Oxford Mathematician Shows Decisions Six Seconds Before They’re Made

This was covered on Science Friday a few months back. I would definitely hold that this is in line with determinism, but I think that coming to the conclusion of determinism isn't jumping the gone. Let's be patient and see what science comes up with, based on this and other ongoing scientific research.
The only thing that we can say definitively based on this research is that what we refer to as our subconscious is in more control than is immediately obvious based on our experience.

I don't think this has anything to do with determinism. This video is simply showing where the decision is made – unsurprisingly in our swamp of neurons. (Neurons – not in the OSX dictionary?!)

IMHO our mind is the sum state of our brains – nothing in the video stated that the professor's brain was unable to choose left or right. The professor's brain is the professor – stating that it it wasn't his decision because his brain made the decision is pretty absurd!


It was however interesting that by levering the brain-scan technology an observer knew a person's decision in advance of that person. Very 'Minority Report'!

Not really surprising though.

Just think about language. How long does it take for you to say a long sentence – 20 seconds perhaps? Do you prepare your whole sentence in your head then start saying it – no you jump into a sentence and despite the fact that the beginning is related to the end it is all 'joined-up'. You needed to subconsciously know the whole sentence before the first word came out.

It feels like all the information required in a thought is created in one brain cycle (1/3s) – then everything else is a serialisation delay as we say, type, write or draw that thought.

It's interesting, and unfortunate, that although we have parallel input mechanisms (principally the eye) we don't really have a parallel output mechanism. Imagine if we had a 'reverse eye' (not necessarily optical, just a parallel output mechanism) – allowing us to emit these thoughts with the speed the brain can create the thoughts!

How short would conversions be! ;-)

But really, it would be rather good for the transfer of information. More like a human to human Matrix style data transfer.