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Brainwaves And Intentions: The Readiness Potential And Its Relation To Free Will, Joanna Pak, Aaron Schurger, Adina Roskies, Pengbo Hu
Brainwaves And Intentions: The Readiness Potential And Its Relation To Free Will, Joanna Pak, Aaron Schurger, Adina Roskies, Pengbo Hu
SURF Posters and Papers
First discovered in 1965 by Kornhuber and Deecke, the readiness potential (RP) is a distinctive buildup of neural activity in motor areas of the brain that begins ~500 ms before voluntary movements. In 1983, Libet used the RP as the foundation for his argument against the existence of conscious free will. This argument became known as the classic model of the RP, which interprets the RP as a precursor to the conscious experience of volition and a quantifiable representation of unconscious brain activity preceding spontaneous movements. Although the classic model connected the RP to free will, the significance of the …