In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. The experiment’s results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world-when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph-but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action. The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps.
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