Release date: 2016-05-20
The brain subtly reverses the order of "decision" and "behavior" in memory, making you think that your own decision leads to behavior.
Pressing the alarm clock, picking out a piece of clothing from the closet, and taking out a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, things happen day after day. In each of these things, we all think that we are free agents, able to control our body consciously and purposefully. But what is the real root cause of these daily experiences? See how science explains.
Nearly 20 years ago, psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley published a classic article and proposed a revolutionary perspective: freedom dominates their behavior. The experience is simply the wrong conclusion of "thought-making action" through post-hoc attribution. As far as perception itself is concerned, it has no causal relationship with the production of behavior. In this way, we sometimes think that we have made a choice, but in fact we have not, or in fact we made a choice, and we thought that we made another choice.
But there is a question like this. According to the theory put forward by Wegner and Whitley, we observe that we (unconsciously) perform an action, such as picking a box of cereals from the store, and then inferring that the action is intentional. If this is the true sequence of events, how can we be deceived so that we believe that we have made a choice before we observe the behavior? This theory of interpreting our sense of "self-discipline" seems to require a supernatural time to reverse causality, because if we say so, our conscious experience is not only a product of behavior, but also a superficial cause of behavior.
In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explored this puzzle and found a radical but not magical explanation: maybe We experience the moment when we make our decisions, the brain is rewriting memories, the new memories fool us, let us think that this choice was made before, and in fact this choice is after the results are subconsciously perceived. Only completed.
Although we have not fully understood the exact way the brain rewrites memory, some similar phenomena have been documented. For example, we saw the phenomenon of this point before we saw a point at the destination. Another example is that when we move our arms, we have an illusory touch before we perceive a real touch. People often interpret this kind of "post-sexual" illusion as the external information from the generation to the conscious perception, there is a time delay between them. Because consciousness is slightly lagging behind reality, consciousness can “predict†future events that have not yet been perceived but have been incorporated into the subconscious, thus creating an illusion that the future will change the past.
In our study, the experiment participants saw five white circles that appeared repeatedly on the computer display, and the positions of the circles were random. Then let them quickly pick a circle in the brain before one of them turns red. If a circle becomes too fast and participants feel that they have no time to make a decision, then they can say that they have no time to make a choice. Otherwise, they have to indicate that they have chosen a red circle (before turning red) or a circle that has not turned red. We studied how likely they were to successfully select a red circle if they thought there was enough time to make a choice.
Participants did not know that in each test of the experiment, the reddish circles were completely randomly selected by a computer script. Therefore, if the participants do make the choices before the circles turn red, as they claim, they should only have a 1/5 probability to select the red circle. However, from the performance reported by the participants, the probability of selecting the red circle is far from 20%, and even more than 30% when the circle turns red particularly fast. Such a reaction pattern shows that the participants' thoughts sometimes replace the order in which the events occur in the consciousness, thus creating the illusion that they make choices first and then change the color of the circle.
More importantly, when the time to turn the circle red is extended to a certain extent, the subconscious can no longer deceive consciousness, and the red circle selection rate reported by the participants when the color change is no longer noticeable until the conscious choice is completed. It has dropped to about 20%. This result shows that participants did not lie to us (or themselves) in predicting ability, nor simply wanted to report that they were right.
In fact, people who have this illusion, when asked about performance after the end of the experiment, usually do not realize that their performance is higher than the random level. In addition, in another related experiment, we found that the high probability of correct selection does not stem from confusion or uncertainty about choice: even if participants are confident in their choices, their probability of making correct “choices†is high. Not true.
Based on these findings, although it is completely inconsistent with intuition, we do have misunderstandings about how we make choices. But why do our thoughts fool us in this seemingly ridiculous way? Does this hallucination not harm our spiritual life and behavior?
Maybe not. This illusion may simply be interpreted as a limitation in the process of brain perception. But this limitation will only cause problems in the short-term measurement of the experiment, and it is basically impossible to affect our real-world life.
Another possible explanation is that our brains are intentionally distorting our perception of choices, which are a very important function (not just defects) for our cognitive mechanisms. For example, if the experience of choice is an attributional inference, as described by Wegner and Whitley, then changing the order of choices and behaviors in consciousness can help us understand that we are able to influence the outside world. entity. More broadly, this illusion makes us believe in free will and, accordingly, the effect of stimulating punishment.
However, let us believe that we can control our lives better than reality. Whether it has any benefits or not, it is clear that this illusion can develop to a very serious level. Although experiencing 1/4 second of perceived distortion is not a big problem, longer-distance distortions (which may be experienced by patients with mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) can be greatly detrimentally misrepresented. People's basic worldview. People with these diseases may start to believe that they can control the weather or have the magical ability to predict the behavior of others. In extreme cases, they even think they have the power of God.
The extent to which the post-visual hallucinations observed in this experiment are related to daily life and mental illness is not clear. This illusion may only apply to a few of us when we think about it quickly and make choices. It may also be in all our decisions, small or large, controlling all aspects of our behavior, but the truth is most likely at these two extremes. between. Regardless of the facts, including our research, more and more research shows that although we believe that we are free agents who can consciously make choices, this belief may be completely wrong.
Source: Global Science
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