One night on a 2008 vacation I had been reading Tor Norretrander’s book The User Illusion and I’ll be darned if my mind didn’t give me a concrete example of how the “half-second problem” works the very next morning!
First of all, what is the “half-second problem” anyway? It is from Benjamin Libet’s experiments with brains during surgery. It turns out, when you “decide” to, let’s say, wiggle your finger, it turns out that your brain demonstrates some activity consistently about one half second BEFORE you THINK you “decided” to wiggle your finger. In other words, this challenges our thought that we all have “free will” even in the most basic of decisions.
So, the morning after I am reading all this, I am sleeping and having one of those vivid early morning dreams about nothing in particular. All of a sudden, in the dream, I just instantly appear in a roller coaster car going over the top of a steep roller coaster peak, and lo and behold, about a HALF SECOND after I fly over that summit……my alarm clock goes off.
I believe that my “roller coaster ride” switch right before my alarm went off was the half-second since my mind actually “heard” the alarm, before my physical ears “heard” it a half-second later. Call me crazy! But I believe!
The Half-Second Problem – Or Is It?
