This stuff is really interesting and really important.  I love neuroscience, and I’m fascinated by the chemical and biological bases of our actions, thoughts, and emotions.

“The central issue is quite simple. If we want to do something, and we decide not to, how does that brain wire that?” said Rajesh Miranda, associate professor of neuroscience and experimental therapeutics at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine. “They showed the region in the brain that can act as a gate to suppress a plan to do something,” said Miranda, who was not involved in the research.

Here’s what’s tricky though: biological explanations should not come to mean biological determinism.

But what does that even mean?  After all, if we are just bodies, isn’t everything, ultimately, biologically determined?  Isn’t free will, as this article posits, just something in the brain?

Yes.  It is.  But just because the mechanics of what we do is in the brain, and the impulses are ultimately chemicals, and the urges are hormones–that doesn’t mean that we’re not still choosing what we choose.  Even if our choices are limited, marginal, less-relevant-than-we-had-believed, they’re still our choices.

I believe we’re still free.  Even if only a little bit.