{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01977800201816347, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0056508577194752775, 'mean_word_length': 5.4363636363636365, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Mind–Brain Identity Theories: Minding the Time Gap

Saigle, Dubljevic, and Racine (2018) made a remarkable work, carefully pointing out the methodological limitations of a series of studies inspired by Libet’s paradigm and the risks of using their results for making assumptions about complex cognitive phenomena. Very briefly, Libet’s paradigm shows evidence that the decision of starting a movement, a mental phenomenon, is associated with a specific pattern of neuronal activity occurring milliseconds earlier. The fact that this neurophysiologic activity is detectable in parietal regions, and its response-locked characteristics, suggest that it is the expression of a final motor output of a decision process that occurred somewhere in the brain and communicated to premotor and motor areas for the preparation and execution of an action. In their discussion, Saigle, Dubljevic, and Racine (2018) clarified the methodological limitations of extrapolating results obtained from Libet’s paradigm-inspired studies, but they only superficially discussed their implications for the question of decision making and free will. I focus my comment on two aspects of this discussion. First, the time gap between the detection of neural activity and the consciousness of a decision is a natural characteristic of the brain’s design and cannot be used as argument favoring dualistic theories of mind. Second, human behavior is the result of different classes of phenomena occurring in different time scales, and short-term events can’t explain alone the genesis of sophisticated judgments involved in the expression of free will. Saigle, Dubljevic, and Racine (2018) mention the use of Libet’s results for corroborating the hypothesis that free will doesn’t exist. Oversimplifying this argument, actions initiated by the brain before a conscious decision of doing so imply some degree of autonomy between mind and brain. In this case, an epiphenomenal consciousness working as an observer of biologically determined events cannot be ethically responsible for the results of such actions. I propose that this kind of argument appears in this discussion due to the anatomic and temporal characteristics of Libet s experimental results. Anatomically, premotor event-related potentials are detectable in parietal regions near the motor cortex, the final output of motor acts. This location can suggest that premotor potentials only indicate that decisions made elsewhere in the brain are ready for being executed. This may not be true. Alternatively, it is possible that the premotor activities recorded by these experiments are integral part of the decision process and not the simple expression of executive commands. Premotor activities can reflect a complex context-dependent set of neuronal activity in different brain regions involved even in the simplest actions (Saberi-Moghadam et al. 2016). In fact, experimental data suggest that most cortical networks have a dual use in environment-dependent and/or internally organized actions with a critical role of hippocampus, where a pattern of self-organized theta oscillations allows prediction of rodents’ future choice in a maze-based paradigm several seconds before their behavioral decision (Buzs aki and Llinas 2017). Thus, instead of marking a decision already made, premotor activity can be interpreted as an integral part of the contextual analysis involved in the decision of starting an action. My second comment is about the time gap between neuronal and mental events. This gap is inherent to the way brain functions are organized because the conscious experience depends on the integration of signals of different modalities being processed at different speeds in relatively distant brain regions but that must be organized in time and correctly tagged to outside events (Engleman et al. 2005). The unitary experience of consciousness hinders the clear perception of this time organization, but experimental manipulations and the observation of human behavior in limit situations allow the identification of its peculiarities. In the laboratory, Stetson et al. (2006) conducted an experiment where a delay was artificially injected between the participant’s key press and a subsequent flash. After adaptation to this condition, the flashes appeared at delays shorter than the early injected delay and were perceived as occurring before the key press, inducing a reversal of action and sensation. During the experienced illusory reversals, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data showed increased activity in anterior cingulate cortex/medial frontal cortex, a brain region previously implicated in conflict monitoring. An example of a limit situation revealing details of the time organization of human behavior is the motor response to imminent threats associated to anxiety and fear. Defensive actions are triggered by sensory inputs processed by subcortical structures like the amygdala