Certainty Principle: People Who Hold False Convictions Are Better at Retaining Corrected Information

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Certainty Principle: People Who Hold False Convictions Are Better at Retaining Corrected Information

Researchers have used imaging technology to spy on the brain as it corrects strongly held beliefs, shedding light on how we might learn from our mistakes.

By Charles Q. Choi  | April 27, 2012 | 

 

  Image: flickr/Olly Newport

Firm convictions dominate news headlines these days, but because of a phenomenon called the hypercorrection effect, strongly held ideas that turn out to be factually incorrect are actually easier to amend . Brain imaging is now shedding light on how people change their minds during hypercorrection, potentially revealing the best ways for us to learn from our errors.

To understand hypercorrection, says cognitive psychologist Janet Metcalfe at Columbia University, "suppose I ask you, 'What is the capital of Canada ?' and you say 'Toronto. ' I say, 'How confident are you?' and you say, 'Very highly confident.' When I then tell you that actually the capital is Ottawa, you're very likely to remember it— not just a few minutes later but weeks later, and maybe for much longer, we think."

Scientists reason that in hypercorrection, after people discover that ideas they felt very sure about were not in fact correct, the surprise and embarrassment they feel makes them pay special attention to alternative responses about which they felt less confident . People then go on to take the corrected information to heart, learning from their errors.

"In contrast, if I asked you a question to which you gave a not-very-confident answer, like, perhaps, 'What color does amethyst turn when it is heated?' and you say, 'blue' with low confidence, when I tell you that it's actually yellow, you're not very likely to remember it," Metcalfe says.

Given this model , to learn more about what happens in the brain during hypercorrection, Metcalfe and her colleagues focused on brain regions linked to attention as well as those involved in metacognition (self- awareness of  the thought process ) . The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 14 volunteers while they answered nearly 600 general information questions that had single-word answers. The participants then rated their confidence on their responses.

"My favorite—'What is the last name of the Oscar award –winning actor who thanked his parents for not using birth control?' '[Dustin] Hoffman,'" Metcalfe says.

The scientists found evidence supporting their hypercorrection model. Both wrong answers and right answers lit up the anterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus, parts of the brain linked with attention and metacognition .
"The anterior cingulate registers our surprise and maybe something that we might, roughly, call embarrassment, and so we gear up all our resources to better encode 'Ottawa,'" Metcalfe says, referring to her previous geography quiz . The region did not, however, activate as strongly for wrong answers about which subjects initially felt low confidence, suggesting that the participants would be less likely to remember corrections to such answers.

The medial frontal gyrus is involved in social processes, suggesting a role in hypercorrection is as well. "This makes a lot of sense—a lot of our knowledge comes from other people and books, and from consensus and encyclopedias, and Scientific American," Metcalfe says. "Even though in our experiments answers were delivered by a computer, those answers were written by people. So it makes total sense that accepting corrections involves your relationship with other people." Medial frontal gyrus activation patterns mirrored those of the anterior cingulate.

In addition, after people were told that an answer in which they were very confident was wrong, the fMRI showed activation in the right temporoparietal junction, an area linked with thinking about what others might know, and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region linked with the avoidance of thinking about something. The former suggests that subjects recognized that others had different beliefs than them, wh ereas the latter hints they may have been suppressing their wrong answers after learning they were incorrect, Metcalfe says. The scientists detailed their findings online March 27 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The findings have implications for educational techniques and theory. "The broadest conclusion we might draw from these findings is that we may have the wrong attitude toward errors," says cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork at University of California, Los Angeles, who did not take part in this work. "Throughout society and our educational system, there tends to be an attitude that you don't want people making errors and mistakes during learning. These findings and related findings suggest that in order to increase the effectiveness of long-term learning and understanding, we should structure instruction and training so that likely errors and misconceptions will come up during the learning process, and use them as opportunities for learning."

He added, "when it comes to, say, job contexts such as nuclear power plants or the military or the police...we don't really want such errors to be deferred until a time and place where they may really matter, and matter greatly."

