When “I Chose” May Be the End - Not the Beginning - of Choice

A Religare reading of Girard et al.

Play a song that marked a period of your life.

First note.

Nothing yet.

Second.

Something changes.

Maybe your breathing. Maybe your posture. An expectation. A sensation that is difficult to name.

A few more notes:

“I have lived this before.”

Then:

“I know this song.”

And only then are we able to tell the story of what happened.

But when did recognition begin?

When did choice begin?

And, above all:

when we finally say “I chose,” how much had the Body-Territory already participated in that choice without yet being able to say it?

Each note encounters a different Body-Territory

The excellent study by Jared Girard, Aaron Bishop, and Cameron Hassall, published in 2026, offers an entry point into this question.

Participants listened to melodies and were asked to respond as soon as one became familiar. EEG showed a prominent central-parietal positivity — CPP, associated with evidence accumulation, developing toward the decision. The researchers also found a note-related indicator that increased before the familiarity judgment, although some analyses produced more ambiguous evidence.

The fundamental idea is simple:

one note can become evidence for the next.

But 5D Consciousness adds another hypothesis:

each Perceived note does not merely increase evidence. It modifies the Body-Territory that will perceive the next note.

The perceiver and what was perceived no longer remain completely independent within that event.

What I Perceive becomes part of the one who will perceive next.

Not everything that participates in the next Perceiving needs to be conscious

Here we need to widen the picture.

Imagine the Body-Territory a few minutes before you clearly perceive:

“I am getting sick.”

An infection may already be producing immune signals and physiological changes.

Or before:

“I am very thirsty.”

Chemical changes related to water regulation may already be occurring.

The interoceptive system continuously monitors mechanical, chemical, hormonal, and pathological information coming from within the organism and participates in homeostasis, motivation, and autonomic, cognitive, and behavioral regulation. None of this needs to immediately appear as a clearly nameable conscious experience.

In the language of 5D Consciousness, we propose calling part of this available field activated and pre-activated representations.

An important distinction is necessary:

“pre-activation” is a BrainLatam hypothesis and vocabulary, not the terminology used in the interoception literature.

The proposal is that different internal and external conditions may already participate in shaping the next Perceiving before they gain enough movement and qualia to become consciously Perceived.

What we have not yet Perceived may already be modifying the one who will perceive.

Van Ede and Nobre: decision-making can also search for evidence within

In 2024, Freek van Ede and Anna Nobre took another important step.

Instead of continuously providing new external evidence, they asked participants to select visual information already maintained internally in working memory.

During this internal sampling, a CPP emerged and grew toward the decision. Its dynamics varied with the time required to decide and became larger when there were more internal contents to choose among.

The study does not demonstrate our hypothesis of bodily pre-activations.

It shows something more specific — and very important:

the construction of a decision can sample what is internally available, not only what arrives from the world.

Within 5D Consciousness, we broaden the question:

what, exactly, is available in that Body-Territory at that moment?

Memories?

Expectations?

A bodily sensation that still has no name?

Familiarity?

Fear?

A mild fever?

Dehydration?

The music that continues playing?

A cultural representation repeated for years?

Perhaps we do not choose only with what we know we are considering.

The tree and its many possible Selves

Now imagine a large tree in the Atlantic Forest.

It has many branches.

None of them is the whole tree.

In the BrainLatam metaphor, each major branch can be an Optimal Place: a functional configuration sufficiently developed to operate well within a particular space.

We call this configuration a Tensional Self.

There is a musician Self.

A researcher Self.

An athlete Self.

A caregiver Self.

A Self that reacts quickly to a particular threat.

But:

the Self is not Being. The Self is a tool.

We are many possibilities of Self.

Each branch offers particular ways of Perceiving, Doing, Planning, and Judging.

When that branch is highly trained:

Rock: “I already know.”

That can be high performance.

Vibe is not the branch — it is what keeps it inhabitable

Now imagine that a particular song begins.

The rhythm continues.

Breathing may change.

Temporal expectation changes.

Affect changes.

Memories become more available.

The Body-Territory finds continuity.

Music can influence states of arousal and attention, although its effects on performance are heterogeneous and depend on the person, the music, and the task. Studies using preferred music have found changes in task focus, mind-wandering, mood, and arousal, while a 2024 systematic review concluded that the relationships among auditory stimulation, autonomic measures, and cognitive improvement remain mixed and insufficient to support a universal rule.

Music can also accompany respiratory and cardiovascular changes. Methodologically, respiration and HRV should not be interpreted as independent phenomena: breathing itself substantially alters measures such as RSA and HF-HRV.

This allows us to propose a BrainLatam definition:

Vibe is a temporal dynamic that keeps certain representational spaces in motion, carrying qualia and remaining sufficiently available to sustain a Self during a Doing.

The branch is the possible Self.

The Vibe helps keep it inhabitable.

That may be why so many young people say:

“I study better with this playlist.”

Perhaps the question is not simply whether music “improves the brain.”

The 5D question is:

is this Vibe helping this Body-Territory keep available the Self required for this Doing?

Representational spaces gain movement

In 5D Consciousness, a representation does not merely need to exist.

It needs to be able to participate in the present.

Some remain pre-activated.

Others gain movement.

Others gain qualia.

And some begin to participate intensely in the next Perceiving.

This directly modifies our triad:

Science = Doing.

Religion = Planning.

Politics = Judging / Choosing / Valuing.

A more available representation may facilitate a particular Doing.

An expectation may make a certain future easier to Plan.

Familiarity, bodily discomfort, or growing confidence may increase the value of one alternative and reduce that of another.

