Brain's 'Background Noise' Determines Free Will?

A person's free will and ability to make their own choices - whether they be right or wrong - may stem from random fluctuations in the brain's background electrical noise, according to a recent study from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis.

"How do we behave independently of cause and effect?" Jesse Bengson, a postdoctoral researcher at the center and first author on the paper, said in a statement. "This shows how arbitrary states in the brain can influence apparently voluntary decisions."

The brain actually has a normal level of "background noise" at all times, which is really just electrical activity patterns fluctuating across the brain. Such activity, according to this new study, may play a role in how each of us makes our everyday decisions.

Volunteers hooked up to electroencephalography, or EEG, sat in front of a computer screen and fixed their eyes upon the center. While researchers recorded their brains' electrical activity, participants had to decide to look either right or left of the screen when cued, and then report their decision. Cues were always given in a random order so they couldn't prepare to make their choice ahead of time.

Bengon found that the pattern of activity in the second or so before the cue symbol appeared - before the volunteers could know they were going to make a decision - could likely predict what choice they would make.

"The state of the brain right before presentation of the cue determines whether you will attend to the left or to the right," he added.

The research, modeled after a famous 1970s experiment by Benjamin Libet, provides a model for how brain activity could precede decision since the volunteers' decisions weren't premeditated.

Results also bring the question of free will to the forefront, and whether or not our brains have already made a decision for us, regardless if we haven't already consciously done so.

Though, Bengson said it "inserts a random effect that allows us to be freed from simple cause and effect."

The work, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published online in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.