Losing Your Religion: Analytic Thinking Can Undermine Belief

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Losing Your Religion: Analytic Thinking Can Undermine Belief

A series of new experiments shows that analytic thinking can override intuitive assumptions, including those that underlie religious belief

By Marina Krakovsky  | April 26, 2012 | 

 

  Image: Wikimedia Commons/innoxiuss

 

People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the strength of their belief, according to a new study in Science.

The research, conducted by University of British Columbia psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, does not take sides in the debate between religion and atheism, but aims instead to illuminate one of the origins of belief and disbelief. "To understand religion in humans," Gervais says, "you need to accommodate for the fact that there are many millions of believers and nonbelievers."

One of their studies correlated measures of religious belief with people's scores on a popular test of analytic thinking. The test poses three deceptively simple math problems. One asks: "If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?" The first answer that comes to mind—100 minutes—turns out to be wrong. People who take the time to reason out the correct answer (five minutes) are, by definition, more analytical—and these analytical types tend to score lower on the researchers' tests of religious belief.

But the researchers went beyond this interesting link, running four experiments showing that analytic thinking actually causes disbelief. In one experiment, they randomly assigned participants to either the analytic or control condition. They then showed them photos of either Rodin's The Thinker or, in the control condition, of the ancient Greek sculpture Discobolus, which depicts an athlete poised to throw a discus. (The Thinker was used because it is such an iconic image of deep reflection that, in a separate test with different participants, seeing the statue improved how well subjects reasoned through logical syllogisms.) After seeing the images, participants took a test measuring their belief in God on a scale of 0 to 100. Their scores on the test varied widely, with a standard deviation of about 35 in the control group. But it is the difference in the averages that tells the real story: In the control group, the average score for belief in God was 61.55, or somewhat above the scale's midpoint. On the other hand, for the group who had just seen The Thinker, the resulting average was only 41.42. Such a gap is large enough to indicate a mild believer is responding as a mild nonbeliever—all from being visually reminded of the human capacity to think.

Another experiment used a different method to show a similar effect. It exploited the tendency, previously identified by psychologists, of people to override their intuition when faced with the demands of reading a text in a hard-to-read typeface. Gervais and Norenzayan did this by giving two groups a test of participants' belief in supernatural agents like God and angels, varying only the font in which the test was printed. People who took the belief test in the unclear font (a typewriterlike font set in italics) expressed less belief than those who took it in a more common, easy-to-read typeface. "It's such a subtle manipulation," Norenzayan says. "Yet something that seemingly trivial can lead to a change that people consider important in their religious belief system." On a belief scale of 3 to 21, participants in the analytic condition scored an average of almost two points lower than those in the control group.

Analytic thinking undermines belief because, as cognitive psychologists have shown, it can override intuition. And we know from past research that religious beliefs—such as the idea that objects and events don't simply exist but have a purpose—are rooted in intuition. "Analytic processing inhibits these intuitions, which in turn discourages religious belief," Norenzayan explains.

Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene, who last year published a paper on the same subject with colleagues Amitai Shenhav and David Rand, praises this work for its rigorous methodology. "Any one of their experiments can be reinterpreted, but when you've got [multiple] different kinds of evidence pointing in the same direction, it's very impressive."

The study also gets high marks from University of California, Irvine, evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, the only former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to have once been ordained as a Catholic priest, and who continues to assert that science and religion are compatible. Ayala calls the studies ingenious, and is surprised only that the effects are not even stronger. "You would expect that the people who challenge the general assumptions of their culture—in this case, their culture's religious beliefs—are obviously the people who are more analytical," he says.
The researchers, for their part, point out that both reason and intuition have their place. "Our intuitions can be phenomenally useful," Gervais says, "and analytic thinking isn't some oracle of the truth."

Greene concurs, while also raising a provocative question implicit in the findings: "Obviously, there are millions of very smart and generally rational people who believe in God," he says. "Obviously, this study doesn't prove the nonexistence of God. But it poses a challenge to believers: If God exists, and if believing in God is perfectly rational, then why does increasing rational thinking tend to decrease belief in God?"

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

Physics & Math

 

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

• Updated 13:15 24 October 2011 by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
• Magazine issue 2835. Subscribe and save
• For similar stories, visit the Finance and Economics Topic Guide

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…" was misattributed.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy
(Data: PLoS One)        

Oligarchy That Runs The World Now Verified By Science

More Government Controls Deemed Needed

by Justin O'Connell / April 19th, 2012

After about five centuries of modern science, since the Scientific Revolution, Science has finally officially confirmed a global oligarchy. Although for, conservatively, 10,000 years ruling families have crafted civilization into a dominating matrix, not until this week has Science confirmed the Truth – or, more accurately, the half-truth.

With movements like the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and the Silver Liberation Army attempting to gain influence in global decision making, “science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears.”

In a study of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations a “relatively small group of companies, mainly banks” have been cited as institutions wielding a disproportionate amount of power and influence over the globe. But, whether or not this power results in undue influence over political processes remains a mystery to Science, according to the study.

Certain axiomatic foundations in the study have gained criticism by certain brokers of Science, but the study still remains a unique and complex systems analysis of the global power structure. Sober history books step aside, for your verbose narratives and portrayal of events is no match for the raw power of science and reason alone. First-hand experience counts for nil. The Experts have weighed in on the way things are, and, for apparently the first time, Science can confirm the oligarchy.

So, if the on-the-ground facts were not proof enough of where power on earth lies – think trillions of dollars of liquidity provided to banks through a bailout culture – or the grassroots movements such as the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and Silver Liberation Army that have all posited corporate greed and banker occupation of the planet as a major hurdle towards peace and freedom, finally theory has been put to reality.

Conducted by three complex systems theorists out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the study, according to the New Scientist, “is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power.” The method used combines mathematics used for a long time to model the makeup of natural systems with detailed data on the corporate world to then map the puzzle of ownership of the world’s transnational corporations.

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says a nonsensical James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

The issue I take up with the aforementioned enunciation is that I do not see the relationship between conspiracy theories and the free market. If I am not mistaken, I believe a free-market is a social condition, whereas a conspiracy theory is a view of an event or the world. And so, conspiracy theories can take place inside the free-market, but the free-market cannot, in any empirically provable manner, exist inside a conspiracy. I am not sure what kind of scienceing this scientist is trying to get away with, but it does not make any rational sense. Furthermore, why does he presume conspiracy theories and free-markets are not reality-based? It seems like Scientist Glattfelder is partaking in his own educated brand of dogma.

Surely, innumerable other studies have researched how very few TNCs own swathes of the world’s economy and its resources, but each of these studies included only some companies and omitted indirect ownerships, and so therefore were incapable of contemplating how the relationship of power affected the globe’s economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for example.

However, in its scientific glory, the Zurich team can do this. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors across the globe, they separated all 43,060 transnational corporations and the share ownerships between them. They then made a model demonstrating which companies controlled other companies through shareholding networks, alongside each company’s operating revenues.

The Great Work “revealed” a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of these companies had direct relationships with two or more different companies. On average they were linked to 20. Moreover, whilst they represented 20% of the globe’s operating revenues, the 1,318 companies appeared to collectively own, through their shares, the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms, “representing a further 60 percent of the global revenues.”

As the team pulled back the shadowy curtain of the corporate world, it discovered a “super-entity:” that is, 147 very tightly knit companies. The ownership of all these companies was held by other members of the super-entity. This entity controlled 40 percent of the total wealth in the overall network. Therefore, less than 1 percent of the companies controlled 40 percent of the entire network,” according to Glattfelder. Most of these were financial institutions. On the top twenty are featured Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and The Goldman Sachs Group.

