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They had a state-of-the-art computer to measure their participants’ brain waves, but it worked only after it detected a finger tap. To pull off their experiment, the duo had to come up with tricks to circumvent limited technology.
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“Kornhuber and I believed in free will,” says Deecke, who is now 81 and lives in Vienna. Over lunch in 1964, the pair decided that they would figure out how the brain works to spontaneously generate an action. The two German scientists who discovered it, a young neurologist named Hans Helmut Kornhuber and his doctoral student Lüder Deecke, had grown frustrated with their era’s scientific approach to the brain as a passive machine that merely produces thoughts and actions in response to the outside world. If anything, it was pursued to show that the brain has a will of sorts. The Bereitschaftspotential was never meant to get entangled in free-will debates. But the story of the Bereitschaftspotential has one more twist: It might be something else entirely. It would be quite an achievement for a brain signal 100 times smaller than major brain waves to solve the problem of free will. Libet’s work is frequently brought up by popular intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari to argue that science has proved humans are not the authors of their actions. It’s covered by mainstream journalism outlets, including This American Life, Radiolab, and this magazine.
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Today, the notion that our brains make choices before we are even aware of them will now pop up in cocktail-party conversation or in a review of Black Mirror. And over time, the implications have been spun into cultural lore. His finding set off a new surge of debate in science and philosophy circles. But Libet introduced a genuine neurological argument against free will. Suddenly, people’s choices-even a basic finger tap-appeared to be determined by something outside of their own perceived volition.Īs a philosophical question, whether humans have control over their own actions had been fought over for centuries before Libet walked into a lab.
Twenty years later, the American physiologist Benjamin Libet used the Bereitschaftspotential to make the case not only that the brain shows signs of a decision before a person acts, but that, incredibly, the brain’s wheels start turning before the person even consciously intends to do something. This momentous discovery was the beginning of a lot of trouble in neuroscience. For the first time, they could see the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement. This flurry of neuronal activity, which the scientists called the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, was like a gift of infinitesimal time travel. In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. The experiment’s results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves.
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At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world-when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph-but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action. The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps.