Mysterious 'background noise' in the brain that gives us free will

A team of experts from the University of California set out to find whether humans are capable of free will - and came up with some surprising results.

The study, lead by Dr Jesse Bengson and published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, aimed to better understand the ability to make choices and where that ability comes from.



Dr Bengson, a postdoctoral researcher at the university, sat 19 volunteers in front of a screen while mapping the electrical activity of their brains using electroencephalography, or EEG.



EEG shows the way the brain is patterning before making a decision.



Are you capable o free will?: A study the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, have found that free will may actually be the result of electrical activity in the brain. Here a subject is hooked up to an electroencephalography, or EEG

Following prompts on the screen, the volunteers were told to make a decision to look to the left or right when cue symbols appeared on the screen, according to The Parent Herald.



The symbols appeared randomly, so the volunteers could not consciously prepare for their decisions.



Dr Bengson found that the brain naturally has a 'background noise' that is produced as electrical activity patterns fluctuate across the brain.

The study determined that looking at the pattern of brain activity 0.8 seconds before the cue appeared was a good predictor of which way the subject would choose to look.



'The state of the brain right before presentation of the cue determines whether you will attend to the left or to the right,' Dr Bengson concluded.



Bengson believes this relates back to free will and suggests our decisions are not pre-determined.



Volunteers in the study were asked to focus on the central point of a screen while their brains¿ electrical activity was recorded. They were then asked to make a decision to look either left or right when a cue symbol appeared on the screen, and then to report their decision

'A broader implication of this finding is that the appearance of free will, as manifested through seemingly arbitrary cognitive decisions, may be a consequence of the role that inherent variability in brain activity plays in biasing momentary behavior,' he noted in the study, IFL Science reported.



Begson said the work 'inserts a random effect that allows us to be freed from simple cause and effect'.



Critics have previously rejected this theory, believing our decisions are deterministic.



The experiment builds on a famous 1970s experiment by Benjamin Libet, a ps