“Why Your Brain Has Trouble Bailing Out Of A Bad Plan”
Published in
1 min readFeb 19, 2019
“The study found that stopping an action required three key brain areas to communicate with eight other areas. Previous research had suggested fewer areas were required.
The team also found that all the communication had to occur within about one-tenth of a second of when a participant saw the cue not to move their eye. After that, a signal has already been sent to the eye muscles and there is no way to stop it, Courtney says.
This lag is why we experience that awful, fleeting moment when our brain knows we shouldn’t stomp on the gas, but our foot does it anyway. “If the signal has already been sent you can watch it happen without being able to stop it,” Courtney says.”
