Consciousness

Having seen how Dualism and Essentialism toy with our understanding of our beginning and end, health and disease, Chapter 15 turns to examine how these colored lenses distort our view of our free will and the self. Whether free will truly exists is not a matter I will decide here, but whether we think it does is entirely within this chapter’s purview. When I believe I have freely chosen to lift my finger, I essentially believe in three things: first, that I can tell whether I did it; second, that I can tell whether I consciously willed the act; and third, that there is a single, unitary, willing ”me.” All three beliefs are demonstrably wrong. Dualism and Essentialism are again to blame.

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Impaired sense of agency in functional movement disorders: An fMRI study

Nahab

Kundu

Maurer

et al. 2017

PLoS ONE

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The sense of agency (SA) is an established framework that refers to our ability to exert and perceive control over our own actions. Having an intact SA provides the basis for the human perception of voluntariness, while impairments in SA are hypothesized to lead to the perception of movements being involuntary that may be seen many neurological or psychiatric disorders. Individuals with functional movement disorders (FMD) experience a lack of control over their movements, yet these movements appear voluntary by physiology. We used fMRI to explore whether alterations in SA in an FMD population could explain why these patients feel their movements are involuntary. We compared the FMD group to a control group that was previously collected using an ecologically valid, virtual-reality movement paradigm that could modulate SA. We found selective dysfunction of the SA neural network, whereby the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and pre-supplementary motor area on the right did not respond differentially to the loss of movement control. These findings provide some of the strongest evidence to date for a physiological basis underlying these disabling disorders.

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Consciousness

Cited by 3 publications

References 128 publications

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Impaired sense of agency in functional movement disorders: An fMRI study

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