> From: "Crumley, Donna" <dhc195@soton.ac.uk>
> Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 14:43:14 +0100 (BST)
>
> Libet was interested in the association between the timing of
> corresponding mental and physical events. He did experiments to find
> out if people's will to move came before or after their readiness to
> move. He asked participants to move their arm whenever they wanted to
> and also to say at what point a dot was at on a clock face when they
> made the 'conscious decision' to move. He found however that there was
> a dissociation between the timing of the corresponding 'mental' and
> 'physical' events. The 'conscious decision' lagged between 350 and 400
> msec behind the onset of 'readiness potentials'. The readiness
> potential was found by recording scalp electrodes which tap the neural
> events which determine the voluntary actions performed. These results
> seem to suggest that ones conscious might lag behind the brain
> processes that control ones body, which when you think about it is
> quite a logical conclusion especially as there is very little evidence
> to suggest that consciousness is a cause.
> Libet himself concludes that:
> "Cerebal initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act begins
> unconsciously".
For an A, go into more depth on consciousness and causality:
relate to the movement/telekinesis issue, and reverse engineering
in general.
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