In 2008, a team of scientists in Germany published a study showing how the brain unconsciously prepares our decisions: that several seconds before we consciously decide what we're going to do, its outcome can be predicted by looking at unconscious activity in our grey matter.
The researchers, from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, told participants in the study that they could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hands, whenever they wanted, but they had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. They found that it was possible to predict from their brain signals which option they would choose seven seconds before they consciously made their decision.
"It's all very Minority Report," Steve Sands says, referring to the Tom Cruise film in which a special police department known as "PreCrime" tracks down criminals based on knowledge provided by psychics. "But we're not too far from that now."
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