A University of London macroeconomics expert, John Driffil, says the value of the analysis to the scientific community is not that a small number of people control the world, but rather what the study demonstrates in regards to economic stability. I submit that a small number of people controlling the world automatically creates instability, as the political and economic processes of civilization are not governed by the will of sovereign individuals, but instead by the decisions of businessmen and technocrats, whose morality could, due to their unique social status, divorce from the values of most people.
In a barrage of scientific verbiage, the Zurich trio maintains that the concentration of power is not inherently good or bad, “but the core’s tight interconnections could be.” The world learned in 2008 that such a highly concentrated network is unstable. “If one company suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”

“It’s disconcerting to see how connected things really are,” agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, who heads the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis has some wrongheaded assumptions, such as equating ownership with control. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control how the companies they part-own conduct business. The system’s behavior, he says in scientific elitism, is too complex to just yet be understood by the study, and that more analysis is needed.
The analysis, the New Scientist goes on, could save the world. By pinpointing vulnerable parts of the System, economists can now suggest measures and policies to prevent future collapses from bringing down the global economy. Glattfelder suggests we may need global anti-trust rules, which currently only exist at the national level, to limit over-connection among transnational corporations. Sugihara maintains the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess inter-connectivity to discourage this risk. In other words, Science has concluded that global governance is needed to manage acute concentration of power among transnational corporations.

The super-entity, the New Scientist proposes, is not the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world, for “such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara. Newcomers to any network do their best to connect with the most highly connected members. Transnational corporations buy shares in each other for business reasons, and not for world domination, claims the article. If connectedness clusters, so too then does wealth, according to Dan Braha of NECSI. In other models created of wealth flow, money tends to flow towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, according to Sugihara, “is strong evidence that simple rules governing transtional corporations creates spontaneously highly connected groups.” As Braha presents it, “The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 percent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organizing economy.”

So, Science has confirmed an oligarchy, but has disproved a conspiracy to rule the world. The Zurich team suggests that one real question is whether the super-entity can exert political power over nations. Driffil maintains that 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha reasons that they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes the pyramid structures may be one such interest.

Although the study highlights the concentration of power within transnational corporations, the study does not track the evolution of this power. In other words, what path of history was taken for such an inordinate amount of power to be consolidated by so few shareholders, and what are the long-term implications for global stability.

When a sober analysis of the evolution of power in history is taken into consideration, one can reasonably and emotionally see that concentrated power by an oligarchy does not lead to stability, but, instead, to wars and famine such as those experienced by so many during the twentieth century, as demonstrated clear-as-a-southern-California-day by the historiography. These are wars and famines that cannot be quelled by the policy suggestions of economists, but only by a complete reset of the project of civilization by man, which means an ending to the dominant culture of power, control and authoritarianism as researched by the Zurich study.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Justin O'Connell blogs at The Handshake Times. He can be reached at: justin@libertycpm.com. Read other articles by Justin.

This article was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2012 at 8:00am and is filed under Science/Technology.

How Physics and Neuroscience Dictate Your "Free" Will

Scientific American Mind » May 2012 Features | Mind & Brain

How Physics and Neuroscience Dictate Your "Free" Will

By Christof Koch  | April 12, 2012 |

Image: Photoillustration by Aaron Goodman

In a remote corner of the universe, on a small blue planet gravitating around a humdrum sun in the outer districts of the Milky Way, organisms arose from the primordial mud and ooze in an epic struggle for survival that spanned aeons.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, these bipedal creatures thought of themselves as extraordinarily privileged, occupying a unique place in a cosmos of a trillion trillion stars. Conceited as they were, they believed that they, and only they, could escape the iron law of cause and effect that governs everything. They could do this by virtue of something they called free will, which allowed them to do things without any material reason.

Can you truly act freely? The question of free will is no mere philosophical banter; it engages people in a way that few other metaphysical questions do. It is the bedrock of society’s notions of responsibility, praise and blame. Ultimately it is about the degree of control you exert over your life.

Let’s say you are living with a loving and lovely spouse. A chance meeting with a stranger turns this life utterly upside down. You begin talking for hours on the phone, you share your innermost secrets, you start an affaire de coeur. You realize perfectly well that this is all wrong from an ethical point of view; it will wreak havoc with many lives, with no guarantee of a happy and productive future. Yet something in you yearns for change.

Such gut-churning choices confront you with the question of how much say you really have in the matter. You feel that you could, in principle, break off the affair. Despite many attempts, you somehow never manage to do so.

