Free Will: Part 1

Last week both New Scientist and ScienceNow had articles on free will and conscious decision-making. Both focused on work being done by John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. First the bad news:

Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. The pattern predicted a left or right decision with about 60% accuracy and occurred about 10 seconds before the conscious choice, the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience. "We weren't expecting this kind of lead time," Haynes says. Even though the predictions weren't perfect, "there's not very much space for operation of free will," Haynes says. "The outcome of a decision is shaped very strongly by brain activity much earlier than the point in time when you feel to be making a decision."

Then the good news:

Experiments to test whether a choice can be reversed are in the works, Haynes says. "We can't rule out that people might be able to change their minds."