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: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 11 2020, @06:30AM (5 children)
I got it! Self-consciousness depends on one breathing, otherwise one may succumb.
Why is this worth a patent though?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @06:54AM (3 children)
I am more likely to say yes while ejaculating. Make use of that fact to sell me Doritos if you can.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @07:09AM (1 child)
Orange coom dust.
Click reply. I dare you.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday February 11 2020, @11:09AM
What is, "The name of Trump's fake tan colour?"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @07:48AM
Hmm... [youtube.com], let's see [youtu.be], maybe this [youtu.be]. Or else... [youtu.be]
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday February 11 2020, @09:47PM
Patent breathing? Its like a license to print money.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Tuesday February 11 2020, @07:40AM
The way I see it, as I'm managing the systems in my body and mind, different parts check in. When they check in, I then decide whether or not I'm going to do them. Take being hungry for example. My stomach says, "I'm hungry." My higher brain then goes through a list, "Are we hungry?", "When did we last eat?", "Would it be fun to throw this food at someone?", "Am I hungry but this stuff in contaminated with coronavirus?" , "If I eat, will I ruin my next meal?" I then decide what I'm going to do.
When I read this study through that lens, I can imagine how they could come to the conclusion that I had no free-will. My stomach checked in before I thought, "I'm hungry." The data rang "His stomach talked first, the brain then followed." Surely one could then deduce that my stomach was in control if I decided to eat immediately. In this circumstance it would appear that my stomach had the original thought and my brain blindly followed.
What I find interesting is, regardless of their hypothesis, they were able to capture all of these signals in such high definition.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @08:13AM (3 children)
So, when something leave you "with bated breath", you are "holding the trigger" of a decision/action about it? :)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/with_bated_breath [wiktionary.org]
CYA
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 11 2020, @08:49AM (2 children)
You mean bathed bread [wikipedia.org]? (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday February 11 2020, @09:40AM (1 child)
Or baited breath [nutrisourcepetfoods.com]?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 11 2020, @09:58AM
Too obviously egghorny [lascribe.net] (grin)
"Waiting with bathed bread" has the finesse of meaning the opposite of "bated breath". Sorta like in "Take your time, don't hurry. Until you finish, I'll be taking mine on the French Riviera, with a bathed bread in front of me" (this is why it's never gonna go mainstream)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday February 11 2020, @09:22AM (4 children)
I wonder how this ties in with how many martial arts strike on the exhale? Mostly it comes down to muscle contractions, but depending on how deep you dig into the philosophy end of things, you see that breath and intent are often interchangeable. In Chinese culture "Chi" has many meanings, among them is both breath and intention. It is interesting that 'western' science is finding a connection there too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 11 2020, @10:24AM (3 children)
E.g. 5 consecutive lines from my Finnish-English wordlist (there are about 100 /heng[gk]*/ words/phrases in total, I find it nice that the full range of realms is covered in such a small snippet)
#henkisesti - intellectually, mentally, spiritually
#henkisyys - spirituality, incorporeity, intellectuality
#henkitiede - arts, humanities
#henkitoreissa - be barely alive, be breathing one's last
#henkitorvi - windpipe, trachea
Of course you don't have to look at exotic languages, it's just struck me that English (from French, from Latin, sometimes from Greek) has similar examples too.
E.g. inspiration (creativity), inspiration (breathing in), expiration (dieing), and spirit (self explanatory) are all the same root word.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday February 11 2020, @11:40AM (2 children)
Add Aspirations (hopes and dreams), to your list.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 11 2020, @12:06PM
There are other roots that have interesting clusters of uses. animus, animated, animal, ... (but not inane) - https://www.etymonline.com/word/*ane-?ref=etymonline_crossreference
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @12:40PM
And spirit=liquor - without it, no superior life can exists. Now, excuse me while I'm feeling superior under this table.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 11 2020, @10:13AM
Having worked on embedded systems, I know that there's less time for a processor do be handling higher level functioning, such as running user code, when it's more tied up handling interrupts. Heck, the Z80 on the ZX81 would *only* run "code" when the video unit wasn't actively generating output (so during flybacks), but that's an extreme case.
