Date Time Researchers observe decision making in brain – and influence outcomes A team of neuroscientists and engineers have developed a system that can show the neural process of decision making in real time, including the mental process of flipping between options before expressing a final choice. By Taylor Kubota In the course of deciding whether to keep reading this article, you may change your mind several times. While your final choice will be obvious to an observer – you’ll continue to scroll and read, or you’ll click on another article – any internal deliberations you had along the way will most likely be inscrutable to anyone but you. That clandestine hesitation is the focus of research, published Jan. 20 in Nature, by Stanford University researchers who study how cognitive deliberations are reflected in neural activity.