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"You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it. In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them. The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion? "Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist. Haynes updated a classic experiment by the late Benjamin Libet, who showed that a brain region involved in coordinating motor activity fired a fraction of a second before test subjects chose to push a button. Later studies supported Libet's theory that subconscious activity preceded and determined conscious choice -- but none found such a vast gap between a decision and the experience of making it as Haynes' study has. In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. Haynes' team monitored these shifting neural patterns using a functional MRI machine. Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand -- a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation. For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis

"Jerome Kagan's "Aha!" moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive. Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Related Letters: The Anxious Mind (October 18, 2009) Health Guide: Anxiety Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (191) » No high-reactors among the first 18. They gazed calmly at things that were unfamiliar. But the 19th baby was different. She was distressed by novelty - new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells - and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Here was what Kagan was looking for but was not sure he would find: a baby who essentially fell apart when exposed to anything new. Baby 19 grew up true to her temperament. This past summer, Kagan showed me a video of her from 2004, when she was 15. We sat in a screening room in Harvard's William James Hall - a building named, coincidentally, for the 19th-century psychologist who described his own struggles with anxiety as "a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach ... a sense of the insecurity of life." Kagan is elfin and spry, ba

"Daniel Kahneman spent part of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris. Like the other Jews, he had to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. One evening, when he was about 7 years old, he stayed late at a friend's house, past the 6 p.m. curfew. The intellectual, cultural and scientific findings that land on the columnist's desk nearly every day. He turned his sweater inside out to hide the star and tried to sneak home. A German SS trooper approached him on the street, picked him up and gave him a long, emotional hug. The soldier displayed a photo of his own son, spoke passionately about how much he missed him and gave Kahneman some money as a sentimental present. The whole time Kahneman was terrified that the SS trooper might notice the yellow star peeking out from inside his sweater. Kahneman finally made it home, convinced that people are complicated and bizarre. He went on to become one of the world's most influential psychologists and to win the Nobel in economic science. Kahneman doesn't actually tell that childhood story in his forthcoming book. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is an intellectual memoir, not a personal one. The book is, nonetheless, sure to be a major intellectual event (look for an excerpt in The Times Magazine this Sunday) because it superbly encapsulates Kahneman's research, and the vast tide of work that has been sparked by it. I'd like to use this column not to summarize the book but to describe why I think Kahneman and his research partner, the late Amos Tversky, will be remembered hundreds of years from now, and how their work helped instigate a cultural shift that is already producing astounding results. Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that w

Samuel Beckett, born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906, was a native English speaker. However, in 1946 Beckett decided that he would begin writing exclusively in French. After composing the first draft in his second language, he would then translate these words back into English. This difficult constraint - forcing himself to consciously unpack his own sentences - led to a burst of genius, as many of Beckett's most famous works (Malloy, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot, etc.) were written during this period. When asked why he wrote first in French, Beckett said it made it easier for him to "write without style." Beckett would later expand on these comments, noting that his use of French prevented him from slipping into his usual writerly habits, those crutches of style that snuck into his English prose. Instead of relying on the first word that leapt into consciousness - that most automatic of associations - he was forced by his second language to reflect on what he actually wanted to express. His diction became more intentional. There's now some neat experimental proof of this Beckettian strategy. In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, a team of psychologists led by Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago found that forcing people to rely on a second language systematically reduced human biases, allowing the subjects to escape from the usual blind spots of cognition. In a sense, they were better able to think without style. The paper is a tour de force of cross-cultural comparison, as the scientists conducted six experiments on three continents (n > 600) in five different languages: English, Korean, French, Spanish and Japanese. Although all subjects were proficient in their second language, they were not "balanced bilingual." The experiments themselves relied on classic paradigms borrowed from prospect theory, in which people are asked to make decisions under varying conditions of uncertainty and risk. For instance, native English

"Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote, "It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion." More recently, the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard declared, "We certainly don't have free will. Not in the sense we think." And in June, the neuroscientist Sam Harris claimed, "You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain." Many neuroscientists are employing a flawed notion of free will. Such proclamations make the news; after all, if free will is dead, then moral and legal responsibility may be close behind. As the legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen wrote in The New York Times Magazine, "Since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn't this mean all behavior could potentially be excused? … The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility." Indeed, free will matters in part because it is a precondition for deserving blame for bad acts and deserving credit for achievements. It also turns out that simply exposing people to scientific claims that free will is an illusion can lead them to misbehave, for instance, cheating more or helping others less. [1] So, it matters whether these scientists are justified in concluding that free will is an illusion. "

