Brain Scanner Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them
wired.com
wired.com
Money quote: "Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.
Most of the work has already been done, eh? So long, free will.
"Better still, check out Grey Walter's precognitive carousel projector experiments. He implanted electrodes in patients' heads, and gave them a slideshow to watch, with a button to push to advance to the next slide. But the button was fake. What really moved the slide was a motor potential building in the brain before they were aware of the desire to move it. It unnerved the patients, because it seemed to them as if the projector was always advancing just before they'd consciously decided to advance it."
" Also many said that they had not yet decided to change the picture, but were just about to make that decision. These findings were replicated by German researchers, who found the time delay between the brain trigger and subject awareness that a decision had been made, to be between 0.5 to 1.0 seconds
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The results here however, indicate that the self-aware part of thought is only informed of a decision after it has actually been made by unconscious processes. Your mind has made a decision before it lets you know what it is, (the precognitive carousel manages to bypass the inbuilt delay necessary to maintain the illusion of free will)."