I was very confused after watching the BBC video, The Secret You. Towards the end of this movie, an experiment was done to test the human decision making process. An Oxford professor was placed in an fMRI machine where he was asked a series of questions. He would answer the questions by pressing a button in either his right or left hand. By monitoring his brain activity, the researcher was able to determine which button he would press six seconds before he would press it.
This amazed me and really made me think. What really controls our decisions? I would like to think that I am in control of every decision I make, but am I? Is it me or my brain deciding? And if my brain is a part of my body, is there really a difference? If our brain made the decision for us, then technically we made the decision ourselves. However, we were not aware that we made this decision, so did we really? It is a confusing subject to think about. I still do not entirely understand it, and I don't think many people do.
My belief going into the video was that I was in complete control of my decisions. I felt that I was presented a set of options, and from those options I chose the best one. After watching the video, I have a slightly different understanding. I feel that when making decisions our brain uses our past experiences to decide what is best for us, thus creating the set of options we choose from. This is something that we don't consciously recognize. After this happens, then our brain chooses the best option.