In my thoughts on these matters of free will, I neglect millennia of learned philosophical debates and focus on what physics, neurobiology and psychology have to say, for they have provided partial answers to this ancient conundrum.

Shades of Freedom

I recently served on a jury in United States District Court in Los Angeles. The defendant was a heavily tattooed member of a street gang that smuggled and sold drugs. He was charged with murdering a fellow gang member with two shots to the head.

As the background to the crime was laid out by law enforcement, relatives, and present and past gang members—some of them testifying while handcuffed, shackled and dressed in bright orange prison jumpsuits—I thought about the individual and societal forces that had shaped the defendant. Did he ever have a choice? Did his violent upbringing make it inevitable that he would kill? Fortunately, the jury was not called on to answer these irresolvable questions or to determine his punishment. We only had to decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether he was guilty as charged, whether he had shot a particular person at a particular place and time. And this we did.

According to what some call the strong definition of free will, articulated by René Descartes in the 17th century, you are free if, under identical circumstances, you could have acted otherwise. Identical circumstances refer to not only the same external conditions but also the same brain states. The soul freely chooses this way or that, making the brain act out its wishes, like a driver who takes a car down this road or that one. This view is the one most regular folks believe in.

Contrast this strong notion of freedom with a more pragmatic conception called compatibilism, the dominant view in biological, psychological, legal and medical circles. You are free if you can follow your own desires and preferences. A long-term smoker who wants to quit but who lights up again and again is not free. His desire is thwarted by his addiction. Under this definition, few of us are completely free.

It is the rare individual—Mahatma Gandhi comes to mind—who can steel himself to withhold sustenance for weeks on end for a higher ethical purpose. Another extreme case of iron self-control is the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in 1963 to protest the repressive regime in South Vietnam. What is so singular about this event, captured in haunting photographs, is the calm and deliberate nature of his heroic act. While burning to death, Duc remained in the meditative lotus position, without moving a muscle or uttering a sound, as the flames consumed him. For the rest of us, who struggle to avoid going for dessert, freedom is always a question of degree rather than an absolute good that we do or do not possess.
Criminal law recognizes instances of diminished responsibility. The husband who beats his wife’s lover to death in a blind rage when he catches them in flagrante delicto is considered less guilty than if he had sought revenge weeks later in a cold, premeditated manner. Norwegian Anders Breivik, who shot more than 60 people in a cold-blooded and calculated manner in July 2011, is a paranoid schizophrenic who was found to be criminally insane and will probably be confined to a psychiatric institution. Contemporary society and the judicial system are built on such a pragmatic, psychological notion of freedom.

But I want to dig deeper. I want to unearth the underlying causes of actions that are traditionally thought of as “free.”

A Clockwork Universe

In 1687 Isaac Newton published his Principia, which enunciated the law of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. Newton’s second law links the force brought on a system—a billiard ball rolling on a green felt table—to its acceleration. This law has profound consequences, for it implies that the positions and velocities of all the components making up an entity at any particular moment, together with the forces between them, unalterably determine that entity’s fate—that is, its future location and speed.

This is the essence of determinism. The mass, location and velocities of the planets as they travel in their orbits around the sun determine where they will be in a thousand, a million or a billion years from today, provided only that all the forces acting on them are properly accounted for. The universe, once set in motion, runs its course inexorably, like a clockwork.

A full-blown setback for the notion that the future can be accurately forecast was revealed in the form of deterministic chaos. The late meteorologist Edward Lorenz came across it while solving three simple mathematical equations characterizing the motion of the atmosphere. The solution predicted by his computer program varied widely when he entered starting values that differed by only tiny amounts. This is the hallmark of chaos: infinitesimally small perturbations in the equations’ starting points lead to radically different outcomes. In 1972 Lorenz coined the term “butterfly effect” to denote this extreme sensitivity to initial conditions: the beating of a butterfly’s wings creates barely perceptible ripples in the atmosphere that ultimately alter the path of a tornado elsewhere.

