Benjamin Libet

Now, neuroscience has studied the relationship between brain activity, conscious intentions, and voluntary movements for decades.

You might have heard of Libet's experience, right? Benjamin Libet's experience in those experiments.

Researchers observed certain patterns of brain activity preceding participants reported awareness of intending to make those movements.

So it'd be like saying that before I intend to move my arm, my brain is already moving my arm.

But what's amazing is as it does this, it makes my ideas way more articulate and well said in a way that I couldn't do it, at least not for an academic purpose.

book and it'll come back and it says, you know, your methodology is supported by like the work of Benjamin Libet, you know, a neuroscientist or, you know, it'll tell me stuff I had no idea about.

It

knows stuff I don't know.

So those of you who have heard it, just bear with us.

The scientific research started back in 1983 with a psychologist named Benjamin Libet who ran some experiments where he actually determined that intention lags decision.

Now, what does that mean? That means, let's say I have a plate of cookies in front of me and I decide whether or not I'm going to take a cookie.

And then I take the cookie or I don't take the cookie.

But what if I told you that free will is a myth? That we were all just a group of atoms who will react to a particular stimulus in a way that can be predetermined? If you picked a banana at the beginning of the video and we go back in time, if free will truly exists, you should be able to change your mind and pick the apple instead.

But what if I told you that if we go back in time under the exact same circumstances, you'll pick the banana again? What if I told you that I can actually tell which of these two options you're going to pick 300 milliseconds before you actually pick it, with 100% accuracy? In the 1980s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist, used an EEG, an electroencephalogram, to show that you can read and tell that somebody is about to move, 300 milliseconds before they decide in their conscious mind to actually move.

This means that before we decide that we want to move our bodies, it's already been decided for us in our subconscious, and we only think that we made the decision ourselves after it's already been made.

In a similar study, participants were asked to press one of the two buttons while looking at a clock with a random sequence of letters on a screen.

That is the assumption we literally all live by.

But when the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet ran this exact experiment back in, uh, 1983, I think-

Yep, 1983.

Yeah.

Free will is an illusion.

But Dr. Benjamin Libet's experiments show that humans do have free will.

At least the free will to say no.

About perhaps half a second before you decide to do something, there's a spike in your brain that he called the readiness potential.

Free will is an illusion.

That our material brain just sort of makes the decision and we kind of think that we decided, but we didn't.

Libet didn't agree with that.

He asked for the subjects to do something more.

Let’s keep the stupid train rolling.

Some of the most fascinating work in neuroscience has been the work of Benjamin Libet, who, uh, was a neuroscientist, uh, in California, uh, back in the mid-20th century.

Libet was fascinated by the correlation in time between thought and brain activity.

And he did a, a whole series of experiments in which he would place electrodes on the scalp of patients or people, and he would ask them to, um, make decisions or think about things.

And he would attempt to time the moment when they made a decision, when they thought about something, and correlate the moment they thought about something with a the moment that there was a change in the brainwave activity.

And he did a number of different experiments.

One experiment has become very famous, and ironically has been used by materialists to support materialism, although an understanding of what Libet actually found is quite the opposite.

It refutes materialism.

a very good place to start.

Because a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet essentially dragged this concept of free will out of the armchair and well, strapped it into a laboratory chair.

He really brought empirical, measurable science into the debate in a way that had literally never been done before.

Right.

We have covered a monumental amount of ground today.

We really have.

We started in a 1983 laboratory with Benjamin Libet's 350 millisecond gap confronting the terrifying idea that the brain decides before the conscious mind even knows.

A huge moment.

This is neuroscientist Uri Maoz from Chapman University in the US.

He's talking about a study that was done by a neuroscientist called Benjamin Libet.

Libet monitored people's brains to measure something called the readiness potential.

The readiness potential is a buildup of electrical activity that happens in your brain before you decide to move.