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People are normally encouraged to engage in premeditation—to think about the potential consequences of their behavior before acting. Indeed, planning, considering, and studying can be important precursors to decision-making, and often seem essential for effective action. This view of premeditation is shared by most humans, a kind of universal ideal, and it carries an additional interesting implication: Even the hint that premeditation occurred can serve as a potent cue indicating voluntary action, both to actors and observers. In legal and moral contexts, for example, actors are seen as especially culpable for the consequences of their actions if those consequences were premeditated, whether or not the premeditation influenced the decision. In this chapter, we review evidence indicating that even irrelevant premeditation can lead people to believe that an action's consequences were under personal control. We present research exploring how various forms of premeditation—including foresight, effortful forethought, wishful thinking, and the consideration of multiple possible outcomes of action—may lead actors to prefer and to feel responsible for action outcomes even when this premeditation has no causal relation to the outcomes.

There has been evidence for understanding the effects of ideomotor action for over 150 years. Yet, the phenomenon remains surprisingly unknown, even to most scientists. This ignorance contributes to embarrassing examples of otherwise competent scientists supporting invalid and dangerous systems such as applied kinesiology, facilitated communication and therapeutic touch. This chapter cites some features that characterise nearly all the systems involving ideomotor action, including projections of the operator's actions onto an external force; delusions of grandeur; delusions of persecution; and self-sealing belief systems.

Amy Sequenzia is a non-speaking autistic woman with cerebral palsy and seizure disorder, but the last thing she needs is your pity and the last thing she wants is to be your “inspiration.” Amy is proud of who she is: a writer, an activist, a difference maker. And she is also proudly autistic, to the point that when asked, “If you could wave a magic wand and make your autism ‘disappear,’ would you?” she replies, “I would break the wand before anyone could wave it.” Amy has synesthesia and experiences music as color. Music also enables her to experience bodily sensations that she claims would otherwise be unavailable to her. “I am usually not very aware of my body,” she writes. “To simply get up from a chair is sometimes hard, as if my body forgets how to move . . . . So when I feel the music inside my body, when I feel my blood running with the music, it is an amazing thing.”