Japanese researchers are able to do this about 25% of the time:-http://techxplore.com/news/2016-01-decipher-words-mind-spoken.html-" The team in Japan enlisted the assistance of 12 volunteers of various ages, asking each to undergo EEG scans while they thought about words and then spoke them out loud. The initial stages resulted in the buildup of brain patterns in a database—later, as each person recited words, the researchers read their brain waves to see if they could identify the words they were about to speak by comparing current brain wave patterns with those in the database. Similar research has been done before, but this time, the researchers looked specifically at brain waves emanating from the Broca area—which is a part of the brain where formation of words occurs before they are sent to other parts of the brain that are used to actually speak them. By limiting the vocabulary, the researchers found they could correctly interpret the words a person was about to speak (up to 2 seconds beforehand), approximately 25 percent of the time. They also found they could up that percentage to near 90 percent if they focused instead on just (Japanese) characters, or syllables.-***-"The paper noted that the research benefited by using Japanese speaking volunteers, because every character in that language has a vowel in it—the lack of them in many western language, it has been noted, has been making it more difficult for researchers in the field working with volunteers who speak in English, for example."-Comment: The two-second gap involves thinking of the word and then speaking it.

I'm not sure the conclusions of this study are valid. My choosing a product in a store are not the same as trying to choose which circle will turn red:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/what-neuroscience-says-about-free-will/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20160429-"In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago, the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to think we made a choice when we actually didn't or think we made a different choice than we actually did.-"But there's a mystery here. Suppose, as Wegner and Wheatley propose, that we observe ourselves (unconsciously) perform some action, like picking out a box of cereal in the grocery store, and then only afterwards come to infer that we did this intentionally. If this is the true sequence of events, how could we be deceived into believing that we had intentionally made our choice before the consequences of this action were observed? This explanation for how we think of our agency would seem to require supernatural backwards causation, with our experience of conscious will being both a product and an apparent cause of behavior.-***-
"In one of our studies, participants were repeatedly presented with five white circles in random locations on a computer monitor and were asked to quickly choose one of the circles in their head before one lit up red. If a circle turned red so fast that they didn't feel like they were able to complete their choice, participants could indicate that they ran out of time. Otherwise, they indicated whether they had chosen the red circle (before it turned red) or had chosen a different circle. We explored how likely people were to report a successful prediction among these instances in which they believed that they had time to make a choice.-"Unbeknownst to participants, the circle that lit up red on each trial of the experiment was selected completely randomly by our computer script. Hence, if participants were truly completing their choices when they claimed to be completing them—before one of the circles turned red—they should have chosen the red circle on approximately 1 in 5 trials. Yet participants' reported performance deviated unrealistically far from this 20% probability, exceeding 30% when a circle turned red especially quickly. This pattern of responding suggests that participants' minds had sometimes swapped the order of events in conscious awareness, creating an illusion that a choice had preceded the color change when, in fact, it was biased by it.-***-"In fact, the people who showed our time-dependent illusion were often completely unaware of their above-chance performance when asked about it in debriefing after the experiment was over. Moreover, in a related experiment, we found that the bias to choose correctly was not driven by confusion or uncertainty about what was chosen: Even when participants were highly confident in their choice, they showed a tendency to “choose” correctly at an impossibly high rate.-"Taken together, these findings suggest that we may be systematically misled about how we make choices, even when we have strong intuitions to the contrary. Why, though, would our minds fool us in such a seemingly silly way in the first place? Wouldn't this illusion wreak havoc on our mental lives and behavior? -"Maybe not. Perhaps the illusion can simply be explained by appeal to limits in the brain's perceptual processing, which only messes up at the very short time scales measured in our (or similar) experiments and which are unlikely to affect us in the real world.-"The illusion may only apply to a small set of our choices that are made quickly and without too much thought. Or it may be pervasive and ubiquitous—governing all aspects of our behavior, from our most minute to our most important decisions. Most likely, the truth lies somewhere in between these extremes. Whatever the case may be, our studies add to a growing body of work suggesting that even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong."-Comment: This study at guessing the red dot illustrates the authors' doubting comments more than something positive. I still think my choice of a cereal is not the same at guessing a red dot against time. The brain does have a reaction time deficit biologically and we know consciousness automatically fills in for the gaps in time. Tricking the brain is well known. I'm not sure what this proves, but it is interesting.

A new article with new studies:

https://mindmatters.ai/2019/09/was-famous-old-evidence-against-free-will-just-debunked/

"In recent decades, debates about free will have always included discussion of Benjamin Libet’s “no free will but maybe free won’t” position, an (at best) minimized version of free will. But recent research suggests that the original experiment had a fatal error.

"As recounted at The Atlantic by Bahar Gholipour, the story begins in 1964, when two German scientists at the University of Freiburg monitored electrical activity in the brains of twelve study subjects every day for several months, via wires fixed to their scalps:

"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. The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. 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.

"They found that the brain waves “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.” This Bereitschaftspotential, or “readiness potential,” was recorded before the participants flexed their fingers.

"Two decades later, Libet (1916–2007) took that timing to mean that the decision to flex a finger had been made before participants were conscious of it. In other words, the participants did not really make the decision; their conscious experience of making a decision was an illusion.

***

"But Libet looked deeper. He asked his subjects to veto their decision immediately after they made it—to not push the button. Again, the readiness potential appeared a half-second before conscious awareness of the decision to push the button, but Libet found that the veto—he called it “free won’t”—had no brain wave corresponding to it.

