Blogger Wrote:My initial impressions of the mechanics behind decision-making were that
electrical impulses of neurons interacting/communicating with each
other somehow eventually result in a physical action. Yet this idea did
not allow for the possibility for the emergence of thought. What would
prompt the neurons to interact with each other? In 2008, scientists at
the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in
Leipzig published a study investigating the brain activity in relation
to decision-making. Participants were asked to push a button with either
their right or their left hand (1). Both decisions resulted in the same
outcome so it did not matter which button they chose but rather that
they chose. Participants were free to decide when to push a button but
had to note the time they felt they made their decision on which button
to choose (1). Computer programs monitored the brain activities of each
participant during the exercise. Their data showed that patterns of
brain activity in the frontopolar cortex occurred before participants
figured out which button to push as well as suggested that certain
patterns were predictive of which button they were going to choose in up
to 7 seconds before participants felt they made the conscious decision
(1). Since the pattern of aforementioned neural activity is associated
with unconscious thought, their results imply that decision-making can
be heavily influenced by unconscious thought but not determined (1).
Since the predictive reliability of the brain activity patterns were not
perfect, conscious decisions can still trump that of the unconscious
(1). The researchers are also careful to note that their research does
not answer where in the brain the final decision is made (1). What
intrigues me about these findings is that though the predictability of
unconscious neutral activity was not one hundred percent accurate, the
subconscious is still at work when faced with decision-making. I think
the findings also suggest that subconscious thinking is always “on” in
the background while conscious processes, though it has the power to
intervene the subconscious, can be “shut off”. My only question for this
study is whether dexterity preferences (i.e. right-handedness,
left-handedness, and ambidexterity) were taken into account.