Know whatâll really bake your noodle? An MRI will show your brain firing to move your arm before your âhigherâ brain function sends the signal.
Your brain fires and then sends an executive summary to the homunculus behind your eyeballs saying, âGood job! âYouâ moved your arm!â And you believe in free will?
Donât some limbs move due to neurons in the spine or other parts of the body? Such as when you get burned or struck by something. To make the reaction quicker, it just bypasses the brain
Correct. Youâre thinking of Spinal Reflexes.
Spinal cord reflexes are simple behaviors produced by central nervous system (CNS) pathways that lie entirely within the spinal cord. The sensory afferent fibers that evoke these reflexes enter the spinal cord and activate spinal motor neurons directly or through a chain of one or more spinal interneurons.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/spinal-reflex
âYouâ really are just an observer of biological programming playing out. Even your âhigherâ brain functions are still being observed by someone. They are a response to the more âbaseâ biology, but they are still programmed responses.
âYouâ is an incredibly tricky word to define. Is your body you? Is your brain you? Is the set of chemical reactions we call consciousness you? Is only the subset of that set of chemical reactions thatâs capable of saying âI am meâ you?
I stuck my arm out towards a cat today and it scratched me. What me did it scratch? If my arm gets amputated because that scratch gets infected, have I lost a part of myself, or have I simply lost some thing that belongs to me?
I think itâs best to define âIâ. Your sense of self is constructed from the biology of your brain. Your âegoâ or the biological and mental character you are observing and observing through is not âIâ. Your thoughts, your feelings, sensations etc.
Under all of that, observing everything, is âIâ. The only irreducible thing in the universe. âIâ am consciousness, the observer that canât be observed. The only thing that the more you try to grasp, the less itâs possible. But still the more you learn. Because the only thing that IS, is I. Reality emerges from consciousness, not the other way around.
Itâs not even one brain, itâs two chunks that function as one whole. Patients who have had a corpus callostomy (splitting the membrane connecting the hemispheres) can find one of their limbs going against what youâre trying to do.
If youâre getting dressed, for example, your left side may refuse if it doesnât like what youâre wearing. It can do totally random things and sometimes people have to use their controlled hand to physically restrain the other.
They think the left half of the brain is responsible for speech and communication, so the right remains this silent observer under the thumb of the left when the connection is intact.
But it has its own will, even if you donât know it.
Electricity. Humans are electronically controlled, thatâs how.
If you have psychic powers raise my hand!
When I think about how I move my limbs my brain starts melting.
You think about moving your arm, but you donât actually think about it, you just do it, so how do you move it without thinking thatâs what youâre doing?
Try not to think about it.
Try very hard not to think about it.