WSJ: don't overthink

Get Out of Your Own Way

Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking a Decision
June 27, 2008; Page A9

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers
now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are
aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up
its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an
eternity at the speed of thought.

Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice.

Corbis

"We think our decisions are conscious," said
neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for
Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research.
"But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg.
This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists
in Germany, Norway and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral
activity that foreshadows our choices. They have tracked telltale waves
of change through the cells that orchestrate our memory, language,
reason and self-awareness.

In ways we are only beginning to understand, the
synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to
perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to
remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on
incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they predetermine our
choices.

To probe what happens in the brain during the moments
before people sense they've reached a decision, Dr. Haynes and his
colleagues devised a deceptively simple experiment, reported in April
in Nature Neuroscience. They monitored the swift neural currents
coursing through the brains of student volunteers as they decided, at
their own pace and at random, whether to push a button with their left
or right hands.

In all, they tested seven men and seven women from 21
to 30 years old. They recorded neural changes associated with thoughts
using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and analyzed the
results with an experimental pattern-recognition computer program.

While inside the brain scanner, the students watched
random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge,
they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left
hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in
the instant they had decided to press the button.

Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment
of conscious decision, the researchers identified signals that let them
know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the
students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers
could also predict which button the students would push.

MIND READING

 

Is your freedom of choice an illusion?

Your brain knows what you're going to do 10 seconds before you are aware of it, neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes and his colleagues reported recently in Nature Neuroscience.

Last year In the journal Current Biology, the scientists reported they could use brain wave patterns to identify your intentions before you revealed them.

Their work builds on a landmark 1983 paper in the journal Brain by the late Benjamin Libet
and his colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco,
who found out that the brain initiates free choices about a third of a
second before we are aware of them.

Together, these findings support the importance of the unconscious in shaping decisions. Psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis and his co-workers at the University of Amsterdam reported in the journal Science that it is not always best to deliberate too much before making a choice.

Nobel laureate Francis
Crick -- co-discoverer of the structure of DNA -- tackled the
implications of such cognitive science in his 1993 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul.

With co-author Giulio Tononi, Nobel laureate Gerald Edleman explores his biology-based theory of consciousness in A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination.

"It's quite eerie," said Dr. Haynes.

Other researchers have pursued the act of decision deeper into the subcurrents of the brain.

In experiments with laboratory animals reported this
spring, Caltech neuroscientist Richard Anderson and his colleagues
explored how the effort to plan a movement forces cells throughout the
brain to work together, organizing a choice below the threshold of
awareness. Tuning in on the electrical dialogue between working
neurons, they pinpointed the cells of what they called a "free choice"
brain circuit that in milliseconds synchronized scattered synapses to
settle on a course of action.

"It suggests we are looking at this actual decision being made," Dr. Anderson said. "It is pretty fast."

And when those networks momentarily malfunction,
people do make mistakes. Working independently, psychologist Tom
Eichele at Norway's University of Bergen monitored brain activity in
people performing routine tasks and discovered neural static -- waves
of disruptive signals -- preceded an error by up to 30 seconds. "Thirty
seconds is a long time," Dr. Eichele said.

Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for
some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings
lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions
may be best made by going with our gut -- not by thinking about them
too much.

Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis
at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to
make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy,
apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder
decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on
the problem.

Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a
decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better,
they reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science in 2006. "The idea
that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is
simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us," Dr.
Dijksterhuis said.

Does this make our self-awareness just a second thought?

All this work to deconstruct the mental machinery of
choice may be the best evidence of conscious free will. By measuring
the brain's physical processes, the mind seeks to know itself through
its reflection in the mirror of science.

"We are trying to understand who we are," said Antonio
Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the
University of Southern California, "by studying the organ that allows
you to understand who you are."