The book is a collection of essays from various scholars who research or think about agency. Agency in psychology and philosophy is the ability of the agent to carry out actions and control their outcomes. Therefore, the sense of agency is the 'feeling' that I am the agent of my actions; I produce and control my actions. Some disorders, such as schizophrenia, exhibit symptoms connected with the loss or impairment of sense of agency. Additionally, empirical research and theoretical speculations about agency relate to the fields of ethics and AI. 

I didn’t have a particular interest in any of the chapters in the book, so I read them all. Some were written in very clear language, and some were difficult to churn. Possibly, those chapters that were easy to read are empirical research. However, many things I found interesting. 

Anthony Marcel speaks about how an accurate observation of movement can be just an accurate observation of an intention to move. It means that, probably, if we are aware that we are moving, in reality, we are aware that we wanted to move, and the action itself is outside of our awareness. He goes further by pointing out that our sense of ownership is connected with the fact that our awareness of action is non-observational. A particularly interesting case arises when a pathological disownership of action occurs; in this case, the person's awareness of action becomes observational. One of the examples of pathological disownership is the anarchic hand illusion. Patients suffering from anarchic hand would have one of their hands perform actions on its own; it may unbutton a shirt when another hand tries to button it, and it may even go and pick food from someone’s plate. Patients would describe these actions as not theirs and would attempt to stop the hand from engaging in obnoxious behaviour. The anarchic hand illusion is often accompanied by lesions of the supplementary motor area (SMA).

Patrick Haggard, in his chapter, discusses several experiments of his own. Before the movement, there is a distinct preparatory activity in a person’s brain called the readiness potential. The readiness potential is an unfolding process that lasts over 2 seconds. It means that movement doesn't come abruptly, but rather is preceded by the preparation of several stages. Using this potential, Partick Haggard was able to disentangle the pre-assembled motor commands (that are sent to muscles) and the preparatory pre-motor processes (that generate the pre-assembling of motor commands). It turned out that awareness of the movement is produced by the latter, not the former. In another elegant experiment, he used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on participants executing a simple movement. TMS is a method of disturbing processing in particular brain areas with a short but powerful magnetic field. In this experiment, it was shown that the motor cortex and SMA are responsible for different stages of action. TMS on the motor cortex causes delays in the reaction times, such as if the assembled motor command was destroyed. Conversely, TMS on SMA cause delays in awareness of the movement. Therefore, awareness of the movement happens before the movement onset and depends on SMA. Collectively, these experiments suggest against illusionism about intentions to move (the notion that the brain makes a movement and then feeds back sensory information to conscious awareness to produce a feeling of ownership).

Overall, I should say that the book is fairly technical. Especially, chapters written by philosophers were slow reads. If you happen to come across this book, I would suggest reading the first chapter, where the editors describe the contents of each of the following chapters, and then reading whatever you like.

Memorable quote “Ordinarily you are aware of what you are doing without inference, and without any room for the possibility of error through misindentification”

October, 2023