PsyDoctor8

Think about it. "Inducing Disbelief in Free Will Alters Brain Correlates of Preconscious Motor Preparation: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not"

Abstract

The feeling of being in control of one’s own actions is a strong subjective experience. However, discoveries in psychology and neuroscience challenge the validity of this experience and suggest that free will is just an illusion. This raises a question: What would happen if people started to disbelieve in free will? Previous research has shown that low control beliefs affect performance and motivation. Recently, it has been shown that undermining free-will beliefs influences social behavior. In the study reported here, we investigated whether undermining beliefs in free will affects brain correlates of voluntary motor preparation. Our results showed that the readiness potential was reduced in individuals induced to disbelieve in free will. This effect was evident more than 1 s before participants consciously decided to move, a finding that suggests that the manipulation influenced intentional actions at preconscious stages. Our findings indicate that abstract belief systems might have a much more fundamental effect than previously thought.

Full paper.

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You have a brain that makes you think that you think.

And it’s a pretty messed up trick, but the lies we tell ourselves may be more important than we realize. Experiments have shown that our brains are constantly deceiving us, almost every second of the day. We can’t totally trust our memory, our perception differs constantly on all kinds of levels, we make up reasons why we believe what we think… meanwhile we don’t even know what consciousness is exactly, but we buy every bit of it.

I freely admit, I was not interested in perception, illusion, memory or attention studies prior to realizing it’s all a form of self-deception. The obvious question then is why do we lie to ourselves? In a recent chat with my new lab director, we touched on some evolutionary reasons that sound like a good starting point, as ya do when you have such questions.

So for the next couple of weeks, in hopes of coming up with an experiment:

I’ll be looking at this 3 pound blob of gooey jello-like mass of tissue….a things that is truly ours, makes us who we are, possibly the seed of our soul and I’ll be asking why it lies to us and how can I manipulate that.

Why Do We Dream?

Begin with: the “Freudian view that we dream as a result of our subconscious desires, and that dreams have hidden meanings.” oh, everything must mean something!

Then: “dreams are essentially side-effects of brain activation.” Residuals/left over buzz more or less.

Then moving on to dreams as a creative filter: “Dreams are simply a result of the “awake-like” forebrain - the “higher” perceptual, cognitive and emotional areas - trying to make sense of the input that it’s receiving as a result of waves of activation arising from the brainstem. A dream is the forebrain’s “best guess” at making a meaningful story out of the assortment of sensations (mostly visual) and concepts activated by these periodic waves. There’s no attempt to disguise the shameful parts; the bizarreness of dreams simply reflects the fact that the input is pretty much random.”

Now we have: “the function of REM sleep is to act as a kind of training system for the developing brain. The internally-generated signals that arise from the brainstem (now called PGO waves) during REM help the forebrain to learn how to process information. This explains why we spend more time in REM early in life; newborns have much more REM than adults; in the womb, we are in REM almost all the time.” More.