How’s this for rapidly altering frontal function—take an average heterosexual male and expose him to a particular stimulus, and his PFC becomes more likely to decide that jaywalking is a good idea. What’s the stimulus? The proximity of an attractive woman. I know, pathetic.[*23]

For starters, T rarely generates new patterns of aggression; instead, it makes preexisting patterns more likely to happen.

Even if quantum indeterminacy did bubble all the way up to behavior, there is the fatal problem that all it would produce is randomness.

seamless stream of influences that, as said at the beginning, precludes being able to shoehorn in this thing called free will that is supposedly in the brain but not of it.

However, in the Haynes studies, fMRI images predicted which behavior occurred with only about 60 percent accuracy, almost at the chance level. For Mele, a “60-percent accuracy rate in predicting which button a participant will press next doesn’t seem to be much of a threat to free will.” In Roskies’s words, “All it suggests is that there are some

we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.

grit, character, backbone, tenacity, strong moral compass, willing spirit winning out over weak flesh, are all produced by the PFC; (b) the PFC is made of biological stuff identical to the rest of your brain; (c) your current PFC is the outcome of all that uncontrollable biology interacting with all that uncontrollable environment.

But here’s the crazy thing: the readiness potential, the evidence that the brain had committed to pushing the button, occurred about three hundred milliseconds before people believed they had decided to push the button. That sense of freely choosing is just a post hoc illusion, a false sense of agency.

Thus, three different techniques, monitoring the activity of hundreds of millions of neurons down to single neurons, all show that at the moment when we believe that we are consciously and freely choosing to do something, the neurobiological die has already been cast. That sense of conscious intent is an irrelevant afterthought.