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.

In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science.

chaoticism, or chaos theory. And its central idea is that really interesting, complicated things are often not best understood, cannot be understood, on a reductive level.

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

Step #1. Start with a tube of diameter Z (a tube because geometrically, a blood vessel branch, a dendritic branch, and a tree branch can all be thought of that way). Step #2. Extend that tube until it is, to pull a number out of a hat, four times longer than its diameter (i.e., 4Z). Step #3. At that point, the tube bifurcates, splits in two. Repeat

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.

The hormone also distorts judgment, making you more likely to interpret a neutral facial expression as threatening. Boosting your T levels makes you more likely to be overly confident in an economic game, resulting in being less cooperative—who needs anyone else when you’re convinced you’re fine on your own?[*9] Moreover, T tilts you toward more ri

determinism and predictability are very different things. Even if chaoticism is unpredictable, it is still deterministic.

There are also PFC differences in cognitive style. In general, collectivist-culture individuals prefer and excel at context-dependent cognitive tasks, while it’s context-independent tasks for individualistic-culture folks.