The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner

when we have had time to consider the situation and get past the automatic reaction.
    What all this means is that consciousness is kind of a slug. This slowness suggests that consciousness might not be up to some of the kind of guidance activity that seems to be needed for the production of willed action. Now, of course, many of the speeded responses we’ve considered here are not ones usually classified as willed. The quick push of a response key in a reaction time task is certainly not the prototypical voluntary action because it is not spontaneous and is governed by the occurrence of an outside signal. However, it is instructive indeed that consciousness seems to follow these actions rather than lead them. At the extreme, it is possible to concur with Marc Jeannerod that “in conditions of normal execution [of action], there is usually no awareness of the con-tent of the representation at any level and no image is experienced. This is explained by the fact that motor imagery and execution have different time constants. Because imagery, unlike execution, implies subjective awareness, it takes longer to appear. If imagery actually occurred in conditions of normal execution, it would be delayed with respect to the corresponding action” (1995, 1429). We may think consciously about what we are doing, turning it over and over in our minds in advance of our action, but it may be that this conscious image we develop is in fact too slow to run concurrently with many of our fast, reactive actions as they happen.
    9 . There has been controversy about just how to establish that something is not conscious, as it could just be that the prime word is gaining access to a tiny bit of consciousness (once every few trials, for instance), and so achieving its effect on just a small (but significant) proportion of responses. The battle right now is leaning toward those who believe the evidence does favor preconscious processing, but stay tuned (Greenwald and Draine 1997; Holender 1986; Merikle and Joordens 1997).
    Consciousness and action seem to play a cat-and-mouse game over time. Although we may be conscious of whole vistas of action before the doings get underway, it is as though the conscious mind then slips out of touch. A microanalysis of the time interval before and after action indicates that consciousness pops in and out of the picture and doesn’t really seem to do anything. The Libet research, for one, suggests that when it comes down to the actual instant of a spontaneous action, the experience of consciously willing the action occurs only after the RP signals that brain events have already begun creating the action (and probably the intention and the experience of conscious will as well). And the studies of the automaticity of fast reactions, in turn, suggest that conscious mental processes regularly follow rather than lead actions that are quick responses to environmental cues. In the case of reactive responses, knowing what we have done and what stimulated our doing is only a luxury we achieve some milliseconds after action.
    The Missing Lightbulb
    The search for where and when the will appears in the course of action has led us in a number of different directions. Unfortunately, none of these sorties has resulted in the discovery of the lightbulb we were looking for at the beginning of the chapter. It has taken a whole lot of scientists to try to screw in this particular lightbulb, and so far we are all still in the dark.
    We do know where the lightbulb isn’t. Apparently, we cannot yet trace the experience of will to any particular signal in the nervous system— from brain to body, or from body to brain. The research on the experience of muscle effort indicates that a variety of different systems can participate in the creation of the sense of effort, and the phantom limb research points to the further idea that one system may stand in for another (vision can substitute for muscle sense, for example) in creating the