In my previous post I commented upon two experiments that attempted to address the question of free will from the point of view of modern neuroscience. I ended my post by suggesting a thought experiment to the reader. If a scientist informed you that he or she knows with scientific certainty the numbers you are going to play in the lottery, what would you do?

My guess was that very possibly you would avoid playing those numbers, if for no other reason, just to prove this arrogant scientist wrong!

The point of this thought experiment was to show that, at the level that our actual decisions are being taken, we are the sole masters in the house, and, crucially, that discussions about our “free will” and about all what science can, or cannot, claim in regards to it are a bit confused.

In a famous experiment of the 80s, neuroscientists claimed that they managed to show that what we, humans, call “free will” simply does not exist. The setting of their experiment was rather simple. A number of volunteers were wired with electrodes and their brain activity was monitored. Then they were asked to choose whether they would flex their fingers or their wrists. They were instructed to first report when they had made their choice and then actually flex their fingers or their wrists.

The neuroscientists running the experiment identified a consistent pattern in the recorded brain activity. Signals were appearing a split second before the volunteers were able to report that they had made their choice. A split second is not much, you would think, but when a scientist is able to show that a result in an experiment cannot be attributed to chance, then this scientist might want to interpret it.

This those scientists did. They explained this pattern of brain activity, observed just before an actual choice was made, as evidence that “unconscious neural processes” determined the volunteers’ actions before they were ever aware of making a decision. They gave it the name “readiness potential”.

I was reflecting, leaving the cinema the other day, on the very clear similarity between the film I had just watched, “Source Code” (2011), by Duncan Jones, and “Groundhog Day” (1993), by Harold Ramis. In the latter, Bill Murray’s character, a stroppy and cynical weatherman finds himself “trapped” inside this Groundhog Day, as it is called, by finding himself forced to relive every single moment of it, from morning till night.

In “Source Code”, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, an American helicopter pilot, finds himself on a commuter train, “trapped” inside someone else’s body, during the same 8 minutes before the explosion of a bomb that will kill him and everyone else in the train. And then he lives these minutes again, and again, because, it turns out, he is on a mission.

It has been a long time since I last wrote about the plans to regulate "talking therapies" through the HPC. The new Government had indicated from the beginning that they were sceptical about those plans, and had made it clear that the issue was not very high up in their agenda of priorities.

Now, finally, we have got some very good news. The Government has decided to abandon any plans to further extend statutory regulation to any further professions --and this includes psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and so on.

This is the sort of things you see in films or read in novels –"Johnny Took his Gun" by Dalton Trumbo or "The Patient" by Georges Simenon are but two of the examples that spring to mind– but the report that circulates all media since yesterday is very real. A paralysed Belgian man who doctors thought was in coma for 23 years was conscious all along. It was only recently that a scan showed that his brain was "almost entirely" functioning. You can read the BBC report here.

I cannot begin to grasp what it must have been this experience for this poor man, but I can very vaguely imagine. A recent book and film used the metaphor of a diving bell. You are inside your body as if you are inside a diving bell. It's alright when you can control your diving bell. You swim around and interact with all other beings in diving bells you encounter. Suddenly something happens and you loose control of the diving bell. Your life as such is not threatened; but you can't communicate any more, you can't interact. You are trapped inside.