Gholipour pointed out in her article that what the readiness potential was was unknown. It appeared to be “the electrophysiological sign of planning and initiating an action.” Experiments by Benjamin Libet asked why it took “half a second or so between deciding to tap a finger and actually doing it?” He repeated the experiment of Kornhuber and Deecke with some methodological modifications. His results “showed that while the Bereitschafspotential started to rise about 500 milliseconds before the participants performed an action, they reported their decision to take that action only about 150 milliseconds beforehand. ‘The brain evidently decides to initiate the act’ before a person is even aware that decision has taken place, Libet concluded.” Free will was thus discounted, and dualism between the immaterial mind and the material synaptic networks of the brain was challenged.
Gholipour shared that it was possible that what Libet observed was accurate, but the question to be asked was “if the Bereitschafspotential didn’t cause actions in the first place?” Libet’s idea has been powerfully influential in neuroscience, and a real alternative had to be offered to dismantle it. In the next blog I will share Gholipour’s review of a 2010 study by Aaron Schurger that made such an offer. Read on.