Free Will and Action

I think I might have stumbled upon a peculiar lapse in how my mind functions. It seems that when I have to start or stop something that I am doing, if there is no other influencing factor, my actions lag roughly fifteen minutes behind my thoughts.

The simplest example is playing the video game Geometry Wars. It is a game that is generally played over and over again, because each round lasts only about 3 minutes. The real difficulty is deciding when to stop, and then actually stopping. If you have nothing of urgent need to be done, there is simply no built in stopping point to the game, you simply have to make yourself stop. You have to decide that your done, and then actually turn the game off.

That may sound simple, but I suspect that it is not because there are less similar situations than one might suspect. Take for instance TV shows. You don’t have to consciously decide that you are over. The show ends. It tells you where to leave. Suppose you are playing a sport. Either there is a set time limit, like in soccer, or you will tire yourself out, natural endings.

To clarify, what I noticed was that there was roughly a ten to fifteen minute delay between my conscious decisions of action with no inherit force determining anything for me other than my mind. If this is true, it is of major importance. It means that I haven’t been making many “free will” decisions without a roughly fifteen minute lapse between mental decision and physical action.

So the real trick now is to notice when this is happening and tightening that timing up. As I have discussed before, I suspect this type of learning can happen incrementally over time. So as long as I do slightly better at this all of the time, I will get better at it.

Kyler