The Decision Begins Before the Response -  Musical Familiarity and Evidence Accumulation

A song begins.

One note.

Another.

Then another.

You still do not know its name.

You do not remember the artist.

But something has already changed.

Perhaps the first experience is not even:

“I know this song.”

Perhaps it is something closer to:

“I have lived this before.”

Then another note arrives.

And a curious sensation emerges:

“I think I know what comes next.”

The next note plays.

It was exactly that one.

Inside this tiny interval lies an enormous question:

when did the decision begin?

When we heard the first note?

When familiarity emerged?

When the future started to feel predictable?

Or only when we finally managed to press a button and say:

“yes, I know it”?

The work of Jared R. Girard, Aaron Bishop, and Cameron D. Hassall, published in 2026 in Psychophysiology, offers a fascinating window into this question.

In Song Familiarity Relies on Evidence Accumulation, the authors recorded EEG while participants listened to melodies and responded as soon as one began to feel familiar. They found a central-parietal positivity — CPP associated with the decision, along with changes in brain responses to individual notes as the familiarity judgment approached.

The proposal is that the decision may be gradually constructed.

But perhaps it is not only the evidence that changes.

With each note, the perceiver changes as well.

Each note encounters a different Body-Territory

In BrainLatam’s 5D Consciousness hypothesis:

Consciousness is the movement that perceives itself as Being within the metabolism produced.

In this model, Perceiving does not simply mean registering information.

A consciously Perceived note materially participates in the configuration of the Body-Territory.

It may alter attention.

Recruit memories.

Generate expectations.

Prepare movements.

Modify affective or autonomic states.

The second note therefore no longer reaches exactly the same organism that received the first.

We can imagine:

note → transformation → new note → new transformation → expectation → familiarity.

From this emerges an important hypothesis:

evidence does not merely accumulate; it successively transforms the one who receives it.

Perhaps familiarity is not simply opening a stored file.

Perhaps it means:

making possible again a movement of the Body-Territory that has already been lived before.

“I have lived this before” is not the same as remembering

Girard works with an important distinction: familiarity is not the same as complete recollection.

We may feel that something has been encountered before without recovering:

where;

when;

with whom;

what it was called.

In the experiment, participants were instructed to respond as soon as the song felt familiar, even if they could not yet identify it.

This brings the study close to a very common experience:

“I have lived this before, but I still cannot say where.”

The past, therefore, does not necessarily need to appear as narrative.

It may participate in the present state without its origin being verbally accessible.

What was lived must be recruitable

This idea can be taken further.

In 2024, Freek van Ede and Anna Nobre showed a CPP-like decision signal during the internal sampling of contents held in working memory.

In other words, CPP does not accompany only evidence arriving from the external world.

It can also accompany the selection of contents that are already internally available.

This allows a 5D question:

what if some decisions depend not only on what arrives now, but on which previously lived configuration can be recruited?

It is not enough that something happened before.

What was lived must be able to participate functionally in the present.

The goalkeeper and the past that must remain available

The Goalkeeper Game, developed in the context of NeuroMat, helps make this intuitive.

The participant must predict whether the next kick will go left, center, or right.

The sequence is generated by a stochastic chain with variable-length memory.

Depending on the context, different parts of the recent history help predict the next event.

The player does not know the rule.

They must infer it while playing.

Prediction therefore depends not only on having a past, but on recruiting the relevant past.

This connects directly with attention.

Attention changes the speed of accumulation

In 2024, Morrow and colleagues showed that when attention was correctly directed, the CPP displayed a steeper build-up rate.

This suggests that attention may alter how quickly relevant evidence participates in the construction of a decision.

In the 5D hypothesis:

an attentional deviation may not erase what was lived; it may simply reduce its participation in the current decision.

This creates an important difference between:

not knowing

and

being unable, at that moment, to recruit what we already know.

What if the decision is not only “which response?”

Here a more ambitious possibility appears.

Imagine an expert athlete.

A situation begins.

The opponent’s posture.

Speed.

Body position.

Recent history.

Perhaps these cues are not merely helping select one response.

Perhaps they are making available an entire functional configuration that has already lived through similar situations.

Not only a memory.

But:

attention;

predictions;

motor programs;

proprioception;

muscle tone;

action possibilities.

Within the BrainLatam model, we could call this configuration a Tensional Self.

The question then stops being only:

“which response should I give?”

and begins to include:

“which Self already knows how to respond?”

Rock: “I already know”

In BrainLatam’s Rock–Paper–Scissors model, Rock represents a configuration with strong sensorimotor, somatosensory, proprioceptive, and highly trained automated participation.

It is not a brain region.

Nor does it mean an absence of sophisticated processing.

It is a state of high readiness.

When a sufficiently familiar situation appears, certain cues may favor:

“I already know.”

Not necessarily as language.

But functionally.

The Body-Territory recruits a configuration that has already perceived, predicted, and acted in that class of situation.