Attention also alters this trajectory: Morrow and colleagues found a faster CPP build-up when attention was correctly directed toward the relevant evidence.

And Dou and colleagues showed that pre-decision CPP characteristics predicted subjective confidence in a choice even when accuracy, response time, and evidence quality were controlled.

Before:

“I am sure”

the trajectory of confidence was already unfolding.

So which Self gains access to the branch?

Perhaps the decision is not only:

“what response will I give?”

It may also include:

“which Self will become sufficiently available to respond?”

A familiar situation may rapidly recruit Rock:

“I already know.”

But then something does not fit.

Error.

Incompatibility.

The fruit does not fit the branch.

Now:

Scissors: “I need to think.”

A 2024 study in mice showed causally that prediction-error signals in the anterior cingulate cortex participated in rapid switching between learned rules. This does not demonstrate our Tensional Selves, but it shows that discrepancies between expected and observed events can participate in transitions between functional cognitive states.

High performance allows the branch to be abandoned when it no longer explains the world.

Dogma does the opposite: it tries to modify the world so the branch never has to be abandoned.

Pre-conscious metacognition

We now reach the most speculative hypothesis in this text.

We use pre-conscious metacognition to describe the possibility that the Body-Territory is already being modified by compatibility, conflict, familiarity, confidence, expectations, interoceptive states, and possibilities for action before we can consciously integrate all of this into a sentence.

We are not saying that there is a little unconscious observer making decisions inside the brain.

We are asking:

how much selection of the conditions of choice has already occurred before we can perceive that we are choosing?

Gherman and colleagues provide an important clue. Using intracranial recordings in patients with epilepsy, they found distributed activity with evidence-accumulation characteristics. In one condition, participants formed the decision, waited through a random interval, and only afterward gave the verbal response.

Forming the decision and saying:

“I decided”

are not necessarily the same event.

Paper: perceiving that the Self is a tool

Rock:

“I already know.”

Scissors:

“This does not fit.”

Paper asks:

“Which Self am I using — and what Vibe is keeping it available?”

Not:

“Who am I?”

Because perhaps that is precisely the mistake.

Confusing one branch with the whole tree.

Paper can perceive:

how am I breathing?

which memory gained qualia?

which expectation am I feeding?

which bodily condition is already participating in me?

which representations gained movement?

which ones stopped being able to participate?

Perhaps “I chose” arrives at the end

We can then imagine:

something happens;

the Body-Territory changes;

activated and pre-activated representations participate in that change;

some gain movement and qualia;

a Vibe becomes established;

a Self becomes more recruitable;

futures begin to be projected;

alternatives receive different values;

evidence continues accumulating;

a decision stabilizes;

and finally:

“I chose.”

The statement is not false.

But perhaps it arrives late.

Religare asks:

how much of Doing, Planning, and Judging was already happening before one of our Selves could narrate “I decided”?

And perhaps freedom is not about deciding from a Self completely independent of everything that came before it.

Perhaps it is being able to perceive:

this Self is only a tool; this Vibe is helping sustain it; there are other possible Selves — and, if the world demands it, I can still breathe within another branch.

References

Girard, J. R., Bishop, A., & Hassall, C. D. (2026). Song Familiarity Relies on Evidence Accumulation. Psychophysiology, 63(8), e70370. DOI: 10.1111/psyp.70370.

van Ede, F., & Nobre, A. C. (2024). A Neural Decision Signal during Internal Sampling from Working Memory in Humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 44(19), e1475232024. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1475-23.2024.

Wang, R. L., & Chang, R. B. (2024). The Coding Logic of Interoception. Annual Review of Physiology, 86, 301–327. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-physiol-042222-023455.

Morrow, A., Pilipenko, A., Turkovich, E., Sankaran, S., & Samaha, J. (2024). Endogenous Attention Affects Decision-related Neural Activity but Not Afferent Visual Responses. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(11), 2481–2494. DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_02239.

Dou, W., Martinez Arango, L. J., Graham Castaneda, O., et al. (2024). Neural Signatures of Evidence Accumulation Encode Subjective Perceptual Confidence Independent of Performance. Psychological Science, 35(7), 760–779. DOI: 10.1177/09567976241246561.

Gherman, S., Markowitz, N., Tostaeva, G., et al. (2024). Intracranial electroencephalography reveals effector-independent evidence accumulation dynamics in multiple human brain regions. Nature Human Behaviour, 8, 758–770. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01824-9.

Kiss, L., & Linnell, K. J. (2024). The role of mood and arousal in the effect of background music on attentional state and performance during a sustained attention task. Scientific Reports, 14, 9485. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-60218-z.

Chee, Z. J., Chang, C. Y. M., Cheong, J. Y., et al. (2024). The effects of music and auditory stimulation on autonomic arousal, cognition and attention: A systematic review. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 199, 112328. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2024.112328.

Ritz, T. (2024). Putting back respiration into respiratory sinus arrhythmia or high-frequency heart rate variability: Implications for interpretation, respiratory rhythmicity, and health. Biological Psychology, 185, 108728. DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108728.

Cole, N., Harvey, M., Myers-Joseph, D., Gilra, A., & Khan, A. G. (2024). Prediction-error signals in anterior cingulate cortex drive task-switching. Nature Communications, 15, 7088. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-51368-9.

Bernardi, L., Porta, C., Casucci, G., et al. (2009). Dynamic interactions between musical, cardiovascular, and cerebral rhythms in humans. Circulation, 119(25), 3171–3180. DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.108.806174.