Remarkably, such a butterfly effect was found in celestial mechanics, the epitome of the clockwork universe. Planets majestically ride gravity’s geodesics, propelled by the initial rotation of the cloud that formed the solar system. It came as a mighty surprise, therefore, when computer modeling in the 1990s demonstrated that Pluto has a chaotic orbit, with a divergence time of millions of years. Astronomers cannot be certain whether Pluto will be on this side of the sun (relative to Earth’s position) or the other side 10 million years from now! If this uncertainty holds for a planet with a comparatively simple internal makeup, moving in the vacuum of space under a sole force, gravitation, what does it portend for the predictability of a person, a tiny insect or an itsy-bitsy nerve cell, all of which are swayed by countless factors?
Chaos does not invalidate the natural law of cause and effect, however. It continues to reign supreme. Planetary physicists aren’t quite sure where Pluto will be aeons from now, but they are confident that its orbit will always be completely in thrall to gravity. What breaks down in chaos is not the chain of action and reaction, but predictability. The universe is still a gigantic clockwork, even though we can’t be sure where the minute and hour hands will point a week hence.

Origins of Uncertainty

The deathblow to the Newtonian dream—or nightmare, in my opinion—was the celebrated quantum-mechanical uncertainty principle, formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. In its most common interpretation, it avers that any particle, say, a photon of light or an electron, cannot have both a definite position and a definite momentum at the same time. If you know its speed accurately, its position is correspondingly ill defined, and vice versa. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a radical departure from classical physics. It replaces dogmatic certainty with ambiguity.

Consider an experiment that ends with a 90 percent chance of an electron being here and a 10 percent chance of it being over there. If the experiment were repeated 1,000 times, on about 900 trials, give or take a few, the electron would be here; otherwise, it would be over there. Yet this statistical outcome does not ordain where the electron will be on the next trial. Albert Einstein could never reconcile himself to this random aspect of nature. It is in this context that he famously pronounced, “Der Alte wu?rfelt nicht” (the Old Man, that is, God, does not play dice).

The universe has an irreducible, random character. If it is a clockwork, its cogs, springs and levers are not Swiss-made; they do not follow a predetermined path. Physical determinism has been replaced by the determinism of probabilities. Nothing is certain anymore.

But wait—I hear a serious objection. There is no question that the macroscopic world of human experience is built on the microscopic, quantum world. Yet that does not imply that everyday objects such as cars inherit all the weird properties of quantum mechanics. When I park my red Mini convertible, it has zero velocity relative to the pavement. Because it is enormously heavy compared with an electron, the fuzziness associated with its position is, to all intents and purposes, zero.

Cars have comparatively simple internal structures. The brains of bees, beagles and boys, by comparison, are vastly more heterogeneous, and the components out of which they are constructed have a noisy character. Randomness is apparent everywhere in their nervous system, from sensory neurons picking up sights and smells to motor neurons controlling the body’s muscles. We cannot rule out the possibility that quantum indeterminacy likewise leads to behavioral indeterminacy.
Such randomness may play a functional role. If a housefly pursued by a predator makes a sudden, abrupt turn midflight, it is more likely to see the light of another day than its more predictable companion. Thus, evolution might favor circuits that exploit quantum randomness for certain acts or decisions. Both quantum mechanics and deterministic chaos lead to unpredictable outcomes.

Afterthought to Action

Let me return to solid ground and tell you about a classical experiment that convinced many people that free will must be an illusion. This experiment was conceived and carried out in the early 1980s by Benjamin Libet, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

The brain and the sea have one thing in common—both are ceaselessly in commotion. One way to visualize this is to record the tiny fluctuations in the electrical potential on the outside of the scalp, a few millionths of a volt in size, using an electroencephalograph (EEG). Like the recording of a seismometer, the EEG trace moves feverishly up and down, registering unseen tremors in the cerebral cortex underneath. Whenever the person being tested is about to move a limb, an electrical potential builds up. Called the readiness potential, it precedes the actual onset of movement by one second or longer.

