Whether it’s a goalkeeper who needs to decide which way to dive, or a motorist who needs to swerve to avoid a pedestrian, people often have to make decisions in a small amount of time, based on a complex onrush of information. But even as their muscles launch them towards one particular fate, there is still room for indecisiveness. Arbora Resulaj from the University of Cambridge has found that people often change their decisions in the split-seconds after making them because of late-arriving information. 

Neuroscientists have come up with several possible explanations for what happens in our brains when we make decisions. For example, the popular “drift-diffusion model” looks at simple choices with two possible outcomes. Take a motorist’s decision about