Beyond Libet

Abstract

There has been a long debate on the existence of brain signals that precede the outcome of decisions even before subjects believe to be consciously making up their mind. The framework of multivariate decoding provides a novel tool for investigating such choice-predictive information contained in neural signals before decisions. New results show that the outcome of free choices between different plans can be read out of brain activity even several seconds before it is made. This suggests that an unconscious causal chain of events can occur outside subjective awareness before a subject makes up their mind. An important future line of research would be to develop paradigms that allow feedback of real-time predictions of future decisions to reveal whether such decisions can still be reverted. This would shed light on how tight the causal link is between early predictive brain signals and subsequent decisions.