Decisions Decisions.

A quick and dirty neurophys-summary on high-function decision making:

The prefrontal cortex is the outermost layer of the frontal lobes - the bit just above and behind your eyes - the bit that most noticibly separates us from neanderthals and chimps. When the docs started chopping bits out of it back in the 50's in the name of psychiatric science - to calm down 'neurotic women' - side-effects varied between death, and catatonia in rare cases and an almost universal severe impairment of short-term memory and an inability to control impulses.

Put into simple terms, people with prefrontal problems become 'external stimulus biased' ie, you give them a comb, and whatever you might tell them to do with it, they'll comb their hair. Show them food, they'll imediately begin to eat. Make them angry - they fight. They see, they do, without intermediary deliberation. They're great at parties.

The PFL works in three ways.

(1) It restrains emotions. Not the feeling of them, but their ability to make us react imediately under their influence. They give us time to think.
(2) It is the home of short-term memory. Short-term memory is not really memory, what happens is - when the PFL is 'shown' something - either real or conceptual - the mental image remains like an echo for a short time even after the original stimulus has been withdrawn.
Think of it as someone with weak fingers holding a single jigsaw piece separate from the mass of other pieces all around, for a little time, before they eventually drop it back into the pile.
(3) It is stupidly well connected. The PFL is connected to pretty much all parts of the brain - perceptual processing - motor function - long-term memory - limbic system, you name it, it's connected.

To go back to the jigsaw - the PFL holds a piece (for as long as concentration allows) and then, like lightning, compares the edges to everything else that is in our 'minds' - discarding bits that aren't relevant, tacking on others, using our faculties of visual and spacial processing to twist and swivel pieces to fit - trawling through our experiential memory, our banks of conceptual knowledge - physics, chemistry, carpentry - whatever we've learned during our lives. Trying to fill in the picture so that we can find the unintuitive answer to whatever problem we're working on. And all the while it's battling with our emotions, to stop them beating down the door of the senate and simply press-ganging us into whatever half-assed plan our amygdala has cooked up - usually a variaiton of kill it, fuck it, eat it, run away from it etc. The first order responses.

It waits until it find the last piece - the eureaka moment - and only then opens the doors to the emotional army, like in one of those films where the president's about to press the button that'll launch the missiles when a clerk runs in at the very last second with some papers in his hands shouting "Stop, STOP we've cracked it - it was just Castro's laundry list..!"

It's time is limited though, sometimes the president still gets to press the button, though with training and effort - that time of focus and concentration can be extended.

Followed on the MRI a volunteer confronted with a tough conceptual problem - the emotional centers light up, but no action is imediately taken, the prefrontal lighting up to counter. Then the rest of the brain's various centres of processing light up in sequences like a christmas tree as the prefrontal dashes around like mad, then a eureaka moment is reached, or at least a 'best guess' moment, the prefrontal subsides slightly, and the emotional centres spur the implementation of whatever final agreement on the 'right action' has been reached.

Perhaps a better analogy would be that the PFL acts at once as clutch and steering. The emotional motor is still revving like crazy, but de-clutched for as long as the PFL 'leg' can hold down the pedal. Sooner or later it gets tired, the pedal rises, and the car goes in whatever direction the wheels have been turned in during the interim.

An important observation however, is that the volunteers, or people who've faced situations in real-life, upon the moment of solution report that "the answer just seemed right" "the answer just popped into my head" - ie. there seems to be little conscious involvement in the actual number-crunching stage, leading in progression to the final answer - only once the problem is solved/best-guessed is the solution booted upstairs to what we'd term as 'us'. What is reported during the process is... usually after the fact, and sounds suspiciously like commentary "I remember thinking this, then this popped into my head, then I remembered that too, and bingo, the answer just came to me."

With effort and practice, short-term memory can be sometimes vastly improved, allowing us to 'hold' more variables in our 'conscious mind' for appraisal, and critical thinking allows us to 'frame' problems in different lights - usually specificly concerned with loss aversion - To us instinctively, when presented with a 20% chance of dying, we shun the operation, but when presented with an 80% chance of survival, we become more likely to accept the procedure. Stupid, but observationally true. - and as you say, all that stuff.

We - the 'we' we'd regard as our essential conscious selves - still seems to be shut out of the process, simply watching as the PFL we've so lovingly buffed-up and pimped-out, races around the track without us. Which ain't such good news for the whole freedom of choice bit.

There is hope however, in many ways the will has been freed over the years from the purely instinctive monkey-see-monkey-do evolutionary will.



Top left and top right: The will has been freed, to some extent, from time. Via memory, and predicitons based on memory, our brains are able to access libraries of information outside of the limited timeframe of the events concurrent with the instance of choice at hand.

Bottom Left: The will has been freed from limited physical POV. To some extent our visual and other perceptual processing centres can perform extrapolative actions on percieved objects/stimuli - we can happily rotate a cube in our minds for example - and attach additional frames - vectors, estimates of speed, possible functions etc etc.

Bottom Right: The will has been freed of reality, in that it can overlay filters and interpretations based on heuristics that have no 'real' physical counterpart - anything from physics to theology.

I stress "cause" in each case as these additional faculties all chuck their two-cents into the great pile of composite causality that eventually collapses into effect.

Anyway, that's about as far as my poor PFL can go without needing some down time.