Do we have free will? The human brain resists ideas that turn our world upside down.

Nowadays a lot of new information appears every day. So it’s no surprise that many of us are often confronted with new ideas. Some of them may contradict our existing beliefs.

These chance encounters with new and different ideas are a good sign. This shows that we are not stagnant in our learning journey. But a more serious question follows. How comfortable are we with these new ideas we encounter?

A few months ago, Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s book, Determination: Life Without Free Will, was published. Like the work of fellow neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain (2010), it establishes the fact that human behavior is not the result of the conscious decision-making process at its stage. To quote Sapolsky: “(Behavior) is truly a mess, a subject involving, among other things, brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, the prenatal environment, early experiences, genes, biological and cultural evolution, and environmental pressures.”

The main idea of ​​Sapolsky’s book is that human behavior is created by biology, over which man has no control, and interacts with the environment, over which he also has no control.

In other words, free will does not exist. It’s just an illusion. The book also examines what society might look like if we accepted that free will does not exist.

The concept of free will underlies the current paradigm for understanding our human behavior. The idea of ​​”no free will” is very difficult to stomach.

Just imagine what would happen to our judicial process if those accused of murder or any other crime proved in court that their actions were determined not by them, but by the environment and their evolutionary history.

Until now, such an argument would have caused disbelief among almost everyone. But with the publication of Sapolsky’s book, such arguments now have a scientific basis.

Rarely do we come across books that present paradigm-shifting views. We know that we had books by Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres (1543), and Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), which offered views that went against the prevailing beliefs of the time. But how did the intellectual world react to Sapoloski’s book?

There was no debate in the public sphere. Even a casual discussion could make people think about what the book says. But the truth is that very few of us willingly address topics that might challenge our existing beliefs. So the book was largely ignored.

Thanks to the convergence of various new technologies such as artificial intelligence, smartphones and the Internet, a huge amount of new information is being created and disseminated. But how much of this newly created information is put to good use?

Does the absorption of new information keep pace with the development of new information, especially information that contradicts our existing beliefs?

The firm silence in response to the arguments put forward in books such as Ramachandran’s and Sapolsky’s shows that newly created information is not easily digested. Like uncollected rainwater, much of this new information will be wasted unless people are willing to absorb it.

But is the human brain capable of easily learning new information? Not really, and especially not when it comes to learning material that challenges the status quo. The human brain performs all its processes using only 13 watts of electricity.

This organ is the most energy efficient machine in the Universe. It optimizes energy consumption by reducing the amount of cognition it undergoes at a conscious level.

This is why our brain finds it more convenient to repeat past actions without thinking. As much as possible, our brain avoids the need to absorb new information. This status quo bias is a biological reality of the human brain. This is why lifelong learning is so challenging.

As India prepares to change its orbit and begin moving towards global leadership, while it is important to create knowledge and share new knowledge with citizens, it is equally, or perhaps more important, to enhance people’s ability to absorb this new information.

The first step in this direction is for policymakers to recognize that such absorption is not an automatic result of new information. Much remains to be done to address the human brain’s fundamental reluctance to accept things that go against previous beliefs.

American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to act.”

Learning to live with opposing ideas without allowing their differences to interfere with our actions is an art that we all must perfect. Debate and discussion have been the main teaching methods in the traditional Indian educational system.

Debating different ideas can create feelings of uncertainty, making us unsure of what we think. It can even make us feel ignorant. But on the other hand, a constant feeling of insufficient knowledge is the greatest quality that one can have in our information age.

This feeling would make us much more receptive to the paradigm-changing ideas proposed by such contrarian thinkers as Copernicus, Darwin and others.