The response may be fast because the solution does not need to be reconstructed from scratch.

Scissors: “I need to think”

But what happens when something does not match the expectation?

The music changes.

The opponent does something unexpected.

The statistical sequence stops fitting.

At that point, another configuration may need to gain priority.

Scissors.

More comparison.

More deliberate control.

More alternatives.

The system functionally moves from:

“I already know”

to:

“I need to think.”

We provisionally call this passage a Tensional Transition:

the shift between functional configurations of the Body-Territory as internal and external evidence makes one of them more recruitable than the others.

This is a BrainLatam hypothesis.

Does CPP switch the Self?

No.

That claim would go beyond the data.

CPP is better treated as a signal related to the accumulation of evidence for a decision.

It is not consciousness.

It is not a Self.

And we do not know whether it causally produces changes between functional states.

But we can ask:

could CPP accompany part of the trajectory that precedes a Tensional Transition?

That makes the hypothesis testable.

Epilepsy: deciding and verbalizing are not the same thing

The study by Sabina Gherman and colleagues, published in 2024, provides an especially important contribution.

The researchers recorded intracranial activity from patients with epilepsy undergoing clinical monitoring.

In part of the experiment, participants formed a decision but had to wait between 1 and 2 seconds before verbally reporting the answer.

Even without an immediate motor response, distributed evidence-accumulation dynamics were observed.

This shows something fundamental:

forming a decision and verbalizing a decision can be temporally separated.

Therefore, the words:

“I have lived this before”

may arrive after a trajectory that was already unfolding.

And where does consciousness enter?

Here we encounter Alfredo Pereira Jr., Flávia Foz, and Armando Freitas da Rocha.

In 2017, the authors proposed a distinction between fast processing and the formation of complex conscious episodes, which would depend on slower distributed integration.

In their model, this integration would occur approximately on the scale of 2 seconds, in dialogue with Ernst Pöppel’s literature on the “conscious present” in the range of roughly 2–3 seconds.

BrainLatam has also worked, through its dialogue with ideas associated with Armando Freitas da Rocha, with a reference of approximately 3.1 seconds. This value should not be treated as a universal stopwatch for consciousness.

The more important point is:

complex conscious experience may require temporal integration that extends well beyond the earliest ERPs.

Perhaps consciousness allows us to perceive which Self is responding

This opens an important possibility for the 5D model.

Perhaps consciousness is not simply:

“producing a response.”

Perhaps it can also allow us to:

Perceive the configuration from which we are about to respond.

Three possibilities then appear.

Rock:
“I already know.”

Scissors:
“I need to think.”

Paper:

“I perceive which Self I am responding from.”

Paper introduces metacognition.

We can remain in the high-performance Self.

We can interrupt it.

Or we can recruit another configuration.

Déjà entendu offers an important caution

In 2025, McNeely-White and Anne Cleary investigated déjà entendu, the auditory analog of déjà vu.

When participants experienced déjà entendu, they more often felt that they knew what would happen next.

But they did not actually predict better.

This produces a crucial conclusion:

the “I already know” Self can also be wrong.

Familiarity may increase confidence without increasing accuracy.

That is why high performance in repeating the known does not necessarily imply high flexibility when facing the new.

The decision begins before the response

Return to the music.

First note.

I do not know.

Second.

Something changes.

Third.

This feels familiar.

Fourth.

Perhaps I know what comes next.

Fifth.

“I have lived this before.”

Perhaps each note is not merely producing evidence for:

“this song is familiar.”

Perhaps it is making progressively more recruitable a configuration that has already lived that song.

CPP is not consciousness.

It is not the switching of the Self.

But it may offer a window into part of the trajectory that precedes a decision.

And the BrainLatam hypothesis becomes:

perhaps some decisions are not only about which response to give, but about which configuration of the Body-Territory becomes available to produce that response.

Perhaps recognizing a song is not simply retrieving information.

Perhaps it is:

making possible again the Self that already lived that movement.

And perhaps consciousness adds an even deeper possibility:

perceiving which Self is about to respond.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hernández, N., Galves, A., García, J. E., Gubitoso, M. D., & Vargas, C. D. (2024). Probabilistic prediction and context tree identification in the Goalkeeper game. Scientific Reports, 14, 15467. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-66009-w.

McNeely-White, K. L., & Cleary, A. M. (2025). Illusory feelings of prediction during déjà entendu. Memory & Cognition, 53(8), 2375–2393. DOI: 10.3758/s13421-025-01716-x.

Pereira Jr., A., Foz, F. B., & Rocha, A. F. (2017). The Dynamical Signature of Conscious Processing: From Modality-Specific Percepts to Complex Episodes. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 4(2), 230–247. DOI: 10.1037/cns0000115.

Du, Y., Krakauer, J. W., & Haith, A. M. (2022). The relationship between habits and motor skills in humans. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.