Yale School of Medicine (YSM) researchers have identified for the first time the brain signals responsible for unconscious action – actions taken by the body that we aren’t consciously aware of until after they’re complete.
“What happens in the brain when we’re aware and unaware of what we do?” asks Hal Blumenfeld, MD, PhD, Professor of Neurology at YSM and senior author of the study. He notes that while previous studies have explored aware or unaware perception, awareness of action is a tougher nut to crack. “To come up with a way to study things that you do that you know you did it or didn’t do it, that’s hard and that hasn’t been looked at by any studies that I know about."
In a study published in PNAS Nexus, Blumenfeld and colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity while participants split their focus between a timed puzzle game and a video memorization task. They describe how brain signals differed between aware and unaware moves, both before and after the move was made.
“It’s a new way, a new approach that hasn’t been used at all before,” Blumenfeld says, “to study this important question."
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