Neural activity suggests that people have already made a decision when they think they’re still deciding
We’d like to think that we are in charge of all of our own decisions. Each time that we make a choice in the busy moments of our day-to-day lives, we believe we’re calling all the shots. Similarly, we think that the never-ending stream of thoughts and images that scroll across the theater of our waking minds are of our own choosing.
But recent research conducted by Roger Koenig-Robert and Joel Pearson at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, predicted decisions being made as far as 11 seconds in advance of test subjects making a voluntary choice. The experimenters were able to do this by decoding neural patterns of activity in the frontal and visual areas of the brain of test participants by using functional magnetic resonance imagery.
In the study, participants were tasked with freely choosing to imagine one of two distinct images—a red circular image with horizontal stripes or a green circular image with vertical stripes. The researchers were able to predict, in advance, the future content of test subjects’: specifically, which image they would choose to imagine.
The researchers caution against concluding that all decisions are predetermined by prior neural activity. As Professor Pearson says in, “Our results cannot guarantee that all choices are preceded by involuntary images, but it shows that this mechanism exists, and it potentially biases our everyday choices.”
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