ANARCHY IN THE BRAIN
SIMON BIGNELL on an intriguing phenomenon and its implications.
The phenomenon of the 'anarchic hand' is probably one of the strangest things researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience will ever come across. People with this bizarre condition have one hand that is under full mental control whilst the other hand seems to behave as if it had a will of its own and competes with the other hand to perform actions. Professor Sergio Delia Sala (University of Edinburgh) has been studying this condition. So peculiar is it that some have come to call it 'Dr Strangelove's syndrome', after the film in which Peter Sellers plays a mad scientist who has to grab his arm to stop it making Nazi salutes. The symptoms can be humorous to watch but can be devastating for the afflicted person.
The complex movements of the anarchic hand are felt by the person to originate in the hand itself rather than in their own minds, and are replications of the actions normally performed. As one patient put it, 'It interferes with my life. It does what it wants and not what I tell it to.' The condition, according to Delia Sala, may be caused by the brain's failure to inhibit actions that are triggered by the environment, such as pouring a jug of water or banging in a nail. For example, when driving near your workplace at the weekend you might turn off towards it, because it's difficult to override such an automatic action.
The condition is not, as might be thought, the result of a dual personality, but rather appears as a result of damage to the medial regions at the front of the brain. Professor Delia SaIa described the case of one patient who had undergone brain surgery. Following the operation the surgeon had accidentally pressed against a region of the brain involved with inhibiting movement, and the patient demonstrated anarchic hand symptoms for the next few hours until the brain region had time to recover.
The anarchic hand demonstrates that such things as agency and free will might be rooted in the brain. The condition may show that the way we restrain or inhibit our automatic actions in response to the environment are deeply rooted in brain processes. In other words, as Delia SaIa puts it, we don't have 'free will', we have 'free won't'.
