CogNation

Episode 22: The Neuroscience of Free Will: Guest Aaron Schurger

December 12th, 2019  |  Season 1  |  57 mins 12 secs

conscious will, consciousness, free will, libet, neuroscience, philosophy, schurger

Guest Dr. Aaron Schurger talks to us about his research on the meaning of the "readiness potential", which has been referred to as "the brain signature of the will". Although this neural signal was already famous from research in the 1960s, it was Benjamin Libet's infamous experiments in the 1980s that proportedly showed that the readiness potential preceded an act of free will by a few hundred milliseconds. More recently (in press), Dr. Schurger and his colleagues have convincingly demonstrated that the readiness potential is not in fact predictive of an act of free will, but instead comes from a lack of a proper experimental control.