The Mere Illusion of Choice and Free Will
Do you belong to the majority of the population who believes that they have full control of their actions and choices? And are responsible for everything that they do or accomplish and have a ‘free will’?
Well… just stay with me till the end of this article where we try to find out if we really have full control of our thoughts and actions, and are there any external physical or mental influences which can completely turn around our whole notion of “being in control”.
On a dark misty early morning in Scarborough, Ontario before the sunlight illuminated the horizon, Kenneth Parks arrived in front of the police station in his car in a confused state with blood on his hands and clothes. Soaked in blood Kenneth told the addled police “I think I have just killed two people”.
The Kenneth Parks case is well-known because it is considered to be one of the most authentic cases of murderous sleepwalking in recorded history. In May 1987, while still asleep, Parks drove a little more than 14 miles to his in-laws’ house, where he stabbed his mother-in-law, almost killed his father-in-law, and stopped short of killing his adolescent sister-in-law.
Parks drove to the police station after realising what had happened and confessed to the crimes there while in great sorrow. However, he was ultimately found not guilty because a plethora of examinations and psychological profiles showed that Parks had had dissociative analgesia after the killings as a result of his ongoing issues with insomnia and anxiety, not to mention the strain of significant gambling debts. A panel of five neurological experts also confirmed that he was sleepwalking during the time of the incident, which made the context clearer for the jury.
On August first 1966, Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old, reached the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition. He then followed to kill the receptionist with the butt of his rifle, killing two families of tourists that came up the stairwell and started fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below.
Whitman had already killed 13 people and injured 32 more before the cops shot him to death and when the police went to look for clues at his home, they found out that on the day of the shooting, early in the morning, he had killed his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.
They also found a typewriter composed suicide note which he wrote the previous evening that reads,
“I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.”
During the autopsy, the doctors discovered that Whitman’s brain harboured a tumour the diameter of a nickel. This glioblastoma tumour had developed from beneath the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and crushed a third area known as the amygdala. The doctors concluded that this might be the reason for this sudden tendency of violence in Whitman.
Now we have seen two cases of violence which resulted from imbalances of the human brain. These are just two examples of the multitude of violence caused by brain disorders. You can google them and find plenty of such cases, and it’s endless (metaphorically of course).
Kenneth Park’s case is due to the psychological changes that happened inside his head, whereas in Whitman’s brain, it was a physiological disorder. Both the changes in their brains affected these young individuals making them violent enough to kill people, outrunning their own conscience. So now we have to ask ourselves, do we really have control over our thoughts and actions? Do we really have a choice when our brain decides something?
Not only do physiological or chemical disorders in our brain influence our actions, but the way the human brain operates is kind of similar in all human beings, which means our choices are not unique (ouch, hurts the ego) and almost all humans think the same, maybe different things, even though the modus operandi being the same.
The Theory of Relativity (Nope, not the einstein one, the simpler one)
Author and professor Dan Ariely in his book “Predictably Irrational” says that “We are always looking at things around us in relation to others. We always compare jobs with jobs, vacations with vacations, lovers with lovers, and wines with wines.” We always like to make decisions based on comparisons. He says most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context.
We don’t know what kind of racing bike we want until we see a champ in the Tour de France ratcheting the gears on a particular model. We don’t even know what we want to do with our lives until we find a relative or a friend who is doing just what we think we should be doing. Everything is relative, and that’s the point. As Dan Ariely quotes, “Like an airplane pilot landing in the dark, we want runway lights on either side of us, guiding us to the place where we can touch down our wheels”.
And of course, just like anything, our decisions can also be manipulated, and that’s what big corporations do on a day-to-day basis even without us noticing it and falling for their techniques. These decisions are taken for us by our brain way before we consciously think about them. The majority of the things that have occurred in your life up to this point have been calculated and decided for you by your brain, and you just have been following along.
Just like how our brain can influence our actions, our actions and experiences can also in turn influence our brain. That’s where the brain’s beautiful yet complex function called neuroplasticity comes into play. William James introduced the first theory of neuroplasticity in his nearly a century-old book “Principle of Psychology,” which postulated that the human brain is capable of rearranging.
Neuroplasticity, also referred to as brain plasticity, is a term used to describe changes to the brain that happen throughout the lifespan in response to new experiences. So when we’re exposed to new experiences or when we learn new things, our brain will keep on rearranging/growing to accommodate the new knowledge or the experience and will use this information later when in need.
Coming back to Kenneth or Whitman’s case, are they really the culprits behind the crime? If so then the court would’ve punished Kenneth, but they chose not to. So our brain and our consciousness are two separate entities and maybe that’s frightening, but also on the flip side, it’s a good thing, since our brain takes care of everything that we don’t consciously have to, like breathing, making the heart beat, or the proper functioning of our organs. It can also calculate the risk factor for us while doing things like driving or other physical activities.
Reaching the end of our article we now know that our brain and our consciousness are two separate entities and how these two can influence each other for survival. Even before thinking of writing this article or selecting the topic, my brain has already done half the work for me by gathering all the mental data I have on this topic and helping me structure the article by creating a clear mental picture without me consciously participating in the process.
It’s beautiful how our brain works, and we’ve only scratched the surface of its functionalities. We as a species are yet to learn the full potential of our biological supercomputer, until then having a basic idea of how our thoughts and actions are influenced will make us a bit more conscious the next time when we have to act or choose.
[The above-written article is just the personal opinion of the author based on the available data and can be wrong in many areas still, as I’ve tried to make it maximum error-free. Do use your conscience while reading and keep on questioning. Thank you for reading.]
