Dr. John Bargh is a Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His work is in the area of "Automaticity" where he investigate about our Automatic Behavior. His Laboratory at Yale:
The ACME (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Emotion) Lab at Yale focuses on nonconscious or automatic influences on psychological and behavioral processes. In one way or another, all of our studies address the issue of free will, and how much of it do we as individuals really have. We are interested in the extent to which all social psychological phenomena -- attitudes and evaluations, emotions, impressions, motivations, social behavior -- occur nonconsciously and automatically. Currently, our research is actively exploring how social goals such as to cooperate, achieve, become friends, and so on, are triggered and operate without the person's awareness. We also are looking at the potential sources of these nonconscious motivations in real life settings, for example, the significant others in our lives can be one major source. A related question is how these various sources of nonconscious influence interact with each other, and how much of our 'real life' experience is governed by them. We are also starting to look at emotional experience as a potential internal trigger of goals and future intentions. That all of these effects occur without the person's intention and awareness, yet have such strong effects on the person's decisions and behavior, has considerable implications for the nature and purpose of consciousness. By discovering those domains of social life in which conscious, deliberate processes are not necessary, we can shed more light on what consciousness is needed for -- that is, what its true purpose is. Source
He gave a talk discussing the issue of "Free Will" during a symposium at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Convention in Tampa, FL.
Our Behavior are not as free as we would like them to be.
Image via WikipediaBrain as a physical organ system serves the role of controller of all the body functions. It communicates with different parts of the body by sending and receiving messages through an elaborate network of interconnected Neurons. This is the fastest communication system human body uses alongwith the slow communication system through hormonal interchange.
One of the functions of the brain is to receive outside information through the five senses of vision, sound, smell,taste and touch and create a worldview for us out of this sensory data. The vision is the most dominant sense and plays a larger role in this process. It helps us in identifying objects. It helps us moving through the space and also to avert any potential dangers. In other words it has served us well. We rely on it.
Is it really hundred percent accurate? We would think that that is the case but that worldview is not hundred percent accurate. The magicians have devised elaborate tricks to deceive our visual sense. They use sleigh of hand to create an illusioray reality that defies our common sense but appears to be true. In most of the cases magicians use the quirks of the human vision system to design the magic tricks beside the older tricks based upon hypnotism. That itself is based upon the highly suggestible nature of human mind.
Here is a demonstration of some of these tricks by Magician Keith Barry at TED talk to show that how easy it is to trick the human mind in making it believe in alternate reality.
First, Keith Barry shows us how our brains can fool our bodies -- in a trick that works via podcast too. Then he involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic.
Study of Optical Illusion is a well known area of Psychology. The psychologists have designed all kind of visual illusion to study the property of vision. Here is a list of some of the well known visual illusion designed by Psychologists. From these studies one can draw a general conclusion that our sense of vision is essential but it is not perfect as we would like to think. It could provide us with wrong conclusion and it can be manipulated or tricked into believing something that may or may not be true.
Recently neuroscientists collaborated with magicians and reported their findings in Nature Reviews Neuroscience journal. The article is available online here with the following title: Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research
authors: Stephen L. Macknik1, Mac King, James Randi2, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson & Susana Martinez-Conde
The article abstract:
Just as vision scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers' deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness. By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory. Such methods could be exploited to directly study the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques.
The study is very important in the sense that it brings knowledgeable people from two diverse areas of neuroscience and magic together to solve the riddle of the human cognition.
The last sentence of the study's abstract is I think a bit of a stretch because we are really not sure what constitute consciousness. It will be a while till we piece all the information from scientific studies together to establish a one unified theory of consciousness if possible because there is a very strong possibility that we may end up not one but many consciousnesses fulfilling the demands placed upon us to survive in a dynamic world.
These studies does however, show that we do not possess perfect senses. We need to be extra careful when we are trying to base our decisions on the information we receive from ours senses.
Recently the existence of freewill has been questioned by Neuroscientists.Benjamin Libet's experiments showed that people's brain started preparing to take actions before they actually became aware of the action they were going to perform.
Implications of Libet's experiments
Libet's experiments suggest unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, therefore, little room remains for the operations of free will. If the brain has already taken steps to initiate an action before we are aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated.
Libet finds room for free will in the interpretation of his results only in the form of 'the power of veto'; conscious acquiescence is required to allow the unconscious buildup of the readiness potential to be actualized as a movement. While consciousness plays no part in the instigationspinal motor neurones by the primary motor cortex, and the margin of error indicated by tests utilizing the oscillator must also be considered). of volitional acts, it retains a part to play in the form of suppressing or withholding from certain acts instigated by the unconscious. Libet noted that everyone has experienced the withholding from performing an unconscious urge. Since the subjective experience of the conscious will to act preceded the action by only 200 milliseconds, this leaves consciousness only 100-150 milliseconds to veto an action (this is because the final 50 milliseconds prior to an act are occupied by the activation of the
Wired magazine is reporting a recent study confirming Libet's findings in this article
Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them
An interesting quote from the article:
"Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.
What are the implication of this research to our most cherished notion of human beings as an independent autonomous agents who act out of their free will?
