Imagine you’re in line at your favourite bakery, deciding whether to have a doughnut or a tart. You weigh them up, the doughnut wins, and you settle on that.

By the time you’re at the front of the line, however, only tarts are left. So, you buy one.

These two decisions feel completely different. One involves deliberation based on our unique and personal preferences, while the other involves simply recognising and picking the only available option.

But our latest research published in the journal Imaging Neuroscience shows our brains actually make these decisions in surprisingly similar ways.

What exactly is a free choice?

When we make free decisions, we recognise multiple options exist, weigh them up, and commit to one based on something internal: our preferences, values and goals.

Forced decisions are different. There’s only one possible outcome, and our job is simply to identify the option and take it.

Because free decisions feel so closely tied to who we are, neuroscientists have long assumed they rely on different processes in the brain compared to forced decisions. Some brain imaging studies support this, showing different patterns of neural activity distributed across the........

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