Simple Brain Mechanisms Explain Arbitrary Human Visual Decisions

piggy submitted, created time 3 weeks 12 hours (www.sciencedaily.com)

Mark Twain, a skeptic of the idea of free will, argues in his essay "What Is Man?" that humans do not command their minds or the opinions they form. "You did not form that [opinion]," a speaker identified as "old man" says in the essay. "Your [mental] machinery did it for you—automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it."

Twain's views get a boost this week from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and University of Chieti, Italy

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Your Brain on Ethics

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 1 week (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

The main strength of the paper is that it shows how the two different "moral motivations" were isolated and details the investigation of how they are represented in the brain.

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Emotion, Decision Making, and the Amygdala

kavin submitted, created time 5 months 1 week (www.neuron.org)

Emotion plays a critical role in many contemporary accounts of decision making, but exactly what underlies its influence and how this is mediated in the brain remain far from clear. Here, The authors review behavioral studies that suggest that Pavlovian processes can exert an important influence over choice and may account for many effects that have traditionally been attributed to emotion. They illustrate how recent experiments cast light on the underlying structure of Pavlovian control and argue that generally this influence makes good computational sense

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decisions are made before you even know it

jane2007 submitted, created time 7 months 2 weeks (www.nature.com)

According to researchers, your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it.

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