I stole the above image from the magazine New Scientist, in which I read an article a few days ago that has had me thinking about it ever since. In "Brain scanner predicts your future moves", Ewen Callaway reports on recent research using fMRI which allowed scientists to predict what a person was going to do up to seven seconds before the person herself knew what she would do. The article seemed relevant to psychology, which is what we're reading about in Quest at the moment, although it is about normal rather than abnormal psychology. But that wasn't the reason that the ideas in it have held my attention for several days.
What has had me thinking for a few days is what these results mean for our ideas about the human mind. If a machine knows several seconds before we make a decision, before we even think about making decision, then can our decision really be our own decision? In case you're getting worried, when you read the article, you will also see that the machine and linked computer are only successful "about 60% of the time – slightly better than a random guess." Today. Some of the questions that I've been asking myself are: what does this mean for our idea of our own mind? What about our consciousness? Our freedom to choose?
Of course, the scientific issues that the researches are focussed on are to do with how the brain functions, and they are also interesting. There is a lot of equally fascinating work being done in psychology and neuro-science these days, and the results are often as important for philosophy as they are for science.
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References:
- Callaway, E., (2008, April 13). Brain scanner predicts your future moves, in New Scientist. Retrieved on April 30, 2008, from http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn13658-brain-scanner-predicts-your-future-moves.html
I do agree that nowadays the scientific researches are focussed on the brain functions, and they are also interesting.However, it is kind a story that i'm quite not interesting in, but it's a good ideas to learn more about this, so we can know more about our brain process.
ReplyDelete"brain scanner predict your future moved" from long time ago people interested in the brain functions. there are many theory about brain fuction but they don't know 100% what brain work is, so they still study.I think many people want see the article but i'm not interested in brain fuctions.
ReplyDeleteI think it's true that the brain machine knows several seconds before we make a decision because when we do anything we have sense about it. I think we can feel or know a bit about our decision.Our decision come from our mind.It's hard to say how it work.it's depend on surrounding where we get the idea from that have effect on our idea or our feeling.Sense that our body uses to get information about anything around us relates to our brain machine telling us what to do.Brain is the centre of our body so it should be a part of our decision.I think this is difficult topic to talk about.It does not have the excact answer.
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