Tom James, a cognitive neuroscientist at Indiana University, is challenging one of the most intuitive ideas about how our brains work: that decisions are discrete processes that sit between what we perceive and what we do. For decades, both neuroscience and common sense have embraced what James calls the "sandwich model"—a linear sequence where sensory information enters the brain, gets processed into a decision, and then triggers an action. But according to James's argument in a recent paper published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, this model has a fatal flaw: the brain simply doesn't appear to have a decision-making mechanism at all.
The disconnect between our intuitive understanding and neurological reality runs deep. "Our actions feel like they are caused by decisions based on desires, beliefs, and intentions," James explains, and this intuition is so compelling that it has shaped how scientists study the brain. Model-based cognitive neuroscience, the dominant methodology in the field, reflects and reinforces this assumption of a linear causal sequence. We have sensory mechanisms for perceiving and motor mechanisms for acting, yet when neuroscientists look for the cognitive machinery that supposedly makes decisions between those two stages, they find nothing—no corresponding neural processes, no decision-making circuitry.
This absence is not trivial. James argues that what we call "decision-making" is actually something far more fluid and simultaneous. Rather than a discrete stage that causes behavior, decisions emerge from a complex, circular interaction between sensory processing, sensorimotor control, and motor execution—all happening in dynamic dialogue with the body and environment. He prefers to call this process "action selection," a term that better captures how the brain actually operates. This shift in terminology demands a shift in how we study the brain itself, moving away from linear models toward methods that can capture these dynamic, simultaneous interactions.
To ground this abstract argument, James borrows a series of clarifying analogies. He draws on philosopher Daniel Dennett's insight that the self is like a center of mass—a useful mathematical concept that nonetheless cannot exert physical force. Just as you cannot move an object by moving its center of mass (you must move the object itself), decisions are abstract, nonphysical entities that cannot directly cause physical actions. They are descriptions of behavior, not mechanisms that produce it.
Consider how we use language about institutions. We say "the university took action during a campus protest" as a convenient shorthand, but this abstraction obscures the actual physical events that occurred—the meetings, the phone calls, the specific decisions made by specific people. For cognitive neuroscience, which seeks to understand the physical mechanisms of the brain, this level of abstraction is too coarse. "As mental phenomena, they are defined on too abstract a level for the goals of cognitive neuroscience," James writes.
None of this means decisions don't exist or aren't real. "Of course they do," James acknowledges. "We use this language all the time and it's very helpful in terms of describing behavior. The leap, I think, is to say that the brain works by having decision-making or control processes." The brain produces behavior that looks like it was decided upon—but it does not require an actual decision-making process to do so. This reframing opens new scientific terrain, inviting neuroscientists to move beyond the sandwich model and develop research methods adequate to the brain's actual, messier complexity.