Who's responsible for 'free will?' Reminding you that all ideas were once new
A figure adapted from Soon, Brass, Heinze and Haynes' 2008 fMRI study where a "free decision" could be predicted above chance 7 seconds before it was consciously "felt." Those green globs could be thought of as the unconscious part of your brain that is actually in control of your life. Image here , paper here As seen previously on this blog , the notion of "Free Will" is a bit of a Neuroethics battleground. About 30 years ago, Dr. Benjamin Libet et. al. published an experiment where the researchers were able to predict when human volunteers would press a button- a fraction of a second before the participants themselves realized they were going to do so. And despite suggestions that the scientific method is breaking down , there is an entire cottage industry of scientists replicating Libet's result and finding more and more effectiv...