Free The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity by Joaquín M. Fuster Page B

function of the prefrontal cortex, the one that bears on freedom and creativity most directly, is the future. Curiously, almost everybody concerned with frontal functions ignores it, except clinicians and the students of working memory. The first because the planning difficulty of the patient who has suffered injury to the frontal lobe is so glaring, and the second because working memory, for which the frontal lobe is so important, is memory retained to be used in the near future. Everybody else seems afraid to be accused of teleology, that is, of believing that the future can cause the present, which is the nemesis of the physical scientist.
    There is another group of scientists, however, who are beginning to see the connection between the future and the prefrontal cortex: the neuroeconomists. The field of neuroeconomics deals with the role of brain structures in the prediction and probability of expected risk and value deriving from free choice – financial reward among others. The prefrontal cortex is one of those structures, heavily implicated in the physiology of choice and liberty. On the one hand, it is profusely endowed with neural detectors of pleasure and reward. On the other, it is endowed with the neural organizers of reward-seeking behaviors (behavioral economics), including the spoken language.
    In recent years neuroeconomics has flourished, for the most part as a result of the application of certain conceptual approaches such as game theory, and a better knowledge of the role of the prefrontal cortex in reward and displeasure. Probability has entered animal neuropsychology much as it previously had entered the study of human behavior. Behavioral tests have been devised to measure how animals, especially primates, estimate the probabilities of reward or risk. Thus, neuroeconomics can make reasonably accurate predictions of simple animal decisions, and even correlate those predictions with neural activity. It does not quite come to grips, however, with complex human behavior. And neuroeconomics would fail to do so even if the mechanisms of the human brain were as perfectly understood as they can ever be. Here also, as in market economics, the interplay of variables cannot be predicted with precision. The reason is that interplay takes place in the cerebral cortex, a system of neural networks that is constantly submitted to influences from many sources, all of them different: influences and bias from past memory in the cortex itself, or from the instinctual, visceral, and emotional centers of the limbic brain and the brainstem.
    Yet, it is precisely in the crucible of probabilities and uncertainties in the human brain that freedom comes to life. The ability to choose between alternatives literally derives from the variance and degrees of freedom of innumerable variables behind prospective human action. As in evolution, both determinism and straight causality dissolve in probability and, as they do, both yield to a teleological factor: purpose or goal .
    Much as in liberal economics, the metaphor of the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith (the self-regulating behavior of the marketplace which leads to social good) emerges in the human brain in the form of imponderable neural influences leading the individual to better adaptation to his environment. Just as innumerable motives move the participants in the marketplace to determine values and prices, innumerable neural influences, some unconscious or merely intuitive, move the individual to make personal decisions. Among those influences are not only the “animal spirits” of biological drive but also the principles of natural law etched in collective evolutionary memory. There are also the principles of esthetics, altruism, and creativity, which are etched in our individual memory by tradition, family, and education – in sum by culture. It is the aggregate of collective and individual memory that allows our prefrontal cortex to invent the future and to make it