Researchers say they ’ve identified two brain networks – one responsible for volition, the other for agency – that together underlie our sense of free will

By Emma Young While there’s still a debate about whether we have free will or not, most researchers at least agree that we feel as if we do. That perception is often considered to have two elements: a sense of having decided to act – called “volition”; and feeling that that decision was our own – having “agency”. Now in a paper in PNAS, Ryan Darby at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and colleagues have used a new technique – lesion network mapping – to identify for the first time the brain networks that underlie our feelings of volition and for agency. “Together, these networks may underlie our perception of free will, with implications for neuropsychiatric diseases in which these processes are impaired,” the researchers write.  Darby and his colleagues first mapped the locations of lesions (brain damage) in 28 people with impaired volition (including people with akinetic mutism, for example, who seem to have lost the motivation to move or speak) and in 50 people with an impaired sense of agency (such as people with so-called “alien-hand syndrome” who feel that they are not in control of their own limb movements).  Then they looked at which other regions in the brain these various damaged locations typically communicate with (for this they referred to a connectivity map based on scans of 1000 healthy people), to investigate whether or not they all form part of the same network. For the patients with disordered volition, while their lesio...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Source Type: blogs