Wired brings you: Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them.

My first reaction after the article was: why wouldn’t brain scans show your decisions before they actually happen? Isn’t it simply logical: somewhere the decision is made, then the decision cascades to all the subsystems (like those moving the muscles) which actually execute the action. Since the signal propagation in a neuron incurs a delay, signal propagation through many neurons incurs a longer delay. So when you actually decide to do something, time passes, and then your decision happens. Sounds OK, right?

However, in this case the delay from inception to action was quite long, like 7 seconds. And the perceived decision point was around 2 seconds or so. Therefore the issue is not quite as clear-cut as one would think!

Unlike the article suggests, I don’t think that this experiment speaks against free will. One could, after all, interpret the results in this way: something exercises free will, but that something which exercises free will is not the high-level conscious “you” (which you usually consider to be you), but is instead something much more deeper. Maybe conscious choice is not an illusion, but we might need to re-think consciousness instead.

Or maybe there’s something wrong with our internal perceptions. When did the test subjects decide to perceive (or “feel”) the decision to push the button - wouldn’t that be somehow visible as well?