Benjamin Libet Free Will Experiment

Benjamin Libet’s free will experiment was an attempt to determine if humans have free will by measuring brain impulses compared to a subject’s determination of when he or she first wanted to act and the time it took the subject to act. The subject acted by bending his or her wrist. Libet wanted subjects to feel like they were in control and therefore did not attempt to force an action to occur. Brain impulses, initiated unconsciously, were recorded before the subject was initially aware of any intention to act. Libet called the measure of these brain impulses readiness potentials. He found that readiness potentials occurred around 350 milliseconds before the subject was first aware of a desire to act, preceding the act itself by about 550 milliseconds.
Given just this information alone, one might conclude that free will is a falsity because we can’t control these brain impulses. However, Libet also tasked subjects with reporting when a will to act was suppressed as the experiment continued. In these cases, where a will to act was not carried out, large reaction potentials still occurred. This indicates that the subjects were in fact preparing to act. One possible explanation that Libet proposed is that free will allows voluntary actions to proceed. This would make sense for the instances in which subjects vetoed acting, as impulses still occur but the action is not undertaken. However, Libet himself admits that this doesn’t seem very likely, as some acts are performed mindlessly without an individual’s conscious wish to do so. An example of this might be driving home from work and not remembering the car trip at all. This can happen when actions, like a car trip, are repeated with such frequency that it doesn’t take a conscious effort to succeed in doing