Your Brain Always Has A Plan B

By Ivan John M. Paltingca | Feb 16, 2017 08:26 AM EST

Our brains are smarter than we think they are. Research shows that when it comes to daily decisions, our brain is often more prepared for plan B than we are.

The brains that people possess are astonishing organs that have the ability to do a myriad of things that we are both aware and unaware of. One of those things happens to be the ability to formulate a backup plan incase the first plan doesn't work out. Research has shown that whether we know it or not, what we choose sets us down to a certain path, but the brain likes to be prepared and thinks things through both possibilities.

In a sense, this can be related to the theory of multiple universes, or the multiverse theory, where we make certain choices but also suggests that if we had chosen the other choices it would mean that we would be going down a completely different timeline. Well, our brain works in a similar way, and though we may not act on the other choice from the set of possibilities, the brain thinks of how that would have happened and prepares for it without our knowledge with a backup plan.

According to Engadget, a discovery for the brain's backup plan made from researchers at Queen's University states that the human brain will make preparations for multiple actions when a decision is made. The research study was done by having test subjects asked to maneuver a cursor to one of two targets.

While it was easy for them to go down the middle, the cursor was increasingly taken out of sync which made the volunteers compensate through unconscious actions, showing that the movements of the volunteers were an avergae of movementes paths needed to reach the target and not the average between the positions, showing that the brain was preparing for both paths. This discovery also hints to helping the production of smarter robots which will most likely have a backup plan for more humanized thinking. 

UPI.com claims that this is more commonly seen in daily tasks such as choosing whether to buy a gallon of milk or a quart of it. Each decision we make, the brain prepares for both possibilities. At least there is comfort in knowing that despite us not being prepared for some of the decisions we make, our brain will always think of a backup plan.

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