From brain science, new questions about free will

WORLD SCIENCE

“Although it is of­ten tak­en for granted that goal pur­suit orig­i­nates in con­scious de­ci­sions, it can al­so arise from un­con­scious sources,” the pair wrote.

Re­cent find­ings show that the hu­man brain is of­ten steps ahead of its own­er, Cus­ters and Aarts ex­plained: the brain pre­pares the ac­tion well be­fore any con­scious thoughts in­struct it to do so.

The sci­en­tists cit­ed work by re­search­ers such as John Bargh at Yale Uni­vers­ity and Pe­ter Goll­witzer at New York Uni­vers­ity start­ing in 2001. Bargh and col­leagues showed how mo­tiva­t­ion to­ward a goal could arise with­out con­scious aware­ness, Cus­ter and Aarts wrote. “S­tu­dents were seated at a ta­ble to work on two seem­ingly un­re­lat­ed lan­guage puz­zles. For some stu­dents, the first puz­zle in­clud­ed words re­lat­ed to achieve­ment (such as win or achieve), and for oth­ers it did not. Stu­dents who were ex­posed to achieve­ment words were found to out­per­form the oth­ers on the sec­ond puz­zle.”

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