I recently read a very interesting paper by Shadlen and colleagues, who discussed the neural correlates of decision making. In this paper they discussed the issue of responsibility: if our brain is fully deterministic, and our actions are governed by our brain, then can we said to be responsible for our actions? In particular, if there is a lot of noise in our brain, and that causes us to accidentally commit a negative action. So the question is: what are we to do?

Last week for me was a whirl-wind of emotions. I was getting ready for a conference, and at the same time had to deal with a co-author on a paper who kept wanting to change things (which involved me doing a lot more work in time that I simply did not have). In short, it was a great chance to work with my emotions. And today was the travel day to the conference, with the lovely surprise that someone decided to jump in front of the train, such that all trains were out of commission and I had to find another route to Berlin. Yet, surprisingly, after not dealing with the previous issues very elegantly, this last little bit of train delays did not disturb me majorly. At every road block (e.g., a bus driver driving very slowly although all passengers had a connection to catch on the other end) somehow there was a voice in me that said something about that all these feelings and emotions were just that: thoughts and emotions (and not atom bombs!).