The question of what initiates a single action in the present is still very relevant. Where does it start within the big neural building?
We do know that, eventually, no matter where it starts within the building, the command for action can only come out at the ground level, via the final motor neurons.
Most people develop a sense of being an individual with selfhood, a sense of being an agent in the world with a feeling of being free to act, to be able to do what one wants. Actions performed ‘consciously’, ‘deliberately’ or ‘intentionally’, also referred to as ‘volitional’ or ‘willed’ actions, contrast with actions performed ‘non-consciously’, ‘automatically’. This is the sense of having a will.
Historically, the issue of this sense of freedom to act has been widely discussed under the philosophical problem of the free will. It has obvious implications for social communities (eg intendere e volere mens rea, the intention to act willingly in committing a crime).
The concept of free will was introduced within the Catholic Church in arguments about choice and human responsibility. Towards the end of the first millennium, there were two opposing views. St Augustine maintained that the of grace of God is given and not chosen. Either one is in the grace of God or one is not. This is the doctrine of ‘predestination’. The opposing doctrine maintained that one could seek the grace of God by actions and gain possible salvation. The consequences for the Church would be very different. If predestination prevailed, the Church would lose the ability to punish sins and would lose power over people. Conversely, to attribute free will to individuals would give them the ability to sin and to punished or be forgiven, as long as some penalty is paid for the sin. This freedom to sin required the Church to know about such sins of individuals. So, the idea of confession was born. Control over people’s minds by the Church increased with the practice confession and the associated practice of issuing indulgences to mitigate possible punishments for sins.
From there, a major philosophical issue developed as to whether or not there can be true freedom to make choices in a world where everything is determined by physical laws. I argued above that world is new at every moment. This applies of course also any human action. It does not mean that actions do not have precedents. All our actions have precedents and some produce highly predictable outcomes. We have a sense of normally being in control of our actions. We can decide to act or not. We can stop an action. This our sense of freedom.
Already in 1920, Leonardo Bianchi noted the tremendous importance of the frontal lobes, which he called the ‘social brain’, in controlling social behaviour1. The case of Phineas Gage, who acquired a major lesion in the left frontal lobe of his brain, was perhaps the first to suggest the brain’s role in determining personality, and that damage to specific parts of the brain might induce specific mental changes. Such inhibitory functions were dramatically revealed after therapeutic lesions of the frontal lobes described as lobotomy or prefrontal leucotomy, a surgical procedure in which the nerve pathways in the frontal lobes of the brain are severed from the rest of the brain. In 1935, after initial experiments on monkeys by the American neuroscientists Carlyle F. Jacobsen and John Fulton, the procedure was tested in humans with severe paranoia and anxiety by the Portuguese neurophysician and Nobel Prize winner, António Egas Moniz. Many patients showed severe negative effects including reduced self-awareness and self-control, resulting in failure to inhibit internal impulses generating asocial or even antisocial behavior. The absence of such control caused an inability to act by removing planning skill. Nevertheless, frontal leucotomies were performed as way to ameliorate self-harming impulses in serious psychiatric cases.
The idea that decisions to act or not require some form of inner veto was proposed by Shallice et al (1989)2. They proposed that the frontal lobes exert executive function over all actions with monitoring functions that include planning, decision-making, or suppressing a dominant response. These functions are associated with increased ability to delay actions required for planning. Planning implies ability to postpone or delay particular behaviours via the inhibition of specific actions. These frontal lobe functions are essential in suppressing antisocial behaviours, for example. Thus, our actions are ’free’ if the ‘executive brain’ gives us permission or not to act in that moment. This suggests that perhaps we should change the idea of ‘free will’ to one of ‘free want’.
Nevertheless, some actions are triggered at levels of the neural building below awareness and are not easily subjected to veto power. For example, rapidly turning the head towards an unexpected noise or flash of light occurs via auditory and visual inputs to the midbrain where they activate complex neural circuits before they reach conscious control. This why is impossible for a goalkeeper respond to a penalty using sensory information that passes all the way to the cortex. It is too slow! The goalkeeper can only try to read movements which may happen before the kick is taken. Furthermore, there is good evidence for a hierarchy of subcortical ‘impulsive’ bottom-up systems balancing the ‘reflective’ top-down inhibition from the frontal lobe system3.
A somewhat unexpected consequence of the ‘free will-free want’ process occurring only in the window of the present is that the responsibility for our actions shifts to that very narrow period when we can either permit or prevent an action. In principle, ethics would be only applicable in the narrow wind of the present! Of course, guilt for actions already performed in the past can still be assigned according to moral, ethical or legal criteria.
Internal drives for action.
We are subjected to several drives from within our neural circuits that have evolved to ensure survival.
The lowest level where a defensive action can start lies in the neuromechanical loops of the spinal cord and brainstem that generate escape reactions that are totally automatic and ‘hard wired’. The most familiar of these reactions include the ‘withdrawal reflex’ and ‘eye-blink reflex‘.
