Decision making is usually not a step-by-step verbal argument or a mathematical calculation, but rather a mental parallel process of inference to the best plan. This process involves assessment of competing actions to determine which combination of them best accomplishes a person's goals. Goals are emotionally valued mental representations of imagined states of the world and self. The brain performs such representations by patterns of firing in neural populations in multiple brain areas, including ones that encode verbal and sensory information. Emotional value is part of the representation of goals and actions by virtue of coordination with brain areas such as the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala, which encode positive and negative aspects of the world. The overall assessment of the coherence of actions and goals is the result of parallel constraint satisfaction carried out by firing of neurons in all the relevant populations based on the synaptic connections among them. You don't tell your brain what to do, and your brain doesn't tell you what to do: you are your brain deciding what to do in your physical and social environment.