The brain starts making decisions before a person actually 'thinks' about it

Hints kept surfacing in recordings that early sensory areas tracked choices, not just stimuli. The signals looked weak and sparse – easy to dismiss as movement noise. Yurii Vlasov, Ph.D., a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and graduate student Alex Armstrong have a cleaner answer.