The results told an unambiguous story. The beginning of the readiness potential precedes the conscious decision to move by at least half a second, and often by much longer. The brain acts before the mind decides! This was a complete reversal of the deeply held intuition of mental causation—the brain and the body act only after the mind has willed it. That is why this experiment was, and remains, controversial. But it has been repeated and refined over the intervening years—a brain-imaging version of the experiment was in the news recently—and its basic conclusion stands.
