> They find that when you perform an action, there is a EEG spike [2] in the motor cortex well before you actually consciously decide to perform the action.
No, that's not what they find. What they find is that the time of the change in EEG (it's not really a "spike", it's more like the leading edge of an increased action potential that lasts for a significant time) is a few tenths of a second before the time that the subject reports as the time they "made the decision". But you can't assume that the time the subject reports is "the time they made the decision", because the process of generating the conclusion "this is when I decided to act" also takes time--and that time was not measured. All you can really conclude from this experiment is that people are not consciously aware of all of the neural processes that actually go into their making a conscious decision.
Actually, this explains a feeling I've been having lately. In various occasions where I have to randomly pick between some things, I choose X but I can somehow feel that the actual choice happened a tiny fraction of a second before I was actually aware of it (kind of a contradiction, but I can't explain it better).
Basically, it feels like the decision was made a tiny bit earlier than "I" made it.
No, that's not what they find. What they find is that the time of the change in EEG (it's not really a "spike", it's more like the leading edge of an increased action potential that lasts for a significant time) is a few tenths of a second before the time that the subject reports as the time they "made the decision". But you can't assume that the time the subject reports is "the time they made the decision", because the process of generating the conclusion "this is when I decided to act" also takes time--and that time was not measured. All you can really conclude from this experiment is that people are not consciously aware of all of the neural processes that actually go into their making a conscious decision.