Priscella Long is disturbed by neuropsychologist Benjamin Libet’s experiment on human decision-making:
The decision was to move a hand. Each person was instructed to move his or her hand whenever the desire arose, to report the precise time this wish or intention to move the hand appeared, and then to go ahead and move the hand. Subjects sat in front of a clocklike face with a light going around like a minute hand, only faster, so that milliseconds could be reported.
The results had ominous suggestions for our idea of free will:
The [subjects’] decision to move the hand occurred in the following order. First neurons fired in the premotor cortex (neurons responsible for planning and executing hand motions). These neurons communicated to the motor cortex, which fired, sending instructions to the motor neurons in the spinal cord that make the muscles contract. At this point—and not before—the subject “decided” to move his or her hand. The “decision” to move the hand occurred before but extremely close to the time the hand moved, a long 350-400 milliseconds after the brain began the process of signaling the hand to move.
What are we to make of this? Is it me or my brain that decides things? [Author Christof] Koch writes, “At least in the laboratory, the brain decides well before the mind does; the conscious experience of willing a simple act—the sensation of agency or authorship—is secondary to the actual cause.”
The Dish 