An Existential Life

In the 1980s, neuroscientists studying the brain processes underlying out sense of conscious will compared subjects’ judgments regarding their subjective will to move (W)  an actual movement (M) with objective electroencepalographic activity called readiness potential, or RP. As expected, W preceded M: subjects consciously perceived the intention to move as preceding a conscious experience of actual moving. This might seem to suggest an appropriate correspondence between the sequence of subjective experiences and the sequence of underlying events in the brain. But researches actually found a surprising temporal relation between subjective experience an objectively measured neural events: in direct contradiction of the classical conception of free will, neural preparation to move (RP) preceded conscious awareness of the intention to move (W) by hundreds of milliseconds.