"The brain, then, has activity that corresponds to a pre-conscious urge to do something. But we are free to veto or accept this urge. The motives are material. The veto, and implicitly the acceptance, is an immaterial act of the will.

***

"The problem is, Gholipour recounts, readiness potentials are not quite what Libet thought:
In 2010, Aaron Schurger had an epiphany. As a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, Schurger studied fluctuations in neuronal activity, the churning hum in the brain that emerges from the spontaneous flickering of hundreds of thousands of interconnected neurons. This ongoing electrophysiological noise rises and falls in slow tides, like the surface of the ocean—or, for that matter, like anything that results from many moving parts. “Just about every natural phenomenon that I can think of behaves this way", Schurger says.

"The Bereitschaftspotential does not necessarily signal the brain’s “brewing intention” but a noise wave pattern in a busy system:

To decide when to tap their fingers, the participants simply acted whenever the moment struck them. Those spontaneous moments, Schurger reasoned, must have coincided with the haphazard ebb and flow of the participants’ brain activity. They would have been more likely to tap their fingers when their motor system happened to be closer to a threshold for movement initiation.

"In short, the classical pattern can be accounted for by assuming that the participants in the experiment did not sense that their decision mattered, so they went with the flow. But, according to more recent research, the subjective experience of making a decision is not an illusion at all. It is our experience of the actual moment when we finally decide to jump off the high diving board or ask for a raise.

***

"These observations point to a fundamental paradox about consciousness. We have the strong impression that we choose when we do and don’t act and, as a consequence, we hold people responsible for their actions. Yet many of the ways we encounter the world don’t require any real conscious processing, and our feeling of agency can be deeply misleading.

"If our experience of action doesn’t really affect what we do in the moment, then what is it for? Why have it? Contrary to what many people believe, I think agency is only relevant to what happens after we act – when we try to justify and explain ourselves to each other." (my bold)

Commemt: Libet did not interpret correctly. The bold considers agency a feeling after we act. That sounds correct to me.

A psychiatrist takes a slightly different approach: - https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/neuraptitude/201608/illusion-choice-the-myth-free-... - "Merriam-Webster's Dictionary1 defines free will as “the ability to choose how to act.” The notion of free will is encapsulated in your subjective experience of having consciously chosen either the left or the right eye to wink. Although the existence of free will is treated as a self-evident fact by most, neuroscientific research suggests that there may be a more complex explanation to your wink and to the notion of free will than there appears at first glance. - *** - "Findings from Libet's experiment demonstrated that the conscious experience of having chosen a particular arm to raise occurred nearly 500 milliseconds after neural mechanisms involved in arm raising had already begun the process. - "Haggard and Eimer3 updated this experimental design and showed that the conscious experience of having initiated a voluntary action coincided not with the neural preparation for the action, but instead occurred later during the actual execution of the action. In other words, Haggard and Eimer showed that your brain chose which eye to wink before both your eye winked and before you had the conscious experience of having made a choice between left and right. - "Finally, in a similar experimental design Soon et al. used fMRI technology to predict a participant's action a staggering 8 seconds before an action was performed. - "Does all of this mean that we don't have any free will? Not necessarily. - "In his 2008 article in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. Patrick Haggard5 suggested that the same neural networks involved in planning motor actions may also “plan” the experience of conscious intention. In our eye wink scenario, Dr. Haggard's theory would suggest that the conscious experience of free will is the contemporary of the physical wink and not the initial choice of laterality. - *** - "Because the choice of which eye to wink was largely arbitrary, your choice of left or right was likely a result of baseline random neural activity or maybe a habitual preference for laterality (maybe you most frequently wink with your right eye). - *** - "Let's imagine for a moment that you did in fact go on to wink with your right eye. In that case, the pre-SMA and its associated structures generated both the neurological map for the planned movement (winking your right eye) and the outline of the conscious experience of intention (“I did this”). This information was then communicated to the motor cortex as well as to parts of the prefrontal cortex.6 - "The prefrontal cortex used this behavioral map to predict an expected action (“I'm going to wink my right eye”), while the motor cortex signaled the right eyelid to close and open. Your somatosensory cortex then received feedback from the body indicating that the predicted action had indeed occurred. - "It is at this point that you have the conscious experience of, “I chose to wink with my right eye.” The human brain is a logical machine and it seeks to establish linear causation regardless of the temporal reality. The fact that your prediction aligned with the actual action is interpreted by your brain to mean that your conscious thought caused the action. In reality, your thought, “I chose to wink my right eye,” is nothing more than a retroactive inference generated in an attempt to transmute a largely unconscious process into a conscious one. - "Obviously, the decision to wink is far more complex when viewed through the eyes of a neuroscientist. But does any of this science matter if our subjective experience tells us that we are making a conscious, free choice? - "I would suggest that the truth of our neural inner workings offers significant advantage over a blind faith in a linear notion of free will. We too often treat reality as an immovable fact. It is as if the world were ice and we were unable to see the liquid state inherent to its form. - "Reality is as flexible and as pliable as the mind that we use to perceive it. The self-doubts, anxieties, and judgments that so often dominate our consciousness can be restructured using the same mental tools that our brain employs to retroactively insert the perception of free will." - Comment: Note he does not say there is no free will. Instead he says the brain creates a linear sense of direct causation, which is not really direct. It cannot be direct because it is a biological organ functioning at our behest, and it gears up in various regions antecedently, to do the job required by our direct intention.