Is it the neural system that shapes our futures?

Neurobiology is revealing the mechanisms that show who we are created: how we make decisions and control our emotions, how our genes shape our desires and how our personal futures are being shaped by a reward system that adapts in response to satisfying experiences.

Neuroscientists have found that maternal attachment is mediated by the peptide Oxytocin, released in the brains of both mother and child during lactation and cuddling. Oxytocin binds to neurons, and the reward pathways record and reinforce the interaction. Mate attachment in females is also mediated by Oxytocin and in males by a similar peptide, vasopressin. In other words, parts of our behavior are inevitable outcomes of neural-hormonal interactions.
As neuroscience discovers these and other mechanisms regulating choices and behavior, we may wonder whether anyone really chooses anything. In this case, answering this question "Is nature deterministic?". becomes more difficult than ever. Given that, I think that free will in its traditional concept should be re-examined again. Any statement on free will needs to be updated according to what we know today about our neural system. New descriptions will reflect our natural need for an effective definition of responsibility, especially in relation to building our preferred futures.

The concept of "free will" has historically been a source of controversy and different schools of thoughts have been developed by philosophers or the psychologists to account for it. With all of these schools, we can learn what a voluntary action means and what an obligatory one is. So we can never excuse Hitler as he was completely free no to commit those brutal actions, but there can be find always a pardon for a sleeping kid who wets his bed. Through such clichés, our brains manage to extract a meaning by which we can talk about free will.

Since personal futures are made by free will, it can be a turning point in understanding a voluntary process of making the future. Neuroscientists believe that self-control is mediated by pathways in the prefrontal cortex, shaped by structures regulating emotions and drives, and it matures as the organism develops. A person learns to inhibit self-defeating impulses, such as biting the mother when it should suck, grasping a burning ember or getting milk when the cows are angry.

Although little is known so far about the nature of these mechanisms, it has become clear that neurons are sensitive to rewards and punishments, on the generation of fear responses by neurons in the Amygdala, and on the response profiles of "decision" neurons in parietal regions of cortex when a person makes a choice after accumulating evidence. Riskier and more profitable exploratory decisions probably depend heavily on the prefrontal cortex. The mechanisms of this area may explain the decisions we make about our future.

The rewards and punishments we imagine as the result of our actions, shape our decisions and so our futures. In other words, we are naturally made so that we can calculate the consequences of our actions. In fact, the same attribute is being used in rewarding systems used for managing the staffs and the organizations.

Big organizations don't have a problem rewarding good decisions or punishing bad ones. In our personal lives, the story is different. While we often remember to punish ourselves for poor decisions, we sometimes forget to reward ourselves for good ones. Today's neuroscience findings tell us that rewarding ourselves when we make good decisions helps us build the capacity to make more good decisions. Did you make a good decision today? Give a gift to yourself and you'll be more likely to repeat the performance.