Next in a hierarchy of ‘urgency” is breathing. The need of supplying oxygen to the body is essential for life: if not enough oxygen arrives the brain, one loses consciousness, and brain death occurs not long after cessation of breathing. Breathing is driven by neural clusters in the brainstem which command final motor neurons innervating the respiratory muscles. If oxygen levels drop too low, the respiratory centres are activated more strongly. That is why one cannot commit suicide by voluntarily stopping breathing: the urge to breathe will always overwhelm the ‘will’, even if this response leads to ultimate death by drowning, for example. Learning not to breathe intentionally (breath hold) is valuable during immersion under water. Indeed, I have used it myself. In one case, I ‘almost’ drowned’ at a Rio de Janeiro beach. I was not a good swimmer and I had little knowledge of currents and waves. So I lost consciousness with all the stages of denial, fear, terror. I only survived because I held my breath long enough to be pushed by the waves to a sand bank where a person saved me. A second time, while in the Adriatic spearfishing at a depth below 20 metres, I lost consciousness during the ascent. My buddy dived down 15 metres and brought me to surface. Probably in both cases, my loss of consciousness very soon would have triggered an automatic breathing reflex with my consequent drowning.
Water intake is essential for life and comes next in time with regard to degrees of urgency in time. The neural circuits for thirst are located further up in the neural building, in the hypothalamus. Inputs arrive from multiple sensory pathways that measure blood volume and blood osmolarity (the relative concentrations of salts and water in the blood). Triggered from the hippocampus, commands to drink reach the appropriate final motor neurons, which can underpin a wide range of behaviours, from searching for water through to thge actual process of drinking.
Intake of fuel as food is next along the time scale of urgency. The central circuits for hunger are located close to the those for thirst. Last in the chain of drives essential for survival is reproduction. It involves complex social interactions and so many levels of activity within the neural building that I will not go in more details here.
The issue of the sense of freedom of acting has been discussed philosophically since Voltaire clearly expressed the problem4 “Liberty is only and can be only the power to do what one will”. But…”the will, therefore is not a faculty that one can call free”. This antedates the well known philosophical perspective of Arthur Schopenhauer who in a short publication masterly pointed out the relative nature of the sense of ‘free will’ in that we are indeed free to eat or not, but we are not free from feeling hungry.
The classic problem of the apparent contradiction of free-will and determinism was also discussed in depth by William James:5 “If a free act be a sheer novelty, that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo. And simply tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible?”
In any case, actions generated via the “will’ are initiated from places in the brain other than from the motor areas. Surprisingly, there are few recordings from the brain of such motivational activity, especially given that motivations arising from education, indoctrinations, ideologies, religions and the like are so strong in determining human behaviour. It appears that most people do not even think of these influences as being capable of at least partially suppressing their free ‘will-free’ or ‘free want’.
The origin of religions is very well studied anthropologically and sociologically. Fundamentally, most religions aim at answering the questions of what is out there in the world, who are we humans amongst other humans, and finally who are we in ourselves. Such questions permeated philosophy from the very beginning. The issue for me, and which the core of this essay is about, is how the claims of religions stand up to the standards of scrutiny that are applied to scientific tests of reality. Unlike science, religions rarely if ever use an unbiased test of reality. Nevertheless, they have become vast social structures with an enormous power over the will of individuals.
In my opinion, the harm religions have done is both unthinkable and totally unacceptable. Tongue in cheek, I tell my religious friends that if they believe in another life after death, they are a danger to everybody, because there is always the suspicion that they are prepared to make the current more difficult than otherwise, in order to obtain their promised afterlife. Thus, they are less inclined to make the best of this life.
The sense of obeisance is clearly a social necessity long grounded in evolution. But the extremes reached in empires, nations, and politically absolute ideologies begs explanation and a search for their neural bases. Apart from some innate fears (such as fear of snakes, spiders, etc) that arising from neural circuits well below the cortex, all other fears are likely to be acquired during development and must be stored in some fashion somewhere in the cortex. Morally absolute prohibitions, fanatical ideas, unquestioned military obedience: all these conditions must have neural bases underlying their generation by perpetrators and, similarly, in one’s responses to them. Although there are plenty of discussions in sociology, philosophy on all these matters, I am unaware of any meaningful neuroscientific studies of them.
As to the original question of where actions start, we have plenty of good answers for many of them, with their neural correlates emerging from good neuroscience. However, it remains a major challenge to understand the neuroscientific basis of the ‘deeper motivations’ for actions that so often generate self-inflicted harm to humanity. I hope my idea of the brain as a multistorey building and the methods to make them scientific objects via construction of appropriate spatio-temporal maps may encourage novel ways to address this challenge.
- L. Bianchi (1920): The mechanics of the brain and the function of the frontal lobes. F.lli Bocca Editori. ↩︎
- T Shallice et al (1989): The origins of utilization behaviour. Brain 112, 1587–1598. ↩︎
- A Bechara (2005): Decision making, impulse control and loss of willpower to resist drugs: a neurocognitive perspective. Nature Neuroscience 8, 1458–1463. ↩︎
- Voltaire (1752 / 1962): Dictionnaire philosophique. Basic Books. ↩︎
- W James (1907 / 1995): Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Dover. ↩︎