Brain activity before we have new thoughts...

Factual Questions
1

Hi,
I’ve heard a few claims that there is brain activity that happens before we become aware of a new thought… so first there is subconscious processing, then we are conscious of a new thought.

I think there was an experiment where people had to press a button whenever they felt like it, and there was brain activity a few hundred milliseconds before they pressed the button…

But maybe they were conscious of the first bit of brain activity… and it just took a long time for the part controlling their muscles to react… (so the delay between initial brain activity and consciousness was 0)

How can scientists be sure that the area of the brain that had brain activity first is not a part that we are directly conscious of?

2

Well, this is such a reasonable claim that I’m not sure why you are having trouble with it. If you were consciously aware of all the processing that your brain does, you’d probably be so distracted that you’d just lie on the ground thrashing around and frothing.

3

Finagle:
Well actually I think there would be a delay between the initial brain activity and our awareness of the final results… what I wanted to know is how they can work out what that delay is… I guess they would assume that particular areas of the brain are what we are immediately conscious of when there is brain activity there… and they’d find out the delay between brain activity in another area and this conscious area…