Brain decides seven seconds before you decide - Do we control our brains or do our brains control us?

"An experiment at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, in 2008 showed  that when you decide to move your hand, the decision can be located in your  brain, with an MRI scanner, before you are aware you have made a  decision. The delay is around six to seven seconds. During that time, your mind  is made up but your consciousness doesn’t acknowledge the decision until  your hand moves.
One interpretation of this is that your consciousness – the thing you  think of as ‘you’ – is just a passenger inside a deterministic  automaton. Your unconscious brain and your body get on with running your  life, and only report back to your conscious mind when necessary to  preserve a sense of free will. But it’s just as valid to say that when  you make a decision, there’s always a certain amount of background  processing going on, which the conscious mind ignores for convenience". Robert Jones [1]

 

http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-are-the-most-awesome-psychological-facts-that-you-know-of

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