On nonlinear time...
I'm not sure why Robert, and he's not alone, believe that nonlinear time precludes a "poetry" in our experience. But that is exactly where we experience linear time; in our perception of all things. Our brains simplify things for us so that we can be functional.
Consider the fact that we receive visual stimuli upside down but our brains revert the image to make sense of it. An experiment was done in which special lenses, I'm no optics expert, were made like glasses but showed everything upside down. The wearer wore them all day, everyday for almost 2 weeks before the brain put everything right. At that point, when the glasses were removed, everything was seen upside down. The brain knows we can't deal with upside down so it rights it for us. Considering we can barely grasp the idea of nonlinear time how could we deal with it and would our brain even lets us try?

If any one can correct me here I would appreciate it, but from what I have learned, that bleep a second before the wiggling could be from our pre-motor cortex actually designing our movement, as it sends the plan to the primary motor cortex which executes the desired voluntary movement. So in a sense, your brain has this "lag" before the executed command. Obviously to us it feels instant, but our movement is first being orchestrated in our brain and then being executed. Thanks.

In response to the idea of parallel universes...

If this is true, there is a universe where my brother and I have each other's name. What's much more interesting though is there is some universe where my brother made every decision I made and visa versa. Therefor we've switched. So essentially the difference between people sort of breaks down with this idea. If I could be my brother in another universe, why couldn't I be my neighbor?

How do other animals fit into this view? Perhaps they too run into situations where their odds are 40/30/30. You can think of this from an evolutionary perspective. Maybe the humans of one universe more closely resemble the lizard people from our conspiracy theories.

My absolute FAV radiolabs!
As for separating your brain from you- your mind is you isn't it? just one of the many layers that make up the self- to say you have no free will because your brain controls your movement, seems illogical to me.

Nevermind, with the help of Soundhound, I found out it is Monopolist by Efterklang.

Anyone know the song from ~43:00?

I think if you check out www.dnaliveforever.com you will see that time travel is a fact.

This isn't really related to the article, just wanted to say that Kraden basically summed up the main idea of The Great Gatsby with the comment, "What I realized is that you can't change the past and thinking about all the decisions you could have made leaves you stuck in time only thinking and not acting or living."

I had a fascinating experience many years ago when I was 9 years old.

We went on a cruise (won a holiday, highly suggest trying out radio show call-in giveaways). There was a moment in the youth entertainment group where we were supposed to stand on stage and straight face while others tried to make us laugh. I gave it an attempt, and though I can't remember why, I found it very embarrassing to be up on stage and stared at by well... everyone.

I remember sitting back down very abashed and thinking about wanting to take back my decision, and staring at the waves in the ocean and thinking about where that choice would leave me. What if I succeeded and felt proud? What if I was a different person. And I remember thinking that choices spread out like the ocean I was staring at, and I seem to remember it was a beginning of a simple inner-peace, which ironically actually cured my stage fright.

What I realized is that you can't change the past and thinking about all the decisions you could have made leaves you stuck in time only thinking and not acting or living.

This episode reminded me of that which was an interesting moment in my life that I hadn't thought about in a long time.

So if you get stuck thinking about the fact that you don't have free will. Simply decide to have free will, and you will have it. Else you will never have any more branches in your life ever, free will or not.

Love the show guys. Thanks for my neurons fire. :)

Regarding the finger wiggling:
Before latching onto a brain prediction, shouldn't the first hypothesis be that we have cognition backwards?
It seems much more reasonable that our decision making happens before we announce to ourselves that we've decided. In stressful situation people often say they acted before they "had time to think," but obviously what we call instinctive reaction is thinking - otherwise the body wouldn't know how it would go about pulling some stranger from a fire. Perhaps "We" still make the choices, but our brains just don't bother our consciousness with the trivial operations of choice. In the case of the finger wiggle, there are probably countless calculations going into settling on timing, which direction to move first, what hand to use, etc. Our subconscious may then just alert our conscious brain, "hey - check it out - we're going to be moving."

How many times have you said to yourself, "I knew that would happen," when an accident occurs? Often it feels based not on hindsight, but on the recognition of some understanding of physics and situation that your brain may have worked out in advance to anticipate the likelihood of a particular coffee cup being knocked from a counter. It would seem just as logical that this scenario isn't a metaphysical or time altering predictive power, but your subconscious working out things and then alerting you of the important observations, maybe even as part of a trigger for memory recall and learning?

Anyway I have no idea how one might test the theory of subconscious centered free will.

Jim,

The speed of light appears constant no matter how fast you are traveling! Put another way, everyone, no matter how fast they travel, perceives the same speed of light as if they are standing still.

Thus, if you are in a car traveling at a cm/second less than the speed of light and you turn on your headlights, the light will still shoot out in front of you at the speed of light! A person standing to the side of the road watching you go by, however, would see the light gradually creeping out in front of you, getting only another cm ahead every second!

Even I would like to acknowledge it for sure.

Einstein proposed that if the bus he was travelling on were to speed faster than light, then he would never see the ticks of the clock. However, he suggests that he would be able to observe his pocket watch no problem!
One of the things that confuses me about this is that, if he were travelling faster than light, would he be able to see anything at all? Wouldn't light which left his pocket watch need to be going faster than him (and normal light) to reach his eye? Would light even hit his pocket watch?

The section no special now is very reminiscent of well acclaimed book Slaughter House 5 by Kurt Vonnegut.

What happens if I see the blip but decide then to not wiggle my finger? Seems like plenty of time to just not bother.

Also there is a lot that we don't know about the brain, couldn't it be that the decision happening is inside before it is verbalized in our brains.Voices in your head talked about how we learn to thing and how we develop an inner narrative. Seems likely to me that the inner narrative is a "line out" of whats happening inside. And that we process before we understand we process.

I love everything you do. i listen pbs or sports more than music. Its nice to know inteligent mind are stil out there