Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain

Culture and Genes Affect Cognition

we are the law because we make the laws.

So the hard determinists in neuroscience make what I call the causal chain claim: (1) The brain enables the mind and the brain is a physical entity; (2) The physical world is determined, so our brains must also be determined; (3) If our brains are determined, and if the brain is the necessary and sufficient organ that enables the mind, then we are left with the belief that the thoughts that arise from our mind also are determined; (4) Thus, free will is an illusion, and we must revise our concepts of what it means to be personally responsible for our actions. Put differently, the concept of free will has no meaning.

Once we understand that the left-brain interpreter process is driven to seek explanations or causes for events, we can see it at work in all sorts of situations.

We devised a way to present this game to the two hemispheres separately and found that the right hemisphere is a maximizer,6 just like the rats and pigeons and the four-year-old humans; it is the left hemisphere that is a frequency matcher. It tries to figure out a system; it is driven to infer a cause for the frequency of the flashes and creates a theory to explain them. We have concluded that the neural processes responsible for searching for patterns in events are housed in the left hemisphere. It is the left hemisphere that engages in the human tendency to find order in chaos, that tries to fit everything into a story and put it into a context.

Hebb’s ideas pointed out the centrality of the idea of the importance of connectivity. It remains a central topic of study in neuroscience today.