Our model of our brain assumes that the conscious mind is the decisionmaker. Logic and reasoning lead to hypotheses, conclusions and actions. Our subconscious mind is only messing things up.
Well, it seems that everyone who has thought differently has had a point.
Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions–but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.”A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren’t based on conscious reasoning,” says Pouget. “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.”
Pouget has run a series of tests determining the way people get to a decision.
Subjects in this test performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure answer. The subjects simply “realized” suddenly what was the “right” answer.
