Neuroscience and free will continued

“Neural antecedents of spontaneous voluntary movement: A new perspective.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2016.

“Now a series of new developments has begun to unravel what we thought we knew about the brain activity preceding SVMs. The main new revelation is that the apparent build-up of this activity, up until about 200 ms pre-movement, may reflect the ebb and flow of background neuronal noise, rather than the outcome of a specific neural event corresponding to a ‘decision’ to initiate movement. In particular, two independent studies, one using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings in humans [5] and the other using single-unit recordings in rats [6], have converged in showing that bounded-integration processes, which involve the accumulation of noisy evidence until a decision threshold is reached, offer a coherent and plausible explanation for the apparent pre-movement build-up of neuronal activity. Bounded integration or ‘evidence accumulation’ models have been in use for decades in the study of perceptual decision-making and reaction time tasks and have proven very powerful in accounting for both neural and behavioral phenomena. Only recently, however, has it come to light that if the ‘evidence’ is absent, or very weak relative to the noise, such models can also be applied to the spontaneous voluntary initiation of movement [5,6].”