Why You Make Most Decisions Unconsciously

Contrary to what most of us would like to believe, decision-making may be largely handled by unconscious mental activity.

The Unseen Hand of the Mind

Every day, you make roughly 35,000 decisions. From the moment you wake up - hitting snooze or getting up immediately, what to wear, whether to have coffee first or shower first - to when you fall asleep, your brain is constantly choosing between options. Yet remarkably, you're only consciously aware of a tiny fraction of these choices.

Consider your morning commute. As you drive the familiar route to work, your hands expertly guide the steering wheel, your foot modulates the brake and accelerator, and you seamlessly navigate through traffic - all while your conscious mind might be focused on the day's upcoming meetings or last night's conversation with a friend. This automatic piloting isn't a bug in our cognitive system; it's a feature that has evolved over millions of years to help us function efficiently in an increasingly complex world.

Our unconscious mind acts as a sophisticated filtration system, processing an estimated 11 million bits of sensory information every second, while our conscious mind can handle only about 40 bits. This massive gap between unconscious and conscious processing isn't just about sensory input - it extends to our decision-making apparatus as well. Research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience has revealed that the majority of our decisions are made by neural processes that operate entirely below our awareness, only bubbling up to consciousness after the fact.

This revelation challenges our cherished notion of being purely rational decision-makers who carefully weigh every option before choosing. Instead, we're beginning to understand that our choices are often made in the depths of our neural circuitry, shaped by evolutionary adaptations, past experiences, and emotional associations that we may never consciously access. The question isn't whether we make unconscious decisions - we do, constantly - but rather, how this understanding might help us make better choices in the areas of life where conscious deliberation truly matters.

Recent Research

Scientists have unravelled how the brain actually unconsciously prepares our decisions. Even several seconds before we consciously decide, its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. This is shown in a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, collaborating with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. "Many processes in the brain occur automatically," says Haynes, "and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our minds from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions, we tend to assume that our conscious mind makes them. Our current findings question this."

In the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted but had to remember when they felt they had made up their mind. The experiment aimed to find out what happens in the brain just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take up to seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally researchers look at what happens when the decision is made, but not at what happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is an astonishing finding.

This unprecedented prediction of a free decision was made possible by sophisticated computer programs trained to recognize typical brain activity patterns preceding each of the two choices. Micropatterns of activity in the frontopolar cortex predicted the choices even before participants knew which option they were going to choose. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but the prediction was above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time, but the final decision might still be reversible.

"Most researchers investigate what happens when people have to decide immediately, typically as a rapid response to an event in our environment. Here, we were focusing on the more interesting decisions made in a more natural, self-paced manner", Haynes explains.

More than 20 years ago, the American brain scientist Benjamin Libet found a brain signal, the so-called "readiness-potential" that occurred a fraction of a second before a conscious decision. Libet’s experiments were highly controversial and sparked a huge debate. Many scientists argue that if the brain unconsciously prepares our decisions, our feeling of "free will" must be an illusion. In this view, it is the brain that makes the decision, not a person’s conscious mind. Libet’s experiments were particularly controversial because he found only a brief time delay between brain activity and conscious decision.

In contrast, Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts—even up to 7 seconds ahead of time—how a person will decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: "Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed."

Final Thoughts

I'd like to know what you think about this article. Have you ever made a decision but felt like your mind had already been made up?