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from the Geraldine-says-"The-Devil-made-me-do-it!" dept.
Scientists at EPFL[*] in Switzerland have shown that you are more likely to initiate a voluntary decision as you exhale. Published in today's issue of Nature Communications, these findings propose a new angle on an almost 60-year-old neuroscientific debate about free will and the involvement of the human brain.
"We show that voluntary action is indeed linked to your body's inner state, especially with breathing and expiration but not with some other bodily signals, such as the heartbeat," explains Olaf Blanke, EPFL's Foundation Bertarelli Chair in Cognitive Neuroprosthetics and senior author.
At the center of these results is the readiness potential (RP), a signal of brain activity observed in the human cortex that appears not only before voluntary muscle movement, but also before one becomes aware of the intention to move. The RP is the signature of voluntary action since it consistently appears in brain activity measurements right before acts of free will (like being aware that one wants to reach for the chocolate).
[...] These findings suggest that the breathing pattern may be used to predict 'when' people begin voluntary action. Your breathing patterns could also be used to predict consumer behavior, like when you click on that button. Medical devices that use brain-computer interfaces could be tuned and improved according to breathing. The breathing-action coupling could be used in research and diagnostic tools for patients with deficits in voluntary action control, like obsessive compulsive disorders, Parkinson disease, and Tourette syndromes. Blanke and Hyeong-Dong Park, first author of this research, have filed a patent based on these findings.
[...] More generally, the EPFL findings suggest that acts of free will are affected by signals from other systems of the body. Succumbing to that urge to eat chocolate may depend more on your body's internal signals than you may realize!
Blanke elaborates, "That voluntary action, an internally or self-generated action, is coupled with an interoceptive signal, breathing, may be just one example of how acts of free will are hostage to a host of inner body states and the brain's processing of these internal signals. Interestingly, such signals have also been shown to be of relevance for self-consciousness."
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdf6srnVcM0
[*] EPFL: École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne"
Journal Reference:
Hyeong-Dong Park, Coline Barnoud, Henri Trang, Oliver A. Kannape, Karl Schaller, Olaf Blanke. Breathing is coupled with voluntary action and the cortical readiness potential. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13967-9
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 11 2020, @12:11PM (11 children)
That discussion only belongs at the metaphysical boundary between physics and philosophy, nowhere higher. (Don't start me on this, I've driven philosophers to tears on this topic.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 11 2020, @12:58PM (7 children)
Indeed most of the time when something about "free will" in brain research is presented (at least to a general audience, I have no idea what happens inside the brain science community), there's some (implicit or explicit) distinction done between "you" (who are "proven" to have no free will) and "your brain" (which actually controls you, "disproving" the free will). But that does make no sense to me. My brain is not something separately from me. If I do something, then my brain does it, and if my brain does something, then I do it. So if my brain controls my behaviour, then that's self control, and actually what would be expected of free will!
Now if they detected that my decisions are preceded by some signal from outer space, that is when I would start to worry about not having free will.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 11 2020, @01:27PM (3 children)
<breathes deeply>
<pauses>
Agree.
Phew!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday February 11 2020, @03:47PM (2 children)
But were you inhaling, exhaling, or holding your breath at the point you agreed? ;)
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Touché) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 11 2020, @04:10PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday February 12 2020, @01:21AM
the universe would be broken otherwise, that is if motor action happened at the same time or earlier.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday February 11 2020, @05:52PM
> Now if they detected that my decisions are preceded by some signal from outer space, that is when I would start to worry about not having free will.
If that happened for everybody else too, it merely shifts the problem of verification of free will from your brain to the source of the signal.
Basically, the brain being analog, already puts it in the domain of quantum scale resolution for triggering neurons. So, there is the as yet impossible to model "signal from beyond space" that affects the brain. Also there is the problem of optimization, apparently damaged or small brains perform too well for the model of 'the brain is the cpu'. Either nature doesn't optimize (by shrinking the brain or by letting the more endowed ones use it fully) or we are missing some different ways for the brain to work.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday February 11 2020, @11:24PM (1 child)
How can you be sure? Maybe it is so your brain wants you to think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday February 14 2020, @10:30AM
I dunno if I dunno or if the brain wants that I dunno by withholding information.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday February 11 2020, @03:44PM (2 children)
I don't have any particular objections to that statement immediately coming to mind. I also don't think the statement is saying very much unless you can clearly define exactly where that metaphysical boundary falls. For example we can probably agree that the boundary will not surround only present-day physics. I'd suggest it surrounds all verifiable physics that could potentially be formed in the future as well.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday February 14 2020, @10:23AM (1 child)
Physics is about the how. Any "why" answered by physics that can't be more correctly reformulated into "how" is either an assumption or philosophy. The rest is domain of philosophical masturbation, like this one.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday February 15 2020, @01:49AM
Pretty much. The trouble is, it's hard to tell in advance whether or not some problems can be so reformulated to be answerable by physics.
I think "how" and "why" are both important questions that relate to causal chains. The "how" questions seek a more detailed breakdown of the current link in the chain, whereas the "why" questions seek to find what, if any, are the earlier (or more fundamental) links in the causal chain.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?