Humans often take for granted that we are ultimately responsible for our actions, that the

choices we make are governed by nothing but our own free will.

To question free will is to question not only moral responsibility, but also the very

notion of the self. After all, if you take away our conscious agency, then who or what

exactly are we? If, for example, we take a Newtonian deterministic view of the universe

and accept the universe as a place in which every event is caused by a pre-existing set

of conditions that in turn result in predetermined actions, we would have to concede that free will

in the stricter sense is an impossibility. Our acts, as John Gray notes in his 2003 book

Straw Dogs, would be nothing but endpoints in long sequences of unconscious responses.

Intrigued by this idea, in 1980, neuroscientist Benjamin Labette devised an experiment to try

and determine whether our actions are conscious choices or not, with some surprising results.

In Labette's study titled Unconscious, A Rebral Initiative and the role of conscious will

in voluntary action, participants were first hooked up to an electroencephalogram or EEG

machine. The device uses electrodes placed directly on the scalp to measure communication

between brain cells. With this set up, the subjects were then tasked with carrying out

a simple function, such as pressing a button or flexing their wrist, while at the same time,

making a note of when they decided to carry out the action. After comparing the participants'

perception of when they decided to act, with the actual brain function instigating the act,

Labette and his team discovered that these seemingly voluntary choices were being initiated

up to 0.35 seconds before the subjects were aware of them. The implications of Labette's

findings were fiercely debated, with some suggesting that this small delay is just a period

of latency between the brain initiating the action and our actual conscious awareness

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