"FOR the last few weeks, the sex abuse scandal at Penn State and the harassment claims against the Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain have been fodder for discussion at my house. The same is true, I assume, around the country. Putting aside the specifics of each case, one question that has come up is, "What would I do?" That is, if I saw what seemed to be a crime or unethical act committed by a respected colleague, coach, teacher or friend, would I storm in and stop it? Would I call the authorities immediately? Would I disregard the potentially devastating impact on my job or workplace or beloved institution? Absolutely, most of us would probably reply. I think so, others might respond. And the most honest answer? I don't know. As much as we would like to think that, put on the spot, we would do the right - and perhaps even heroic - thing, research has shown that that usually isn't true. "People are routinely more willing to be critical of others' ethics than of their own," said Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and two other authors in the journal article "See No Evil: When We Overlook Other People's Unethical Behavior." The article appeared as a chapter in the book "Social Decision Making" (Psychology Press, 2009). "People believe they are more honest and trustworthy than others and they try harder to do good." But our faith in ourselves isn't borne out by history or research, something the Times columnist David Brooks pointed out in his column this week. The most well-known example of this in academia is the experiment conducted by the Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. In the experiment, participants were "teachers" and, unbeknown to the participants, the "learner" was really an actor. The teacher was to instruct the learner in word pairs. For every wrong answer, the teacher could shock the learner, increasing the intensity of the shock for

"Talking about ourselves-whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter-triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money, researchers reported Monday. About 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. Now, through five brain imaging and behavioral experiments, Harvard University neuroscientists have uncovered the reason: It feels so rewarding, at the level of brain cells and synapses, that we can't help sharing our thoughts. Bragging gives the same sensation of pleasure as food and money. The same areas of the brain are activated, scans show. "Self-disclosure is extra rewarding," said Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, who conducted the experiments with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves," Ms. Tamir said. To assess people's inclination for what the researchers call "self disclosure," they conducted laboratory tests to see whether people placed an unusually high value on the opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings. They also monitored brain activity among some volunteers to see what parts of the brain were most excited when people talked about themselves as opposed to other people. The dozens of volunteers were mostly Americans who lived near the university. In several tests, they offered the volunteers money if they chose to answer questions about other people, such as President Obama, rather than about themselves, paying out on a sliding scale of up to four cents. Questions involved casual matters such as whether someone enjoyed snowboarding or liked mushrooms on a pizza. Other queries involved personality traits, such as intelligence, curiosity or aggression."

"One day last summer, Anne and her husband, Miguel, took their 9-year-old son, Michael, to a Florida elementary school for the first day of what the family chose to call "summer camp." For years, Anne and Miguel have struggled to understand their eldest son, an elegant boy with high-planed cheeks, wide eyes and curly light brown hair, whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment. Michael's eight-week program was, in reality, a highly structured psychological study - less summer camp than camp of last resort. Michael's problems started, according to his mother, around age 3, shortly after his brother Allan was born. At the time, she said, Michael was mostly just acting "like a brat," but his behavior soon escalated to throwing tantrums during which he would scream and shriek inconsolably. These weren't ordinary toddler's fits. "It wasn't, 'I'm tired' or 'I'm frustrated' - the normal things kids do," Anne remembered. "His behavior was really out there. And it would happen for hours and hours each day, no matter what we did." For several years, Michael screamed every time his parents told him to put on his shoes or perform other ordinary tasks, like retrieving one of his toys from the living room. "Going somewhere, staying somewhere - anything would set him off," Miguel said. These furies lasted well beyond toddlerhood. At 8, Michael would still fly into a rage when Anne or Miguel tried to get him ready for school, punching the wall and kicking holes in the door. Left unwatched, he would cut up his trousers with scissors or methodically pull his hair out. He would also vent his anger by slamming the toilet seat down again and again until it broke. When Anne and Miguel first took Michael to see a therapist, he was given a diagnosis of "firstborn syndrome": acting out because he resented his new sibling. While both parents acknowledged that Michael was deeply hostile to the new baby, sibling rivalr

"What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience. "Neuroaesthetics" is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art to collaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals. Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, likes to say that art is governed by the laws of the brain. It is brains, he says, that see art and it is brains that make art. Champions of the new brain-based approach to art sometimes think of themselves as fighting a battle with scholars in the humanities who may lack the courage (in the words of the art historian John Onians) to acknowledge the ways in which biology constrains cultural activity. Strikingly, it hasn't been much of a battle. Students of culture, like so many of us, seem all too glad to join in the general enthusiasm for neural approaches to just about everything."

"Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it. The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence. Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories). The experiment, being reported Friday in the journal Science, is likely to open a new avenue in the investigation of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, some experts said, as well as help explain how some memories seemingly come out of nowhere. The researchers were even able to identify specific memories in subjects a second or two before the people themselves reported having them. "This is what I would call a foundational finding," said Michael J. Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. "I cannot think of any recent study that's comparable. "

"Maybe such a crisis is in order. It isn't just that as these machines get more powerful they do more jobs once done only by people, from financial analysis to secretarial work to world-class chess playing. It's that, in the process, they seem to underscore the generally dispiriting drift of scientific inquiry. First Copernicus said we're not the center of the universe. Then Darwin said we're just protozoans with a long list of add-ons--mere "survival machines," as modern Darwinians put it. And machines don't have souls, right? Certainly Deep Blue hasn't mentioned having one. The better these seemingly soulless machines get at doing things people do, the more plausible it seems that we could be soulless machines too. But however logical this downbeat argument may sound, it doesn't appear to be prevailing among scholars who ponder such issues for a living. That isn't to say philosophers are suddenly resurrecting the idea of a distinct, immaterial soul that governs the body for a lifetime and then drifts off to its reward. They're philosophers, not theologians. When talking about some conceivably nonphysical property of human beings, they talk not about "souls" but about "consciousness" and "mind." The point is simply that as the information age advances and computers get brainier, philosophers are taking the ethereal existence of mind, of consciousness, more seriously, not less. And one result is to leave the theologically inclined more room for spiritual speculation."

"As neurologists, psychologists and biologists have zeroed in more and more precisely on the physical causes of mental disorders, they have found themselves addressing a much deeper mystery, a set of interrelated conundrums probably as old as humanity: What, precisely, is the mind, the elusive entity where intelligence, decision making, perception, awareness and sense of self reside? Where is it located? How does it work? Does it arise from purely physical processes-pulses of electricity zapping from brain cell to brain cell, helped along their way by myriad complex chemicals? Or is it something beyond the merely physical-something ethereal that might be close to the spiritual concept of the soul? Great thinkers have had no shortage of ideas on the subject. Plato was convinced that the mind must be located inside the head, because the head is shaped more or less like a sphere, his idea of the highest geometrical form. Aristotle insisted that the mind was in the heart. His reasoning: warmth implies vitality; the blood is warm; the heart pumps the blood. By the Middle Ages, though, pretty much everyone agreed that the mind arose from the brain -- but still had no clear idea how it arose. Finally, in the 17th century, the French philosopher Rena Descartes declared that the mind, while it might live in the brain, was a nonmaterial thing, entirely separate from the physical tissues found inside the head. Furthermore, said Descartes in one of history's most memorable sound bites, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). His point: consciousness is the only sure evidence that we actually exist. Until just a few years ago, unraveling the relationship of mind and brain was beyond the realm of observation and experimentation. But science has finally begun to catch up with philosophy. Using sensitive electrodes inserted deep into the gray matter of test animals, researchers have watched vision as it percolates inward from the eye's retina to the inner brain. Powerful te

"Stress in the Brain Anxiety has become a hot topic in education research, as educators and policymakers become increasingly focused on test performance and more-intensive curricula, and neuroscience has begun to provide a window into how the brain responds to anxiety. Anxieties and Stereotypes Researchers have found that the more anxious their female teachers were about math, the more likely girls-but not boys- were to endorse gender-related stereotypes about math ability. In turn, the girls who echoed those stereotypical beliefs were performing less well than other students in math by year's end. SOURCE: University of Chicago Anxiety can literally cut off the working memory needed to learn and solve problems, according to Dr. Judy Willis, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based neurologist, former middle school teacher, and author of the 2010 book Learning to Love Math. When first taking in a problem, a student processes information through the amygdala, the brain's emotional center, which then prioritizes information going to the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for the brain's working memory and critical thinking. During stress, there is more activity in the amygdala than the prefrontal cortex; even as minor a stressor as seeing a frowning face before answering a question can decrease a student's ability to remember and respond accurately. "When engaged in mathematical problem-solving, highly math-anxious individuals suffer from intrusive thoughts and ruminations," said Daniel Ansari, the principal investigator for the Numerical Cognition Laboratory at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. "This takes up some of their processing and working memory. It's very much as though individuals with math anxiety use up the brainpower they need for the problem" on worrying. Moreover, a series of experiments at the Mangels Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Attention at Baruch College at the City University of New York sugg

"A small new study provides more evidence that, on average, antidepressants may be little more effective than a sugar pill in most patients who take them. "I think we've made decisions (about how to treat depression) more difficult," says co-author Robert DeRubeis, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. The findings are published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association. "I hope we have.""

