Neural substrates underlying decision making based on free will

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The brain has an ability to access to various processing in the brain and to manipulate it in top-down manner. The ability of human being is overwhelming relative to the other animals both in quantitative and qualitative aspects. I hypothesized an existence of 'free will' and studied how top-down signals come into effect in the process of decision making. I applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the human prefrontal cortex and evaluated dynamics of effective connectivity from the prefrontal cortex. We found a change in TMS-EP dependent of task difficulty and behavioral performance. The results suggest that the efficiency of signal transmission from the prefrontal cortex changes dynamically depending on the strength of bottom-up signals.