The Importance of Free Will

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There's a line in your book that I've actually been thinking about, but I didn't realize it. Just to give you an example of these kinds of strange ways we fool ourselves. We have no volition whatsoever; all we have is the story we tell ourselves. So are we just puppet and we haven't touched upon Libet yet, but so, yeah, we're going to, I want to talk about it.

While operating on a 16-year-old girl who suffered from severe seizures, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried stumbled on the region of the brain that makes us laugh. To neuroscientist Patrick House, Fried's ability to produce laughter surgically raises deep and disconcerting questions about how the brain works. Join Fried, House, and EconTalk's Russ Roberts for a live broadcast from Jerusalem's Shalem College that is a sequel of sorts to House's earlier appearance on EconTalk. House and Fried discuss the mystery of consciousness and try to square the biological bases for emotions with the circle of our humanity.