{"id":8715,"date":"2016-05-04T04:27:41","date_gmt":"2016-05-04T04:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=8715"},"modified":"2016-05-04T04:27:41","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T04:27:41","slug":"free-will-could-all-be-an-illusion-scientists-suggest-after-study-shows-choice-may-just-be-brain-tricking-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/free-will-could-all-be-an-illusion-scientists-suggest-after-study-shows-choice-may-just-be-brain-tricking-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"Free will could all be an illusion, scientists suggest after study shows choice may just be brain tricking itself"},"content":{"rendered":"
Research adds to evidence suggesting ‘even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong’<\/span><\/em><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Andrew Griffin<\/span><\/a>\u00a0| The Independent<\/a><\/div>\n
[This article was written by\u00a0Andrew Griffin<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0and was originally published by\u00a0The Independent<\/span><\/a>.]<\/em><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n

\n

\"A<\/a>
A woman looks at a human brain at an exhibition in Bristol Matt Cardy\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Free will might be an illusion created by our brains, scientists might have proved.<\/span><\/p>\n

Humans are convinced that they make conscious choices as they live their lives. But instead it may be that the brain just convinces itself that it made a free choice from the available options after the decision is made.<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea was tested out by tricking subjects into believing that they had made a choice before the consequences of that choice could actually be seen. In the\u00a0test, people were made to believe that they had taken a decision\u00a0using free will \u2013\u00a0even though that was impossible.<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea that human beings trick themselves into believing in free will was laid out in a paper by psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley nearly 20 years ago. They proposed the feeling of wanting to do something was real, but there may be no connection between the\u00a0feeling and actually doing it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new study builds on that work and says that the brain rewrites history when it makes its choices, changing our memories so that we believe we wanted to do something before it happened.<\/span><\/p>\n

In one of the studies undertaken by Adam Bear and Paul Bloom, of Yale\u00a0University,\u00a0the test subjects were shown five white circles on a computer monitor. They were told to choose one of the circles before one of them lit up red.<\/span><\/p>\n

The participants were then asked to describe whether they\u2019d picked the correct circle, another one, or if they hadn\u2019t had time to actually pick one.<\/span><\/p>\n

Statistically, people should have picked the right circle about one out of every five times. But they reported getting it right much more than 20 per cent of the time, going over 30 per cent if the circle turned red very quickly.<\/span><\/p>\n

The scientists suggest that the findings show that the test subjects\u2019\u00a0minds were swapping around the order of events, so that it appeared that they had chosen the right circle \u2013\u00a0even if they hadn\u2019t actually had time to do so.<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea of free will may have arisen because it is a useful thing to have, giving people a feeling of control over their lives and allowing for people to be punished for wrongdoing.<\/span><\/p>\n

But that same feeling can go awry, the scientists wrote\u00a0in the\u00a0Scientific American magazine. It may be important for people to feel they are control of their lives, for instance, but distortions in that same process might make people feel that they have control over external processes like the weather.<\/span><\/p>\n

The scientists cautioned that the illusion of choice might only apply to choices that are made quickly and without too much thought. But it might also be \u201cpervasive and ubiquitous \u2014 governing all aspects of our behaviour, from our most minute to our most important decisions\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever the case may be,\u201d they write, \u201cour studies add to a growing body of work suggesting that even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The work is published in the journal Psychological Science.<\/span><\/p>\n

[Note: This article was written by\u00a0Andrew Griffin<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0and was originally published by\u00a0The Independent<\/span><\/a>.]<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Free will might be an illusion created by our brains, scientists might have proved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biology","category-psychology"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",1368,1026,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain-300x225.jpg",300,225,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",750,563,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain-1024x768.jpg",750,563,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",1368,1026,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",1368,1026,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",1067,800,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",760,570,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",600,450,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",600,450,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",653,490,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",480,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",87,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",640,480,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",96,72,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/brain.jpg",150,113,false]},"author_info":{"info":["RevoScience"]},"category_info":"Biology<\/a> Psychology<\/a>","tag_info":"Psychology","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}