In 1983 Benjamin Libet published an article in the magazine “Brain” that continues to spread shock waves to this day.

The American physiologist claimed that the decision to act is made in the brain before we are even aware of it.

In the experiment, Libet asked his test subjects to indicate with a wave of the hand when they would decide to act.

Lo and behold: the EEG showed unconscious brain signals about half a second beforehand, to which Libet ascribed a causal role.

The willingness potential was born.

Thomas Thiel

Editor in the features section.

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Since then, big questions have been linked to the term: Do humans have free will, or are we puppets of our brain? Would man have dignity if he had no moral choice? Would he be guilty? In the debate on free will, the Libet experiment played an important role. However, recent studies have shown that it is on shaky feet when it comes to the number of subjects. Others doubted that the exact point in time could be precisely determined in the case of complex decisions. Still others observed actions without prior readiness potential and readiness potentials without subsequent action. In 2012, the psychologist and neuroscientist Aaron Schurger showed in a widely acclaimed article that the decision-making process is based on undirected,random brain waves. In short: to this day nobody really knows what the readiness potential actually stands for.

Bojana Grujičić has read the relevant essays on the topic.

She wants to find out whether, in addition to the random brain waves, there is also a deterministic variable that causally prepares a decision.

It is difficult to imagine that deliberate action emerges from a completely undirected process.

The willingness potential could only be the last step in the decision-making process, is her hypothesis, which she is currently investigating at London University College with the neurophilosophist Phyllis Illari.

Get serious about interdisciplinarity

Bojana Grujičić started her doctorate two years ago at the Max Planck School of Cognition. It belongs to the first year of the graduate schools that started in 2019 and started with the immodest goal of raising German doctoral training to the highest international level and attracting the best young researchers from all over the world. Since then, there have been three such schools, in addition to the one for cognition, a second one for photonics and a third one for physical and chemical life processes. None of them have a fixed location, you have to imagine them as networks that connect a total of 27 universities and thirty non-university institutes, including two branches abroad: the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and the University College London.

Martin Stratmann, President of the Max Planck Society, came up with the idea that the structure of the schools should reflect academic excellence that, unlike in countries with elite universities, is not gathered in one place in Germany.

This also means that they have the task of bringing the universities together with the non-university institutes that are strong in research and of taking the much-demanded interdisciplinarity seriously.

Cognitive science is a good example of this.

It brings together philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, physicists, mathematicians and is increasingly attracting AI researchers.