"Recall a time you said or did something incorrect in front of peers or authority figures. Now think of all the details you can recall associated with that experience. Where you were, who was there, any other things you wouldn't ordinarily remember about distant events such as what you wore, saw, did earlier or later that day. If you have a minute, write down some of these ancillary sensory memories. What you recall now is the result of your dopamine-reward network and your flashbulb memory or event memory system. As the brain evolved for survival of the animal and the species, much of what we humans now do is directed by hard-wired neural networks and neurotransmitters not under conscious control. Actually only about 17% of your brain is capable of responding to your conscious will; the rest is pretty much like that of a lower mammal or newborn baby with reactions to input based on association with imminent danger, risk, or pleasure."

"Despite memory's obvious benefits, it can also let us down, said Daniel Schacter, PhD, longtime memory researcher and chair of Harvard University's psychology department, at an APA 2003 Annual Convention session honoring the publication of his book, "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers" (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). "Memory, for all that it does for us every day...for all the feats that can sometimes amaze us, can also be a troublemaker," said Schacter of his book, which describes the seven major categories of memory foibles being investigated by psychologists. However, noted Schacter, the same brain mechanisms account for memory's sins as well as its strengths, so investigating its negatives exposes its positives. "We shouldn't think of these fundamentally as flaws in the architecture of memory," he explained, "but rather as costs we pay for benefits in memory that make it work as well as it does most of the time." At the session, during which Schacter received the APA Div. 1 (Society for General Psychology) William James Book Award, he defined his book's seven sins. The first three are "sins of omission" that involve forgetting, and the second four are "sins of commission" that involve distorted or unwanted recollections."

"BARBARA HERBERT, a former council worker living in southern England, discovered after the death of the woman she had thought was her mother that in fact she had been adopted. Among her assumed mother's papers, she found a name and address in Finland. When that produced no answer, she contacted the local newspaper in Finland. A reporter dug up the story. Her real mother had been sent to England, two months pregnant, in 1939. She had given birth, been sent back to Finland, and committed suicide at the age of 24. Mrs Herbert had a feeling the story was not over. She seemed to recall somebody saying, "There was another one." So she contacted Hammersmith Hospital, where she was born; and, sure enough, there had been twins. The Registrar-General refused to help her contact her twin. She took the Registrar-General to court, and won. That is how she found her sister. They met at King's Cross station in London. "We just said 'Hi' and walked off together, leaving our husbands standing there," says Mrs Herbert. "It seemed so natural." Mrs Herbert is a bit fatter than her sister, but she can think of no other important difference between them. Their intelligence quotients (IQs) were one point apart. They were tested again a year later; they scored ten points higher, but still only one point apart. Mrs Herbert and her sister Daphne are gold dust to geneticists. Unlike fraternal twins, who are the product of separate eggs fertilised by different sperm, identical twins are natural clones, produced when a fertilised egg splits in two shortly after conception. Such twins, when separated after birth, are thus a scientific experiment designed jointly by nature and by society. They have the same genes but have been brought up in different environments. These curiosities are getting rarer. Until the 1960s, twins offered for adoption in the West were often separated at birth, on the argument that two babies would be too much for one mother. That no longer happens

"These points are extremely well-taken, particularly his last comments about the use of brain scans as indications of the brain's functions. I'm delighted to see a scientist of Gazzaniga's stature provide these cautions. Others have also worried about the over-interpretations of brain scans, a question I raised in my Psychology Today blog posting "MRI's: The new phrenology?" How many times have you heard the expression "the brain lights up"? The brain does not behave in technicolor; it's just that the colors make for a better story when researchers are trying to sell their results to the public and funding agencies. It's important that we not over-interpret the pretty colors that brain scans provide but instead recognize that everyone's brain is a little bit different and that activity in a region doesn't signify exactly what a person is thinking or feeling. I hope that we will keep these cautions in mind even as brain scans become more and more commonplace. "