Neuroscience of free will and consumer choice
We as human beings seldom explore the physiology of the brain. Before understanding free will, let us explore a few interesting facts about the human brain. The human brain weighs 1.5 Kg that processes 70,000 thoughts per day using 100 billion neurons that connect more than 500 trillion points through various synapses and the synapses travel at 480 Km/hour. The human brain is 2 percent of body weight yet consumes 20 percent of energy and it contains more cells than the stars in the sky. On an assumption, the human brain’s memory storage capacity is close to around 2.5 petabytes (a million Gb).
We as human beings make an innumerable number of choices on a day-to-day basis, be it in our personal life or professional life or maybe a product choice. The most intriguing question about our so-called conscious choices is whether the choice or decision has free will. This article has synthesized key findings from the literature and tries to probe whether our choices have ‘free will’.
The most elusive question to date from the days of great philosophers like Aristotle to Plato is about the existence of ‘free will’. “Do we have free will or is free will an illusion”?
There are a lot of thinkers who have worked on this subject since 18th century and in the late 20th century, neuroscience has been at the forefront to answer this maze.
Omorogie J (2015) defined, “Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded”, for example, a person diving into the pool, supposedly using his free will. The first study of this kind was done by Benjamin Libet, a scientist in the domain of human consciousness and he was the recipient of a virtual Nobel Prize for his seminal work, “Experimental investigation of consciousness, initiation of action and free will”
Adam Bear (2016) published an article in Scientific American, ‘What Neuroscience says about free will’ and he states that we are less in control of our lives as well as our decisions than we believe that we are. The prime reason to believe in free will as argued by Adam is the brain mechanism that leads to punishment regarding non-desirable behaviours in society.
Biologist, Anthony Cashmore states that the concept of free will is an illusion. Cashmore has argued that a belief in free will is akin to religious beliefs. One of the ground-breaking studies was explored by Banjamin Limbet. The significant outcome of his studies is that a person’s brain commits to certain decisions before the person realises having made them at the conscious level. The delay in the time-lapse is around a second or more. It is challenging to find through an experimental study using tools like electroencephalography (EEG) or fMRI to identify exactly when a person becomes aware of his action. Some findings indicate that awareness comes after actions have already begun in the brain. To put it simple, the conscious brain of a person realizes a little later before the brain has made the decision.
Benjamin Limbet and his colleagues conducted experiments using EEG to detect the neural activity in participants prior to performing a motor function. An experiment was designed where the participant must place his index finger at their preferred position on a clock with a moving object (a dot). He demonstrated that neural activity occurred 200ms (milli-second: 10-3 of a second) before the conscious awareness of the decision to perform the voluntary action, suggesting that the brain has made a decision before consciously realizing it.
Hence free will might be an illusion created by our brains tricking itself. The idea that human beings trick themselves into believing in free will was published in a popular paper by Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley.
On the spiritual side of the Vedanta philosophy and as quoted by Swami Vivekananda, “there cannot be any such thing as free will; the very words are contradiction because the will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space, and causality….to acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here”. The interpretation of this is that the will is not “free”, as it is heavily influenced by the cause and effect. “The will is not free, it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect, but there is something beyond the will, which is free” and I would leave it to the interpretation of the readers to make their meaning out of this.
Many of our conscious decisions in the marketplace are not conscious, it is at the unconscious level. There are many products in the marketplace that we purchase through autopilot mode. However, if you really see the unconscious element of our understanding is again through the percolation of our experiences through conscious states and over a period of time we develop autopilot mode of purchase in the marketplace. It is a pertinent fact that many of the decisions at the conscious level are the result of prior brain activity. Neuroimaging studies in recent times have proven that our decisions are already made in the brain 7 seconds prior to the conscious state realising the decision.
Professor Gerald Zaltman, Professor from Harvard Business School has developed a market research tool, Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET, 1990), that as consumers, many of our decisions on purchasing, we are only aware of a few reasons for purchase decisions, however, there is umpteen number of reasons which are embedded at our subconscious level, for the purchases we have made and the reasons for our purchases hardly surfaces to our conscious level. In a nutshell, as a marketer, it is only the tip of the iceberg we know the reasons for consumer purchases, the rest being hidden in the subconscious state.
Many times, we are influenced by unconscious reasons because advertisements do psychological experiments to find what we are sensitive to and then they set up the environment, so we make the decisions through unconscious subliminal influences. We also need to make a distinction between picking and choosing or proximal acts of choosing or distal acts of choosing; where decisions require less effort, like picking Corn Flakes in the supermarket are easily done in our subconscious while our conscious mind can focus more on complex tasks like buying a property or automobile, it’s not picking as in the Libet’s tasks. Hence the counter argument is within the given constraints, we have some degree of freedom to act within the parameters of our environment.
Free will is an enduring problem for philosophy and science, there are proponents and detractors to the concept of free will. Many studies on this notion are adding up to the body of knowledge on free will, and very well reasoning the most seemingly immutable and etched belief that can be shaken up.
References:
- Anthony R. Cashmore, The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behaviour and the criminal Justice system, Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences
- Benjamin Libet; et al. (1983). “Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential)”
- Libet, Benjamin (1985). “Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action” (PDF). The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 8(4): 529–566.
- Omoregie, J. (2015). Freewill: The degree of freedom within. UK: Author House | ISBN 978-1-5049-8751-6
- Wegner, Daniel M.; Wheatley, Thalia (1999). “Apparent mental causation: Sources of the experience of will”. American Psychologist. 54(7): 480–492. . ISSN 0003-066X.
- http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_5/sayings_and_utterances.htm
- Paul Reber, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/
