"Free will could all be an illusion..."

"Research adds to evidence suggesting 'even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong'"

The idea was tested out by tricking subjects into believing that they had made a choice before the consequences of that choice could actually be seen. In the test, people were made to believe that they had taken a decision using free will – even though that was impossible.

The idea that human beings trick themselves into believing in free will was laid out in a paper by psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley nearly 20 years ago. They proposed the feeling of wanting to do something was real, but there may be no connection between the feeling and actually doing it....

In one of the studies undertaken by Adam Bear and Paul Bloom, of Princeton University, the test subjects were shown five white circles on a computer monitor. They were told to choose one of the circles before one of them lit up red.

The participants were then asked to describe whether they’d picked the correct circle, another one, or if they hadn’t had time to actually pick one.

Statistically, people should have picked the right circle about one out of every five times. But they reported getting it right much more than 20 per cent of the time, going over 30 per cent if the circle turned red very quickly.

The scientists suggest that the findings show that the test subjects’ minds were swapping around the order of events, so that it appeared that they had chosen the right circle – even if they hadn’t actually had time to do so.

The idea of free will may have arisen because it is a useful thing to have, giving people a feeling of control over their lives and allowing for people to be punished for wrongdoing.

But that same feeling can go awry, the scientists wrote in the Scientific American magazine. It may be important for people to feel they are control of their lives, for instance, but distortions in that same process might make people feel that they have control over external processes like the weather.

"I saw online that there was a Dumb Starbucks sign. One of my friends posted about it, and I live across the street, so I just walked over,"

"A store labeled as "Dumb Starbucks," using the Starbucks corporate logo and bearing an almost identical look to an actual Starbucks, opened up in Los Feliz on Friday, according to employees."

It's open until 6 p.m. Saturday, and the drinks are free as part of what a barista called a "grand opening," but it was unclear if they would remain free Sunday. The menu was limited."

Business was steady Saturday afternoon — although there was no business license or health code rating posted in the establishment. The baristas said they were hired from Craigslist."

Customers seemed confused about what exactly was going on."

Brown speculated that it might be either an art project or a TV prank show."

The @dumbstarbucks Twitter account was already picking up steam Saturday."

"If you hear a word, that greases the wheels of perception,"

says Lupyan: the visual system becomes primed for anything to do with dogs.

In a series of CFS experiments, the researchers asked volunteers whether or not they could see a specific object, such as a dog. Sometimes it was displayed, sometimes not. When it was not displayed or when the image was of another animal such as a zebra or kangaroo, the volunteers typically reported seeing nothing. But when a dog was displayed and the question mentioned a dog, the volunteers were significantly more likely to become aware of it. 

That article 'took me back' (as opposed to some weird rhetorical device) to a radio program I had heard called Is Free Will Really Free?

It's scary to think that choice might just be an illusion. Perhaps we are not so in control as we would like to be. In a conversation at the 92nd St Y, Malcolm Gladwell talks to Robert about the common sense of dissatisfaction felt by people required to justify a choice to others before they made it, and he brings up the unsettling idea of priming--that certain stimuli could predispose us toward certain choices or behaviors. Yale psychology professor John Bargh takes us a step further by describing an experiment where researcher Lawrence Williams was able to alter people's opinions without their knowledge using nothing but a simple cup of coffee.

So, what does coffee have to do with it, anything, dogs, zebra, kangaroo, the volunteers, whatever. Aside from the fact that I have to close this post, which, aside from "choosing" the topic to base the post upon, satisfactorily closing the post seems to be the hardest part.

Listening to Imus, this morning, I heard the following clip.

Ashton Kutcher Speech - Teen Choice Awards