Readiness Potential

I always think there's something funny about neuroscientists trying to decide a question like "is there such a thing as conscious free will". They can't account, really, for consciousness itself, at least not yet, so how far can they get with "conscious free will". But back in the 80's a guy named Libet did some interesting experiments.

He gave people some decisions to make, and asked people to record the time when they decided them. He showed that there was a blip in the brain 550 milliseconds before a person was aware of deciding.

So he figured that blip, er, signal, was the real decision, occurring in some non-conscious way, and that the conscious mind became aware of the decision a teeny bit later and took credit for it.

This sort of fits the Freudian model. The id decides, the ego makes  up a reason for the id's dark doings.

But now... some other people ran some new experiments, which question whether that initial blip is really a secret decision or just the brain gearing up to decide.

"We argue that what looks like a pre-conscious decision process may not in fact reflect a decision at all. It only looks that way because of the nature of spontaneous brain activity."

There's many a slip
and maybe a blip
twixt the cup and the lip.