Libet, Benjamin

1. Entity type Person
2. Birth date 12 April 1916
3. Death date 23 July 2007
4. Birth place Chicago, Illinois, USA
5. Death place Davis, California
6. Gender Name Male
7. Biographical Data

   1. Libet was a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco during the latter half of the 20th century who did pioneering research on the neurobiology of consciousness.He was born on April 12^th, 1916 in Chicago, Illinois. He studied Physiology at the University of Chicago and graduated with a Ph.D. in Physiology in 1939. In 1979, Libet attempted his perhaps most ambitious, but certainly most spectacular trial to trace the unconditionally free will, unbound by matter or any other general framework. Specifically, Libet was interested in the correspondence of electrical signals from the brain (measured by electrodes taped to the intact scalp in awake volunteers) and the contents of consciousness. His most famous experiments involve measuring electrical activity in the brain when volunteers were asked to move their wrist. The volunteer would look at a moving clock and note the exact time (to the millisecond) that he consciously decided to move his wrist. Libet compared the timing of the brain activity with the timing of the volunteer’s decision to move. He consistently found that the brain activity (he called it the readiness potential) preceded the conscious awareness of a decision to move by a couple hundred milliseconds.

8. Electronic Location 19/01/2019