The psychology – and philosophy – of free will

The New York Times reviews recent research by psychologists, experimental philosophers, and others into the concept of free will:

Intellectual concepts of free will can vary enormously, but there seems to be a fairly universal gut belief in the concept starting at a young age. When children age 3 to 5 see a ball rolling into a box, they say that the ball couldn’t have done anything else. But when they see an experimenter put her hand in the box, they insist that she could have done something else.

That belief seems to persist no matter where people grow up, as experimental philosophers have discovered by querying adults in different cultures, including Hong Kong, India, Colombia and the United States. Whatever their cultural differences, people tend to reject the notion that they live in a deterministic world without free will.

Turning off the brain’s ‘anxiety switch’

The Huffington Post reports:

A recent study from Stanford located a part of the brain that could function like an on/off switch.Researchers found a certain brain circuit that when stimulated in mice proved to inhibit their anxiety — the mice were emboldened to freely explore open areas they typically shunned out of fear of predator attacks.

The March 9 study was published by the online science and medical journal, Nature.

Are atheletes better at processing visual information?

The New York Times reports on a new study conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Researchers had both athletes and non-athletes perform a task – crossing a busy street – while immersed in a virtual reality simulation. As with a real-life street crossing, subjects had to gauge the speed of oncoming vehicles. The study found that athletes were better able to complete the task not because they crossed the street more quickly or otherwise brought to bear their athletic prowess, but because they glanced up and down the street more than non-athletes and appeared better able to project when to cross the street relative to the positions of oncoming vehicles.