When you want to move, does your brain know before you’ve decided?
It is the end of a long, hard work day and all you feel like doing is flop on the sofa and watch TV. Your eyes move to something on the screen and watch it for a few minutes, then you think to yourself: “I wonder what’s on elsewhere…”. So you reach for the TV remote and switch the channel.
At this precise moment, let’s freeze frame and ask: how did this simple decision unfold?
Which happened first: the conscious recognition of the intention to move your arm or the brain activity required for the movement?
For a long time, people grappled with this as a ‘chicken or egg’ question and arrived at only philosophical answers, not scientific ones. Indeed, for many years the question was actually believed to be outside the purview of science.
The international chain
In the early 1980s, American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet published his pioneering work exploring what scientists now call the intentional chain.
In its entirety, the intentional chain entails an intent (the desire to change the channel in the example above), an action (reaching for the remote), and an effect (e.g. sounds/sights from a different channel). Due to the technical challenges involved, it wasn’t possible for scientists to study the intentional chain from beginning to end — until now.
In a study published recently in PLoS Biology, Jean-Paul Noel from the University of Minnesota in the US and collaborators from the US, the UK, and Switzerland, reported an experiment in which they selectively targeted each element of the intentional chain, one by one.
They found that conscious recognition of the intent to move coincides with activation in the M1 cortical area, the part of the brain controlling voluntary limb movements. One surprise was a difference in the timing of conscious recognition: the perception of movement and the brain activity corresponding to this intent.
First study of its kind
The study’s participant was a tetraplegic person outfitted with a brain implant in his M1 area (a.k.a. the primary motor cortex). Electrical impulses from the implant stimulated the area. This setup, called a brain-machine interface, used with a device called neuromuscular electrical stimulator (NMES), which activated forearm muscles to cause hand movements, made it possible for the researchers to activate or inactivate individual components of the intentional chain in the study.
The neural recording and experimental setup (left). The behavioural responses are displayed on the right. Row 1: full intentional chain where the BMI user indicates time of intention (I, red), action (A, green), and an effect (E, blue) in the external environment. Row 2: estimates of the timing of actions and effects in the absence of intention. Row 3: estimates of the timing of intentions and effects in the absence of actions. Row 4: estimates of the timing of intentions and actions in the absence of an effect. Row 5: estimate of the timing of actions in the absence of intentions and effects. Row 6: estimate of the timing of effects in the absence of intentions and actions.
| Photo Credit:
PLoS Biol 23(4): e3003118.
A particular hand movement was of interest in this setup. The participant held a ball in his hand. When he squeezed it, a sound was emitted exactly 300 mslater. This was the environmental effect, the last piece of the intentional chain. During the experiment, the participant was asked to watch a clock on a computer screen. Depending on the specific trial, he had to report the reading on the clock — at the time he felt the urge to move his hand, the time he moved his hand or the time he heard an audio tone.
This was the first study to look in the M1 area in the context of subjective intention of voluntary actions. The researchers found that the timeline of activity in this area was somewhat different than that reported for other brain areas in previous research. Specifically, all the other areas had been activated prior to intention and action — whereas M1 showed activity before but also during a voluntary action.
This makes sense given that M1 is the final stop in the brain, before the signal moves to the spinal cord and finally to muscles of the hand.
Rearing up
Normally, when you intend to move your right hand to pick up an object or lift your foot up to kick a ball, the desire for voluntary movement is reflected as electrical activity in specific parts of the brain. Even before Libet conducted his foundational work, German scientist Hans Helmut Kornhuber placed electrodes along the heads of participants in a study who each made a voluntary decision — to press a button any time they felt like it. He conducted this study in the 1960s. Kornhuber found that in the moments leading up to an individual pressing the button, the electrodes recorded a gradual increase in the strength of an electric signal, which he called the readiness potential.
Think of it as the brain gearing up to act. This meant that if these same brain parts were stimulated with electric signals, one could manufacture in the individual an urge to move the hand or the foot.
