Benjamin Libet

Oh, that is the center of the controversy.

To understand this, we have to travel back to the 1980s, to Benjamin Libet's lab.

The Libet experiments.

Right.

Libet set up an experiment that dropped a bomb on the concept of free will, and the scientific community is still dealing with the fallout.

Walk us through that setup, because it's iconic in neuroscience.

It's brilliant in its simplicity.

Picture yourself as the participant.

Does free will actually exist? Well, tonight we're going to find out just how difficult it is to answer that question when we cannot even agree on who is doing the choosing.

In the early 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet asked volunteers to do something almost absurdly simple.

Just sit still, watch a clock, and whenever you feel like it, move your wrist.

There wasn't any countdown or signal, or no one telling you when to do it.

But experiments suggest otherwise.

In the 1980 AEs, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet found that electrical activity in the brain, a readiness potential, appeared hundreds of milliseconds before subjects reported making a decision.

This implies that the brain begins preparing an action before you are aware of choosing it.

Later studies have even predicted decisions seconds before they reach conscious awareness.

named

Benjamin Libet.

He conducted experiments involving voluntary movement.

Participants were asked to make simple movements whenever they felt like doing so, while researchers measured electrical activity associated with movement preparation in the brain.

If the interpreter module is constantly spinning stories to explain actions after they happen, it challenges the deeply held intuition that our conscious self is the author initiating the action.

We have to look at the work of neurobiologist Benjamin Libet in the 1980s.

Oh, I know Libet's experiments.

They are basically the boogeyman for anyone defending free will.