Science fact or science fiction?

I’ve been aware of Libet's 1979 experiments for some time where he showed the brain has activated movement before a person is consciously aware of the decision. It’s one of those science facts I understood theoretically but the other day when I was reading the explanation of it in my new Sci-Fi read ‘mindscan’(another Robert Sawyer novel) it clicked on a practical level. The explanation used was:

“you're lying in bed, quite mellow, and you look over at the clock, and you think to yourself, I really should get up, it's time to get up, I've got to go to work. You may think this a half-dozen times or more, and then, suddenly, you are getting up — the action has begun, without you being consciously aware that you've finally, really made the decision to get out of bed. And that's because you haven't consciously made that decision; your unconscious has made it for you. It — not the conscious you — has concluded once and for all that it really is time to get out of bed."

I've had that for sure. This rekindled my interest in the scientific evidence for this explanation, especially to check out if the sci-fi description below is correct:

“The action begins 550 milliseconds prior to the first physical movement. Two hundred milliseconds later, the action that's already been started comes to the attention of your conscious self — and your conscious self has 350 milliseconds to put on the brakes before anything happens. The conscious brain doesn't initiate so-called voluntary acts, although it can step in and stop them.”

You see I hadn’t picked up on the 350 millisecond veto before and it does make sense so did some web searching and read this:

http://www.blutner.de/philom/consc/consc.html

It’s a nice easy to digest summary which does verify the sci-fi and concludes:

“Consciousness is not a high level authority that gives orders to subordinated instances. Instead, its main role is a selective one: make a decision between the bulk of possibilities that are proposed by unconscious processes.”

So there’s all kinds of possibilities already happened in my brain at 550 milliseconds and at 350 milliseconds I can veto the action or carry it out. Explains how indecision happens so much especially in now that we have more and more choices and freedoms. It's exactingly as I read in Incognito.

“Your conscious brain takes ownership of the action, and fools itself into thinking it started the action, but really it's just a spectator, watching what your body is doing.”

(Mindscan again) Thought provoking fiction – love it :)