"Possible site of free will found in brain" was one of the more intriguing headlines in New Scientist this month. Angela Sirigu, of the CNRS Cognitive Neuroscience Centre in Bron, France, says that there is a specific brain region, the parietal cortex, involved in the consciousness of movement. When it was stimulated with an electrical probe during surgery, patients felt a desire to, say, wiggle their finger, roll their tongue or move a limb. Stronger electrical pulses convinced them that they had actually performed these movements, even they had been motionless.

In the rather dry words of her team's article in Science, "Our study suggests that motor intention and awareness are emerging consequences of increased parietal activity before movement execution." In other words, the sensation that we will to do something is illusory.  What really happens is that first of all the neurons crackle and fire and then we feel like doing it. As the article points out, free will is "appealing from a spiritual point of view", but contemporary research has all but disproved it.

Patrick Haggard, a British neuroscientist, told New Scientist that the experiment pinpoints volition in a specific part of the brain. "That's extremely interesting, because up to now it has been very difficult for neuroscientists to deal with the idea of intentions or wishes or will," he says. No one should be surprised, says Haggard, that the experience of volition can be linked to specific brain areas. "I can't think of any way you can have conscious experience other than as a result of neurons in your brain firing."

So, if there is no free will, is there really any role for ethics at all? That is the intriguing question which neuroscience is posing more stridently every year.~ New Scientist, May 7; Science, May 8