‘You like to think of yourself as the author of your actions. You decide, you act, and the story feels seamless and continuous, as if your experience and your brain’s activity are one and the same thing, happening in perfect sync. But modern consciousness research quietly challenges that comforting picture. A growing body of experiments suggests your brain may be getting a tiny head start on you, committing to actions milliseconds or even seconds before you feel that you made a choice.

This does not mean you are a robot or that free will is an illusion in any simple sense. Instead, you are looking at a far stranger possibility: your conscious feeling of deciding might be the last step in a chain, not the first. The gap is thin, but measurable, and it forces you to rethink what it really means when you say, “I chose that.” Once you see how this plays out in your everyday life, you may never look at a simple decision the same way again….’ (Sameen David via discoverwildscience)