Summary: Researchers find that “neural activation patterns were predictive of the contents of voluntary visual imagery as far as 11 seconds before the choice of what to imagine. These results suggest that the contents of future visual imagery can be biased by current or prior neural representations.”

Source: University of New South Wales

We like to think that we are in the driver’s seat when it comes to the choice and strength of our everyday thoughts, but new research from UNSW suggests they might be more automatic and unconscious than we think.

A new UNSW study suggests we have less control over our personal choices than we think, and that unconscious brain activity seemingly determines our choices well before we are aware of them.

Published in the prestigious Nature journal, an experiment carried out in the Future Minds Lab at UNSW School of Psychology showed that free choices about what to think can be predicted from patterns of brain activity 11 seconds before people consciously chose what to think about.

The experiment consisted of asking people to freely choose between two visual patterns of red and green stripes – one of them running horizontally, the other vertically – before consciously imagining them while being observed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The participants were also asked to rate how strongly they felt their visualisations of the patterns were after choosing them, again while researchers recorded their brain activity during the process.

Not only could the researchers predict which pattern they would choose, they could also predict how strongly the participants were to rate their visualisations. With the assistance of machine learning, the researchers were successful at making above-chance predictions of the participants’ volitional choices at an average of 11 seconds before the thoughts became conscious.

The brain areas that revealed information about the future choices were located in executive areas of the brain – where our conscious decision-making is made – as well as visual and subcortical structures, suggesting an extended network of areas responsible for the birth of thoughts.

Lab director Professor Joel Pearson believes what could be happening in the brain is that we may have thoughts on ‘standby’ based on previous brain activity, which then influences the final decision without us being aware.

“We believe that when we are faced with the choice between two or more options of what to think about, non-conscious traces of the thoughts are there already, a bit like unconscious hallucinations,” Professor Pearson says.

“As the decision of what to think about is made, executive areas of the brain choose the thought-trace which is stronger. In, other words, if any pre-existing brain activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will be more likely to pick that option as it gets boosted by the pre-existing brain activity.

“This would explain, for example, why thinking over and over about something leads to ever more thoughts about it, as it occurs in a positive feedback loop.”

Interestingly, the subjective strength of the future thoughts was also dependent on activity housed in the early visual cortex, an area in the brain that receives visual information from the outside world. The researchers say this suggests that the current state of activity in perceptual areas (which are believed to change randomly) has an influence in how strongly we think about things.

These results raise questions about our sense of volition for our own private and personal mental visual images. This study is the first to capture the origins and content of involuntary visual thoughts and how they might bias subsequent voluntary conscious imagery.

The insight gained with this experiment may also have implications for mental disorders involving thought intrusions that use mental imagery, such as PTSD, the authors say.

However, the researchers caution against assuming that all choices are by nature predetermined by pre-existing brain activity.

“Our results cannot guarantee that all choices are preceded by involuntary images, but it shows that this mechanism exists, and it potentially biases our everyday choices,” Professor Pearson says.

About this neuroscience research article

Source: UNSW Newsroom

By Lachlan Gilbert – UNSW

Publisher: Our Brains Reveal Our Choices Before We’re Even Aware of Them organized by Neuroscience News.

Image Source: First brain image is credited to Shutterstock. The second image is credited to Future Minds Lab of UNSW.

Original Research: Open Access research article “Decoding the contents and strength of imagery before volitional engagement” by Roger Koenig-Robert & Joel Pearson is in Nature: Scientific Reports. Published March 5, 2019

doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-39813-y

Note: Summary quote is from the paper listed above.

Abstract

Decoding the contents and strength of imagery before volitional engagement

Is it possible to predict the freely chosen content of voluntary imagery from prior neural signals? Here we show that the content and strength of future voluntary imagery can be decoded from activity patterns in visual and frontal areas well before participants engage in voluntary imagery. Participants freely chose which of two images to imagine. Using functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and multi-voxel pattern analysis, we decoded imagery content as far as 11 seconds before the voluntary decision, in visual, frontal and subcortical areas. Decoding in visual areas in addition to perception-imagery generalization suggested that predictive patterns correspond to visual representations. Importantly, activity patterns in the primary visual cortex (V1) from before the decision, predicted future imagery vividness. Our results suggest that the contents and strength of mental imagery are influenced by sensory-like neural representations that emerge spontaneously before volition.

Concluding remarks and future directions (from Scientific Reports)

Our current study can be seen as the first to capture the possible origins and contents of involuntary thoughts and how they progress into or bias subsequent voluntary imagery. This is compatible with the finding that the most prominent differences between low and high vividness trials are seen for the pre-imagery period in visual areas, especially the primary visual cortex, which can be interpreted as when one of the patterns is more strongly represented it will induce a more vivid subsequent volitional mental image. This is in line with reports showing that imagery vividness depends on the relative overlap of the patterns of activation elicited by visual perception and imagery. Our results expand that finding by showing that the vividness of future visual thoughts is predicted by information stored in the primary visual cortex.

It is up to future research to reveal whether representations biasing subsequent voluntary imagery are genuinely non-conscious or not. This will not only shed light on age-old questions of volition, but also provide a clear mechanism for pathological intrusive thoughts common across multiple mental disorders.

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