The Spectrum of Free Will

January 28, 2011 3 Comments

Ratha Grimes is a fellow Googler, and a founding member of our new Toastmasters Group on the Google campus, the Chatterbox.  Yesterday she gave her third speech, which focused on the concept of free will.  Do we have free will, or is everything pre-determined?  Using some excellent examples and research, she comes to her own conclusion.

I wanted to include her talk on the blog because of the relevance of the “free will” discussion to the fields of behavioral economics and game theory.  Both of those fields are based on how people make decisions.  Figuring out how we make decisions – and even if we make decisions at all – is paramount to understanding the foundations of these fields.

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It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
- Invictus by William Ernest Henley

The broad appeal of this famous poem illustrates the importance of free will and self-determination to most people. In our culture, we take an all-or-nothing attitude toward this subject. In our legal system, for example, a person is considered to be in full control of his faculties and to bear full responsibility for his actions, or else is considered to be psychologically broken (“insane”) and completely without fault.

It would seem that we look at things this way because we prefer to believe that we are in control of our own lives. The philosopher Robert Nozick illustrated the desire to look at things this way with a thought experiment called “The Experience Machine.” In the future, advanced neuropsychologists have figured out a way to stimulate a our brains to induce any experiences we desire. We would not be able to tell that the experiences aren’t real. We could plan out any type of life we wish to lead, and then jack in to the machine. If offered that choice, would we do it? When asked this, most people say no. A main reason that people would choose not to use the machine, according to Nozick, is that “we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.”

Yet it is also true that we have been significantly influenced by our backgrounds and environments. Parents instinctively understand this when they criticize the friends their teenage children have chosen to hang out with. I recently was reminded of this effect when I was shopping in the grocery store and they advertised pears over the PA system. A soothing female voice described pears with lunch, pears for a snack, crunchy sliced pears in a salad… and I had to go buy a pear. (It was delicious.) Read more of this post

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Dr. Julie Schweitzer – UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute

November 20, 2010 2 Comments

Julie Schweitzer talked about decision-making in people with ADHD.  This topic was relevant to the theme of the day, because apparently ADHD and ADHD-type disorders predict high-school drop-out rate better than any other disorder.

Apparently, there are parts of the the brain that, when faced with certain decisions, react differently in people with ADHD and normal people.  These parts of the brain deal with cognitive control and decision-making.  According to Schweitzer’s research, those diagnosed with ADHD have less self-control than those without ADHD, and this gap increases, with regards to a single decision, as time passes.

Schweitzer’s research, which is primarily in the field of neuroscience looks to answer the question: “what is the link between decision making and cognitive control?” In order to answer this question, her lab ran a series of experiments and MRIs.  Subjects were asked to make a series of choices – such as “Would you rather have 55$ today or 75$ in 61 days?”

According to Schweitzer, “Those who are most impulsive – who wanted to the money now – were more likely to use areas of the brain often associated with ADHD.”

So what’s next?  Schweitzer says, figure out the different subtypes of ADHD understand how the diagnoses correlate with underlying neurochemistry and genes.

This is an intriguing topic – another one about which I’d like to learn more.  To find out  more about Schweitzer’s work, head over to her website.

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The GPS of your Mind

November 20, 2010 Leave a comment

Alex Terrazas is the President and Chief Scientist at MediaBalance, Inc.  The company’s mission is to bring high technology and behavioral psychology to bear on the nation’s most critical health problems.

In his talk, titled “What Train-Driving Rats Can Tell Us about Memory in Virtual Environments,” Terrazas talked about cognitive mapping, which is, basically, how your mind creates geographic maps.  Terrazas equated it to the GPS of your mind.  What are we doing to our brains, he wonders, by using all of this mapping technology, like Google Maps, GPS, and Mapquest?  Do these technologies change the way we synthesize and store locational information?

Terrazas focused on the hippocampus, where spacial location information and memory is stored.  His conclusion is that, in order to understand our physical surroundings, or the layout of a city, we may need to physically walk around in order to map it to our brains.  That is to say, we need to walk around – not use GPS devices or Google Maps – to understand where things lie relative to each other.

This has profound implications for the future of virtual reality and virtual learning.  It could be that there are some things that we do need to learn the traditional way – i.e., physically, or in person, and not virtually.

Terrazas concluded: “We either need to throw away our GPS devices or find another use for our hippocampus.”

I followed up with Terrazas via Twitter after the event – I’m interested in learning more.  I’ll post on whatever I find out.

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The Empathic Civilisation

September 16, 2010 3 Comments

One of the topics I studied at Oxford was Mirror Neurons.  Mirror neurons are essentially the wiring in our brains that deals with empathy.

Here’s a video that touches on mirror neurons, their history, and what it means in terms of empahy for our society.

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Perfection in Imperfect Information

September 2, 2010 3 Comments


This is the third in a five-part series about information overload in the age of the Internet.

In economics, there’s a concept called “imperfect information.”  Counter-intuitively, some markets function poorly, or can’t function at all, if every stakeholder knows everything.  This leads us to the question, in what situation would be it good to have less than all of the information? Read more of this post

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