Decision Time

September 29, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Social brain, The RSA 

No sooner do I finally get my article about human nature and political values published in Prospect than a key piece of research cited in the piece gets challenged. A study undertaken in New Zealand has questioned the conclusions of the work of Benjamin Libet, conclusions which had become the cornerstone of how we have come to think about the workings of our brain.

Put simply, Libet’s research, which has been repeated and refined by other neuroscientists, seemed to show that the part of the subject’s brain associated with a physical action, for example, pressing a button, showed activity significantly earlier (a few tenths of a second) than the subject became aware of making the decision to act. This research seemed to show that the idea of conscious choice is often an illusion. Whilst we do make conscious decisions which involve forward planning, our day to day actions are automatic. The sense we have of making conscious choices reflect the deep seated need of human beings to make meaning, but it is an illusion. As Robert Heinlen put it ‘man is not a rational animal but a rationalising one’.

But now research by Judy Trevena and Jeff Miller, neuroscientists based in Otago, has questioned Libet’s work.  Their research involved replicating Libet’s experiment but with an important modification. While Libet asked his subjects to press buttons, the New Zealand team allowed subjects to choose whether or not to press. Trevena and Miller then found that the brain activity identified by Libet (so called Readiness Potential) occurred after the subjects had been prompted and before they were aware of making a choice – whether or not they then decided to press the botton.  In other words, it is not that the automatic brain ‘decides’ to act before the conscious brain but that it creates a readiness to act which only gets turned into action by conscious intervention.  Furthermore ,Trevena and Miller claim to show that the brain activity specifically associated with ‘deciding’ to act takes place after the conscious awareness of that decision.

Unsurprisingly, the New Zealand study is causing waves in the neuroscience community. Those who have always been sceptical about Libet are seizing on the new research, while others who claim to have undertaken experiments reinforcing Libet’s conclusions are questioning Trevena ands Miller’s methodology.

Although it can all get quite technical, this is a fascinating debate with social and philosophical as well as scientific ramifications. We are exploring whether we can host a debate here at the RSA. Indeed, if someone would just give us a few tens of thousands of pounds we would love to modernise an old RSA tradition and work with neuroscientists at UCL to replicate the research with a live video link to a Great Room audience.

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8 Comments on Decision Time

  1. Sam McLean on Tue, 29th Sep 2009 10:06 am

    2. Fascinating post. Will definitely be checking this research out. Rather than creating a dichotomy between ‘automatic brain’ and ‘rational brain’, I am attracted to the idea of the brain as a kind of fold in which the connections between each work in tandem and in different ways depending on the socio-cultural context.

  2. Pip Hardy on Tue, 29th Sep 2009 11:19 am

    3. One of the things that neuroscience can help us with is to consider the ways in which ancient traditions of meditation and mindfulness affect our brains and, consequently, our actions… given that both our joys and our sorrows, our pain and our pleasure arise from this one great organ: the brain. Neuroscience, in the form of Giacomo Rizzolatti, has already discovered the presence of ‘mirror’ neurons, that help us to feel the emotions, movements and intentions of others and facilitate a kind of natural empathy – an essential quality in any civilised society and hence in its citizens.

    Readers of this blog and RSA fellows in general might be interested in a conference taking place in November at the University of East London entitled Mindfulness and Well-Being: from spirituality to neuroscience http://www.uel.ac.uk/mindfulness/

  3. matt on Tue, 29th Sep 2009 11:24 am

    4. I always thought the Libet research was inconclusive because it relied on the subject’s saying when they were making the decision, which could itself be delayed.

    I think the research is still striking though – the brain automatically prepares you to make a decision. You still might make the decision, but only on the back of some legwork that occurs automatically. That means the decision is the result of an integrated system of processes, constantly feeding back to one another – both conscious and unconscious, deliberate and automatic.

    One thing that seems to follow from this: If decisions are in part the result of automatic processing, that processing affects what decisions can be made. Probably not in the case of pushing a button, but in other cases social and emotional priming, learned habits, will affect decision-making. For example, someone fearful will be ‘readied’ for decisions in a different way than someone relaxed. This is obvious really, but worth stating in neuroscientific terms, as it reinforces the idea that emotional attunement and social norms constrain the range of decisions someone can make.

  4. Jonathan Rowson on Tue, 29th Sep 2009 4:57 pm

    5. I enjoyed your Prospect article, and it surprises me that it has taken so long for the political/policy world to think more axiomatically about human nature with respect to behaviour change.
    With respect to Libet’s research, on page 48(top left) you write:
    “…the intuition that what we call the ’self’ polices the boundary between us and the world is brought into question.”
    Does the Otago finding change that significantly?

    If the new understanding is that we are not always unconsciously choosing, but more often unconsciously mobilising in readiness to consciously choose, then the cartesian consciously deciding self may have won a small battle, but the wider war is long since lost. There are numerous other findings that call the folk view of the self into question, not least(as Madeleine Bunting reminded us in the Guardian) centuries of Buddhist thought(a point developed more systematically by Francisco Varela and the field of neurophenomenology more generally).

  5. reasoned response vs classical conditioning « eskimon on Wed, 30th Sep 2009 1:31 am

    6. [...] still can’t agree which side has more validity, as this recent post from Matthew Taylor [...]

  6. Peter McManus on Wed, 30th Sep 2009 1:06 pm

    7. Dear Matthew, many thanks for the excellent talk in Oxford last night. You and much of the audience seemed to favour devolution to local bodies (or,as I would prefer to say, subsidiarity). However, Simon Jenkins’ article in today’s Guardian should give us all pause – the current weakness of local institutions and accountability in the UK needs to be addressed (a long-term project) before real benefits can accrue.
    Peter McManus FRSA

  7. sikiş film on Sat, 3rd Oct 2009 5:11 am

    8. nice one thank

  8. Raechel Wright on Sun, 2nd May 2010 5:15 am

    9. Jonathan Rowson above made the point quite eloquently.

    I have a question. Surely Trevena and Miller aren’t arguing that there is a conscious self making all decisions. Surely they aren’t arguing that we’re always aware of a decision before it’s made.

    Yes, they’ve shown that Libet’s experiment may not have shown what he thought it did. So, knowing Trevena and Miller to be smart folks, I’m curious: what do they believe they’ve shown?

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