14 DAY TRIAL // For people who always say they are in control of their own lives, this new scientific study may come as an unpleasant surprise, as it states that the choices we make, regardless of how strong we feel about them at the time, can easily be overridden by peer pressure, or by others in our social network. This again goes to show that our minds are subordinated to the collective spirit, and explains why mobs tend to follow the actions of a single individual, and then take them up as their own.
Researchers from the University College London (UCL), who have published their find in a recent issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex, liken the human mind to a spinning coin, which a small nudge can push in one direction or the other.
For its study, the team asked a number of volunteers to decide freely what button they would push when they were given a specific cue. When pressing the button, their cerebral activities were recorded using EEG (electroencephalogram), a device that shows the activity of brain waves when people think or decide something.
A part of the test subjects were allowed to push whatever button they wanted, while others were diverted from their choice, when arrows appeared on the computer screen, hinting that they should change their mind, and push the other button. Also, after the people in the second group made up their mind about which button to trigger, they were instructed by a text message to change their choice, without any reason being specified.
“When people had chosen for themselves which action to make, we found that the brain activity involved in changing one's mind, or reprogramming these 'free' choices was weak, relative to reprogramming of choices that were dictated by an external stimulus. This suggests that the brain is very flexible when changing a free choice. The implication is that, despite our feelings of being in control, our own internal choices are flexible compared to those driven by external stimuli, such as a braking in response to a traffic light. This flexibility might be important – in a dynamic world, we need to be able to change our plans when necessary,” Stephen Fleming, an investigator at the UCL Institute of Neurology and also the main author of the new paper, says.
“Our study has two implications for our understanding of human volition. First, our brains contain a mechanism to go back and change our mind about our choices, after a choice is made but before the action itself. Our internal decisions are not set in stone, but can be re-evaluated right up to the last moment. Second, changing an internal choice in this way seems to be easier than changing a choice guided by external instructions,” UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience researcher professor Patrick Haggard adds.
“We often think about our own internal decisions as having the strength of conviction, but our results suggest that the brain is smart enough to make us flexible about what we want. The ability to flexibly adjust our decisions about what we do in the current situation is a major component of intelligence, and has a clear survival value,” he concludes.