Long before you're consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it.

If that's the case, do people actually make decisions? Or is every choice -- even the choice to prepare for future choices -- an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid?

Those questions are raised by a study conducted by Max Planck Institute neuroscientists and published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand; seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions.

For more on the experiment, see my Wired.com story, for which I had the privilege of speaking to Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a prominent neuroethicist. As is so often the case in journalism, we had a fascinating (email) conversation that didn't fit into the article itself, and I decided -- ha -- to publish it here.

Me: The big question is how much people should feel comfortable extrapolating these results to other, more seemingly complex decisions about which we feel a deep personal connection -- do I rent an apartment, get involved in a relationship, leave my job in search of another, and so on.

Martha Farah: The authors have taken an important first step toward understanding how we make decisions, and toward revealing the apparently prolonged cascade of unconscious processes that precede the conscious decisions we make with what seems like "free will."  But of course there is always a trade-off in science between making a process scientifically tractable and making it realistic. Remember, Galileo rolled balls down inclines and theorized about infinite frictionless planes; he didn't set about trying to understand the fluttering, zig-zagging motion of a falling leaf! The authors started with a very simple decision-making task, and their results now form the basis for some good working hypotheses to be tested with more complex decisions.

Interview Continues (Off Site)