Kornhuber’s work, later confirmed by others, proved there was electrical activity in the brain before the individual performed a voluntary action. Subsequent research showed that certain brain circuits are activated before an individual is even aware of their intention to perform a voluntary movement.
In the new study, Noel & co. explored the question: when do we become aware of a decision we are about to make?
Interesting patterns
In the first round with their setup, the researchers studied the full intentional chain. They recorded electrical activity in the participant’s M1 area caused by the intent to move his hand using functional MRI. They recorded any subsequent movement of that hand with NMES. Finally, they recorded the sound of the participant squeezing the ball in his hand. Thus, they had an objective way to measure each step of the intentional chain — a significant departure from previous studies in which researchers depended on participants’ responses themselves.
When the researchers compared the objective measurements to the participant’s subjective perceptions, some interesting patterns emerged. For example, when the team asked the participant to report the time at which he developed a conscious awareness of his intention, his answer suggested his perception preceded actual electrical activity recorded by the MRI. Similarly, when asked to report the time at which he perceived his hand began to move, the researcher found his perception preceded the signal recorded by NMES.
In the next round, the researchers used NMES to move the participant’s hand, thus bypassing the subjective intent and therefore electrical activity in the brain. This time, the participant perceived that his hand moved at a time well after the measured electric signal. When the researchers blocked the hand movement signal from NMES, while keeping the intent and effect parts of the chain intact, the participant perceived his intention to occur much earlier — more so than the full intentional chain. In either case the difference was only in the order of milliseconds, but for the brain this is an eternity.
The role of M1
The work of Patrick Haggard at University College London may help understand these results better. Haggard & co. asked participants in a study to report the timing of an action (pressing a keyboard button, say) and the timing of an effect of their action (a colour changing on the computer monitor). The team’s results showed that participants perceived a shorter time interval between a voluntary action and its effect — called the intentional binding — than what was objectively recorded. In this context, Noel’s team have discovered a new form of intentional binding: between intention and action.
Since the work of Kornhuber and Libet, as more scientists examined the time between an individual perceiving a voluntary decision and that decision turning into action, it has been becoming clearer that the timing of brain activity in relation to a voluntary decision depends on where in the brain one looks.
Through multiple attempts to understand the brain’s goings-on in the moments leading up to a voluntary action, scientists have mapped the parts that light up with electrical activity as an individual consciously develops an urge to take some voluntary action as well as areas that light up with the conscious perception of having taken the action. In the new study, Noel et al. have added to this knowledge by revealing the role the M1 area plays with the start of a conscious decision to take some action and during the execution.
Where are you looking?
In the last few decades, cognitive neuroscientists have found that a single voluntary decision for an individual involves multiple different slices in their brain. There’s the slice of ‘what’ decision to make, ‘when’ to make it, ‘whether or not’ to translate that decision to action. Activities in various parts of the brain correspond to different slices and the timing of brain activity in relation to a voluntary decision depends on which slice is examined. So if we look in the premotor or parietal cortical areas, we find them activated before a voluntary movement has occurred.
The new study shows that the M1 area integrates signals from premotor-parietal areas, which explains its activity in the moments leading up to the voluntary action. The specific way the tests were set up made it possible for the researchers to separate M1 activity due to intention from its activity due to action. In a situation where a decision is converted to action, that of reaching for the remote in the example earlier, M1 activity relays that decision down to the spinal cord and to muscles of the arm.
The fact that the study was conducted with a single tetraplegic participant raises obvious questions about whether its findings can be generalised. In another recent study in Nature Communications, Noel collaborated with Italian scientist Tommaso Bertoni to examine the same question in 30 healthy participants. They aimed to study the participants’ brain activity using electrodes placed on their scalps (in contrast to electrodes implanted inside the M1 area of the brain). The results have supported the role of the M1 area of the brain in translating voluntary decisions to actions, adding further credence to the findings by Noel and team in their paper.
Dr. Reeteka Sud is a neuroscientist by training and senior scientist at the Center for Brain and Mind, Department of Psychiatry, NIMHANS, Bengaluru.
Published – June 05, 2025 05:30 am IST