Intuitively, the sequence of events that leads to a voluntary act must be as follows: You decide to raise your hand; your brain communicates that intention to the neurons responsible for planning and executing hand movements; and those neurons relay the appropriate commands to the motor neurons that contract the arm muscles. But Libet was not convinced. Wasn’t it more likely that the mind and the brain acted simultaneously or even that the brain acted before the mind did?

Libet set out to determine the timing of a mental event, a person’s deliberate decision, and to compare that with the timing of a physical event, the onset of the readiness potential after that decision. He projected onto a screen a point of bright light that went around and around, like the tip of the minute hand on a clock. With EEG electrodes on his or her head, each volunteer had to spontaneously, but deliberately, flex a wrist. They did this while noting the position of the light when they became aware of the urge to act.

The results told an unambiguous story, which was bolstered by later experiments. The beginning of the readiness potential precedes the conscious decision to move by at least half a second and often by much longer. The brain acts before the mind decides! This discovery was a complete reversal of the deeply held intuition of mental causation.

The Conscious Experience of Will

Why don’t you repeat this experiment right now: go ahead and flex your wrist. You experience three allied yet distinct feelings associated with the plan to move (intention), your willing of the movement (a feeling called agency or authorship), and the actual movement. If a friend were to take your hand and bend it, you would experience the movement but neither intention nor agency; that is, you would not feel responsible for the wrist movement. This is a neglected idea in the debate about free will—that the mind-body nexus creates a specific, conscious experience of “I willed this” or “I am the author of this action.”

Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard University, is one of the trailblazers of the modern study of volition. In one experiment, Wegner asked a volunteer to wear gloves and stand in front of a mirror, her arms hanging by her sides. Directly behind her stood a lab member, dressed identically. He extended his arms under her armpits, so that when the woman looked into the mirror, his two gloved hands appeared to be her own. Both participants wore headphones through which Wegner issued instructions, such as “clap your hands” or “snap your left fingers.” The volunteer was supposed to report on the extent to which the actions of the lab member’s hands were her own. When she heard Wegner’s directions prior to the man’s hands carrying them out, she reported an enhanced feeling of having willed the action herself, compared with when Wegner’s instructions came after the man had already moved his hands.

The reality of these feelings of intention has been underscored by neurosurgeons, who must occasionally probe brain tissue with brief pulses of electric current. In the course of such explorations, Itzhak Fried, a surgeon at U.C.L.A., stimulated the presupplementary motor area, which is part of the vast expanse of cerebral cortex lying in front of the primary motor cortex. He found that such stimulation can trigger the urge to move a limb. Michel Desmurget of INSERM and Angela Sirigu of the Institute of Cognitive Science in France discovered something similar when stimulating the posterior parietal cortex, an area responsible for transforming visual information into motor commands. Patients commented, “It felt like I wanted to move my foot. Not sure how to explain,” or “I had a desire to roll my tongue in my mouth.” Their feelings arose from within, without any prompting by the examiner.

Free the Mind

I have taken two lessons from these insights. First, I have adopted a more pragmatic conception of free will. I strive to live as free of constraints as possible. The only exception should be restrictions that I deliberately and consciously impose on myself, chief among them restraints motivated by ethical concerns: do not hurt others and try to leave the planet a better place than you found it. Other considerations include family life, health, financial stability and mindfulness. Second, I try to understand my unconscious motivations, desires and fears better. I reflect deeper about my own actions and emotions than my younger self did.

I am breaking no new ground here—these are lessons wise men from all cultures have taught for millennia. The ancient Greeks had “gnothi seauton” (“know thyself”) inscribed above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The Jesuits have a nearly 500-year-old spiritual tradition that emphasizes a twice-daily examination of conscience. This constant internal interrogation sharpens your sensitivity to your actions, desires and motivations. This will enable you not only to understand yourself better but also to live a life more in harmony with your character and your long-term goals.

This article was published in print as "Finding Free Will."
Adapted from Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, by Christof Koch, © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Christof Koch is chief scientific officer at the Allen institute for Brain Science in Seattle and Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He serves on Scientific American Mind's board of advisers.