By Patrick Glover DETAILS A longstanding debate in philosophy focuses on the existence of free will. Do humans have some inherent moral agency, or are our brains just biological machines, subject to the same physical determinism as any other animal? Modern neuroscience can provide some insight to these questions, such as Benjamin Libet’s famous 1986 experiments that […]

Libet had the subjects view an oscilloscope with a dot rotating periodically in a circle, and subjects were asked to retroactively report where the dot was when they first became aware that they were about to perform the voluntary task. He could then calculate the average latency between when the subject reported awareness and when […]

It took a lot of tinkering, but I’ve finally performed the free will experiment using multiple electrodes on the scalp. The hardware setup was fairly simple. Take two more Heart/Brain shields, switch C7 for a 47µF cap on both, and stack them on top of the existing setup using headers. Make sure each shield has a […]

Now that I’ve got the ear clip unipolar EEG set up, I’m finally ready to record. I have my subject wear two headbands: one around the head like a normal sweatband and one under the chin and over C3 like in my previous experiments. I had to do a quick test to get the polarity […]

I had been searching for a readiness potential for weeks, trying to sift through noise two orders of magnitude louder than the signal itself, with little success. This morning Greg, my research mentor, pointed out that since I’m using a bipolar electrode EEG, the op-amp is only magnifying the difference between the two leads over […]

Many EEG experiments are done using 21 electrode helmets to gain better localization resolution. In our case, this will not be necessary. Since the secondary motor area generates the readiness potential, the strongest RP signal is found immediately over that region, contralateral to the side of the body performing the task. In our case, the […]