The Illusion of Conscious Will is a book written by Dr. Daniel Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard. The book describes reasons why free will is an illusion. This post has notes featuring the results of studies cited in the book.
• Alien hand syndrome is linked to damage to the middle of the frontal lobe on the side of the brain opposite the affected hand.
• A study found that people who were falsely accused of an event were more likely when witnesses were present to: sign a confession, internalize guilt, and confabulate details in memory.
• Brain imaging studies suggest that voluntary actions are associated with activity in the frontal lobes of the brain.
• A study of 300 amputees in prisoner-of-war camps during World War II found that 98 percent of the amputees experienced a phantom limb.
• A study involving a mirror reflection of another person’s hand fooled subjects into thinking that someone else’s hand was their own.
• An experiment that asked participants to move their finger found that conscious willing of finger movement occurred after the onset of the readiness potential but before the actual finger movement (and before the awareness of movement).
• An experiment that asked subjects to identify a moving target by gesture and voice showed that subjects moved their hand toward the target as soon as 100 milliseconds after the target jumped, but they did not say they were aware of the target until more than 300 milliseconds later.
• An experiment showed that people assigned more causality to themselves if they were first manipulated to feel self-conscious.
• A study involving educated adults in North America found that they are more inaccurate in throwing darts at a picture when it portrays a person they like.
• A study showed that people were more likely to perceive that they controlled a chance event when they achieved a large number of initial successes in predicting the event.
• Research shows that depressed individuals are less likely than nondepressed people to overperceive control of successful outcomes.
• 65 percent of patients with schizophrenia have experiences that seem to emerge from inconsistency of thought and action.
• Measures of movement in the voice boxes of people with schizophrenia indicate that auditory hallucinations are self-generated.
• Brain scans in people with hallucinations indicate activity in Broca’s area.
• Research shows that schizophrenic people experience voices less frequently when they hum or keep their mouths open.
• A study found that schizophrenics who were hallucinating accepted a video image of a hand as their own hand.
• An experiment showed that participants moved a pendulum more in a forbidden direction when they were specifically asked not to move it in that direction.
• A series of experiments where subjects were asked not to think of a specific thought showed that the subjects’ minds specifically gravitated towards the thoughts they were asked not to think.
• Research shows that people get depressed when they try to be happy, stay awake when trying to force themselves to sleep, get anxious when trying to relax and get distracted when trying to concentrate.
• Thoughts about failure are more easily accessible for depressed people.
• An experiment showed that subjects retaliated with noise weapons more readily when they were first falsely led to believe that their opponent was hostile.
• An analysis of 488 societies found that 90 percent exhibit forms of altered states of consciousness, and 52 percent exhibit the specific situation of trance with spirit possession.
• A study found that people were more likely to agree to participate in a psychology experiment scheduled for an early time if they were first asked whether they would be in and experiment and then told the time.
• Research shows that hypnotic susceptibility is correlated with imagination, absorption, and belief in hypnotizability.
• Reviews of studies show that hypnosis is effective for pain control.
• Studies of hypnotically-induced amnesia suggest that people can forget material through hypnosis.
• Research shows that hypnosis does not increase the accuracy of memory, but instead can increase the subject’s confidence in false memory reports.
• PET scans of highly hypnotizable subjects showed that the anterior cingulate cortex was just as active when the subjects were experiencing auditory hallucations as it was when they were hearing a recorded message.
• Evidence indicates a tendency to attribute more causality to earlier rather than later events in a causal chain.
• Research on patients with damage to the frontal lobes show little response to upsetting pictures and are less effective at winning gambling experiments.
• Research shows that perceived control makes people feel and perform better in stressful environments.
