Libet discovered that people became aware of an urge to move about a quarter of a second before they actually made the move. But that wasn’t the surprising part. He examined their EEG recordings—the brain waves—and found something more surprising: the activity in their brains began to rise before they felt the urge to move. And not just by a little bit. By over a second. (See figure on the following page.) In other words, parts of the brain were making decisions well before the person consciously experienced the urge.14 Returning to the newspaper analogy of consciousness, it seems that our
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