Hannah Fry

But I had a conversation actually with a retired Cambridge professor about a month ago.

And something he said has just really... I've been thinking about it almost nonstop ever since.

And I think I might have changed my mind on exactly that point.

Tell me why.

He was talking about how...

we have this idea that there is a conscious version of you that is sort of assimilating all of the signals and coming up with a conclusion about where you are, who you are, what you're feeling, etc.

But he was saying, actually, we don't ever have any firm evidence that that is the case.

It may be that actually all of that is just an illusion of a conscious self.

You know, in the same way that when you look carefully at about

uh sight or smell i mean there's all sorts of illusions that are evidenced in the way that our that our brain works and he was saying maybe they're like the idea of you as a single entity

sort of sitting on top of all of these electrical signals, maybe that is in itself an illusion.

And then I was thinking about, there's a very famous experiment, which you and I have talked about before.

There's a very famous experiment where someone presses a button, but at the same time as their brain is being monitored.

And actually the decision to press the button and the physical action that they take to press the button are offsets

But not in the way around that you might imagine it.

The cause and effect is not, oh, I think I'll press that button over there.

And then the message gets sent to your arm, at which point you go to move the button.

It's the other way around.

Your arm makes the movement and then your brain retrospectively comes up with that decision afterwards.

Easily.