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who moved first

In 1983, Benjamin Libet asked volunteers to flick their wrist whenever they felt like it, and measured a brain signal called the readiness potential building for roughly half a second before they felt the urge to move — about a third of a second before the felt urge itself. It became one of neuroscience's most famous arguments that conscious choice arrives too late to be the real cause of your actions. That certainty hasn't held up cleanly since: a 2012 model showed ordinary background brain noise can produce the same rising signal with no decision behind it at all; a 2019 study found the signal nearly vanishes before meaningful choices, showing up clearly only before arbitrary ones; and a 2025 follow-up found the opposite pattern. Four decades on, whether the conscious "I" actually decides, or just narrates a choice already made elsewhere in the brain, remains a genuinely open question — not the settled case pop science often claims.