Gholipour identified the two German scientists who discovered the readiness potential, or Bereitschaftspotential. They are Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Luder Deecke. “Over lunch in 1964, the pair decided that they would figure out how the brain works to spontaneously generate an action. ‘Kornhuber and I believed in free will,’ says Deecke.” In my research I am seeking to identify how the intention of an immaterial mind generates encoded spike trains of action potentials that are transmitted with specified information through neural synaptic networks to “generate an action.”
Kornhuber and Deecke devised an experiment utilizing a computer to measure their participants’ brain waves that worked only after it detected a finger tap. They recorded the brain activity separately on tapes and played the reels backwards into the computer. This technique is referred to as reverse-averaging, and it revealed the readiness potential, or Bereitschaftspotential. “John Eccles and . . . Karl Popper compared the study’s ingenuity to Galileo’s use of sliding balls for uncovering the laws of motion of the universe.” So the question is, what IS the readiness potential and is it related to free will? Read on.