Techotic

According to research carried out by the Max Planck Institute people made decisions by up to ten seconds before they carried them out.

In tests, researchers asked each volunteer to view a screen and decide which of two buttons to press and when to press it, while a brain scan called functional magnetic resonance imaging track their thoughts.

The researchers findings which were published online in Nature Neuroscience was that neural activity in parts of the brain called the prefrontal and parietal cortex showed people actually made decisions several seconds before they carried them out.

Prof John-Dylan Haynes, the lead researcher in Leipzig, Germany, stated:

We found the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity up to ten seconds before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

The impression that we are able to freely choose between different possible courses of action is fundamental to our mental life.

However, the findings suggest our subjective experience of freedom is no more than an illusion and our actions are initiated by unconscious mental processes long before we become aware of our intention to act.