Who is in charge of your decisions? Your conscious or ??? (Scene 47:53-end)
Based upon the scene the conscious mind is made up of a correlation of neurons that react by images and sounds. It is this interconnectivity of neurons that keeps the brain awake. It helps decide what you do and what you want. It helps provide free will to a person. However this scene demonstrates how much free will someone really has and if there is more to the conscious mind in making decisions. Marcus Du Satoy has a test to find out the real answer. He goes under a scanner and is given a right and left hand clicker. He is asked several questions and told to click the appropriate clicker in either hand. The scanner records where in his brain the decisions were made and the computer records when the decisions were made. The results were surprising. The computer could predict Marcus' decision six seconds before he was even aware of the decision he was going to make. This is amazing to me. It is unbelievable a machine can predict what the human brain is going to do before ourselves even know. The computer can't think. We are with our selves all day everyday and we don't know how we are going to respond and through imaging the computer is able to detect our response. Researchers think the conscious brain is second to brain activity, they also believe the conscious mind is encoded within brain activity in harmony with beliefs and desires. Researchers believe the conscious mind and brain perform different aspects of the same process. Research continues to provide new theories and evidence to discover more about the conscious mind and new technology helps make hypothesis reality. My question is if responses are believed to becoming from a gray unknown matter in the brain, what else could be providing the brain with these answers? There is no direct answer to the question and ultimately it is up to each individual person to decide who is in charge of his or her decisions or what theory to believe. Or is it really?
It would be interesting to know what exactly the computer is prompting a response to and what the two clickers have to do with it. But either way, it would be an interesting test to take! It is interesting because I think people do tend to do things they wouldn't normally do, or things they think they would never do. What would you do if you were being attacked by someone, and was it a conscious decision? It's a good question and topic.