



Ahhh, stop confusing me! Okay, so when you look at it from one standpoint, they appear fast, but from another, they appear slow. Fast because they've made the decision seemingly before "you" have. Slow because of the six second delay before that decision is carried out.

You know..I'm just going to retreat to a topic that doesn't expose my stupidity to such an embarrassing degree. I think I'm starting to bother people again, anyway.

No offense but some of your sentences just confuse me.


Anyway, I think your point is that since we know that the brains do all these crazy things behind the scenes, how does it benefit people with psychological disorders. It's as simple as knowing how a properly functioning brain works in contrast to one with [this] disorder. Knowing how the brain works is imperative to psychology to become a hard science, and actually produce consistent results.

Precisely, except that the first standpoint is nonsense because there is no "you" which is separate from your neurons.

Once again, you are your neurons. Therefore, these four sentences are equivalent (mean the same thing):

1) Your neurons make a decision and it takes you six seconds to realise it.
2) You make a decision and it takes you six seconds to realise it.
3) You make a decision and it takes your neurons six seconds to realise it.
4) Your neurons make a decision and it takes them six seconds to realise it.

"You" and "your neurons" mean, and are, the same thing. You seem to have a problem with documentaries repeating that and it seems that you yourself do not understand it.

At least your trying to learn Sub. Most people don't even get that far. So here have a happy song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYW50F42ss8