René Descartes believed that “I think therefore I am. ” However, the latest advances in cognitive informatics, cognitive science, and computational intelligence may reveal that, perhaps, we are not the master of our brains in many cases (ICIC, http://www.ucalgary.ca/icic/).
There are three categories of stimuli that drive the brain known as the external trigger events, emergent reflexive events, and internal emotional events. Almost all the events that drive the brain, particularly those in the first and second categories, are not controllable and predictable by an individual. Therefore, human brain and the thinking threads are not fully autonomous rather than event-driven in most of cases.
It is noteworthy that even a sequence of behaviors or actions are initiated autonomously by the mind, all the consequent actions in the sequence are passive, reflexive, and event-driven. For example, once a kid clicks an online game, although the first initiative is autonomous, all following consequences are passively driven by real-time events of the game. Therefore, in much of the time, the brain is a passive system driven by external or internal events rather than an autonomous system fully controlled by the owner.
This perhaps is a rational explanation for human behavioral addictions such as games and web surfing.
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