So the idea of the brain doing more (sub-)conscious stuff when there's less background processing kinda makes sense, it has little surprise value. I really don't feel my heartbeat unless I try to focus on it, so I wouldn't expect it to be generating too many signals for the brain to process. So their experiments showing no correlation with it again doesn't surprise me.
This could be falsified by forcing other periodic-ish waves of inputs onto the test subject, and seeing if there's a correlation.
e.g.:
- physical: putting the test subject on some kind of massage mat, and sending a periodic vibrating wave across it, and see whether there's more choices made during the downtime
- visual: pulsing patterns of different levels of complexity
- auditory: playing tones (or silence) that evolve into chords and/or counterpoints of increasing complexity and back again.
I only watched the vid, not read the paper, and the vid only mentioned breathing and heartbeat, so I don't know if exogenous stimuli were considered.
NB: I know shit all about biology. Honestly, I was shit at it because I didn't care one whit about it when I studied it as a kid until the age of 12, and then had to give it up as there was no way to fit it into the school timetable with the other subjects I needed to study. Since then (after decades of decaying whatever I may have once known, which was probably wrong anyway) I've been entirely self-taught, as I've actually started to care several whits about it, on an /ad hoc/ basis - holes will be numerous and huge. Please be gentle with your corrections, I am here to learn.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday February 11 2020, @10:51AM (13 children)
Define voluntary action.
Am barely aware what the hands are doing when I am writing this. All I know is that mind is going through what I have to say and there it is on the screen.
When I am doing a really voluntary action, like pressing the trigger on the rifle at the range, I hold the breath. Somebody tells you to do it when you exhale, somebody tells you not to do when your heart beats and so on, doesn't really account for much tbh.
One very very interesting experience I had was when I had the urge to sneeze, which I considered irresistible till then, and halfway in the movement before sneezing the head barely touched a piece of furniture overhead, and my body aborted the sneezing procedure. That is, instantly I had no urge to sneeze, as the body recognized the movement might have me smashing the head somewhere. Totally gone.
Now, attributing this to a darwinist selection of random genetic brain programming looks to me difficult to believe, maybe we must take into account the conscience, however emerging or formed, as having a little more weight in the shaping of the body responses. Anyway the panic mode you enter when something strange happens aborts your (or my) sneezing. Like the reported emptying of the bowels when the body is in peril, that IIRC has been interpreted as the desire not to have stuff in the intestine provoking infection when the body is rupturing. A pretty difficult thing to acquire by mere dumb darwinist selection.
Of course the problem is not in darwinist selection as a phenomenon, but in the implicit assumption that the selection is random in an impersonal universe, which is a heck of a difficult thing to prove until you have explained all the universe (we're barely halfway there) and demonstrated your explanation is the ultimate one (no way we get there).
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday February 11 2020, @10:58AM (12 children)
Also I fail to understand how this and previous experiments improperly publicized as relevant should be determining the freedom of the will.
It's like saying OH look, the output of /dev/myfuckingrandom takes TIME, and it takes even more TIME to get it to the rest of the system, and that happens according to the CPU clock therefore it must be a fake randomness. No, the only way to know is to look at the code and the hardware connections to some whateverish source of randomness.
Account abandoned.
(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?
(Score: 3, Funny) by SemperOSS on Tuesday February 11 2020, @01:09PM
And here I thought that I learned to pull the trigger on the exhale because it made my hands more steady … it was actually to make it a voluntary decision. Hmmmmm, maybe we should
askdemand that the police and other armed people hold their breath whenever they pull their guns.Sorry, did I misunderstand something?
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @02:54PM
so ... while xhaling, someone at epfl decided to make this study?
does it also matter "how good" the air is we breath?
so very polluted air, when exhaling, doesn't lead to much decisions, whilst breathing clean air leads to many decisions?
i suppose if the pollution is severe enough, all decision making will stop ... too late ya'll ^_^