Why Logic Fails in Business and Investing: The Neuroscience of Subconscious Decision Making

By Perry Mardon — Wealth Pattern Savant | 38 years of consciousness practice | Operations manager for ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs | Author of The Great Book of Wealth

If you believe your business and investment decisions are driven by logic, you are fighting a losing battle against your own biology.

This is not a motivational opinion. It is a measurable, peer-reviewed, neurologically documented fact — and the failure to address it is the single greatest blind spot in modern business and investment training.

I have spent over two decades working at the intersection of subconscious pattern diagnosis and wealth creation. I managed operations for entrepreneurs running 18 to 27 businesses simultaneously from Maui. I have since helped over 65 Australian business owners create more than $47 million in automated wealth. And in every single case, the obstacle was never a lack of intelligence, strategy, or effort. It was a subconscious script the founder or investor could not see, running decisions they believed were logical.

This article explains why that happens, what the science actually says, and how to identify whether it is happening to you.

The Fundamental Flaw in Business & Investment Training

Every MBA program, investment course, and business coaching program on the planet trains one thing: the conscious mind. They teach frameworks, models, strategies, and analytical tools. They train the part of you that thinks it is in charge.

The problem is that it is not in charge.

If they told you in week one of a program that the part of the brain they are about to train does not actually make your decisions, they would have nothing to sell you. So the entire industry is built on an assumption that neuroscience dismantled decades ago.

This is not a criticism of education. Strategy matters. Financial literacy matters. But training the conscious mind alone is like giving a press secretary better talking points while ignoring the president who is actually making the calls.

What the Science Actually Shows

Three landmark studies dismantle the illusion of conscious control over decision making. These are not fringe findings. They are taught at Harvard and published in peer-reviewed journals. Yet they have never been integrated into business or investment training anywhere in the world.

The Libet Study (1983)

Benjamin Libet, a neurophysiologist at the University of California, measured electrical brain activity while subjects made simple voluntary movements. He discovered that the brain's "readiness potential" — the measurable electrical buildup that precedes action — begins a full 350 milliseconds before the subject reports any conscious intention to move.

In plain terms: your brain has already started executing a decision before "you" — the conscious you — even feels the urge to act. Libet's work was controversial at the time, but it opened the door to a series of studies that made the findings even more dramatic.

The Haynes Study (2008)

John-Dylan Haynes and his team at the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan subjects' brains while they made simple choices. By analysing patterns of brain activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortex, the researchers could predict which choice a subject would make up to seven to ten seconds before the subject consciously "decided."

Consider what this means for a founder or investor. When you believe you are weighing up whether to sell a position, hire a candidate, or pivot your strategy, the decision has potentially already been made by neural processes you have no conscious access to. Your conscious mind is not deliberating. It is waiting to be informed — and then constructing a logical narrative to explain a choice it did not make.

The Fried Study (2011)

Itzhak Fried at UCLA went deeper, recording from individual neurons in the human medial frontal cortex. His team found that the firing of specific neurons predicted a subject's decision to act approximately 700 milliseconds before the subject reported any awareness of intending to act.

This study confirmed at the single-neuron level what Libet found with surface electrodes and Haynes found with fMRI. The mechanism is consistent across methodologies: subconscious neural activity precedes and determines conscious awareness of a decision.

What This Means for Your Portfolio

When you "decide" to exit a trade, double down on a venture, or freeze under pressure, you are not making a logical choice in the moment. You are executing a command that was issued seconds earlier by your subconscious, based on patterns encoded from your personal history.

Your conscious mind then does what it has always done: it invents a rational explanation. "The market looked shaky." "The timing wasn't right." "I had a gut feeling." These are not reasons. They are cover stories.

The Press Secretary Illusion

I use a simple framework with my clients to make this tangible.

Think of your brain as a government. The Subconscious Mind is the President. It makes the executive decisions based on deep-seated beliefs, survival scripts, and emotional patterns encoded across your lifetime. It operates silently and does not explain itself.

The Conscious Mind is the Press Secretary. Its only job is to stand at the podium and create a coherent, logical story to explain the President's decisions — both to the outside world and to you.

This is why intelligent people self-sabotage and cannot understand why. The Press Secretary is articulate, analytical, and convincing. It will give you a perfectly logical reason for every decision you make. But it is not making the decisions. It never was.

Every business course you have ever taken trained the Press Secretary. Not one of them has examined the President.

The Universal Mechanism and Your Personal Pattern

Here is where most conversations about the subconscious go wrong. People treat it as a single, universal problem with a universal fix — "reprogram your mindset," "think positive," "visualise success." This is useless, and here is why.

The mechanism is universal. Every human brain works this way. The subconscious fires before conscious awareness in every person, without exception. That is the science.

But the pattern is personal. The specific beliefs, fears, and scripts encoded in your subconscious are unique to your personal history and biography. Two founders can have identical strategies and completely different results, because their subconscious scripts are running different commands.

This is why I distinguish between different wound types in my diagnostic work.

The Micromanager's Wound vs. The Founder's Wound

These are two examples from the patterns I diagnose in business owners and investors. They produce opposite behaviours on the surface but share the same root cause: a subconscious script overriding conscious strategy.

The Micromanager's Wound typically originates from early experiences where the person's environment felt chaotic or uncontrollable. The subconscious encodes a survival script: "If I do not control everything, something bad will happen." In business, this manifests as an inability to delegate, obsessive oversight of details, and a bottleneck effect where every decision must flow through one person. The founder consciously knows they should delegate. They have read the books. They have hired good people. But the subconscious script overrides the strategy every time, because the President is operating from a threat pattern the Press Secretary knows nothing about.

The Founder's Wound is different. It often originates from experiences where the person's worth was tied to achievement or originality. The subconscious script reads: "I must build something new to prove I am valuable." This produces serial entrepreneurship, constant pivoting, an inability to scale what is already working, and a pattern of abandoning profitable ventures to chase the next creation. Again, the conscious strategy says "scale what works." But the subconscious has a different mandate entirely.

These are just two of many patterns. The critical point is that you cannot fix what you cannot see. And you cannot see it because the Press Secretary — your conscious, logical mind — is specifically designed to hide it from you by making every decision feel rational.

Why Mindset Work Does Not Solve This

If your subconscious fires seven to ten seconds before conscious awareness, you cannot "affirm" your way out of a neural pathway. Positive thinking is a conscious mind activity. You are once again training the Press Secretary while the President continues unchallenged.

This is not mindset work. It is not positive thinking. It is not motivational. It is a diagnostic process.

The distinction matters because diagnosis works with specificity. Instead of telling yourself "I am abundant" while your subconscious believes money is dangerous, a diagnostic approach identifies exactly what your subconscious believes about money, power, your own worth, doing business, and making money — and then shows you how those specific beliefs are overriding every strategy you have ever been taught.

Your training educated your conscious mind. Diagnosis examines the part that actually makes the choices, shows you what is in it, and helps you re-script it.

How to Diagnose Your Subconscious Scripts

In my book The Great Book of Wealth, I have compiled over 60 diagnostic exercises designed to bypass the Press Secretary and surface the specific subconscious scripts running your business and investment decisions — without your knowledge.

These exercises do not ask you what you think about money. Your conscious answers to that question are unreliable by definition. Instead, they use indirect diagnostic methods to reveal what your subconscious has actually encoded, often from experiences you have long forgotten or never considered relevant to your financial life.

The book examines the part of the brain that actually makes the choices, shows you what is in it, and gives you the tools to begin re-scripting it.

Get your copy of The Great Book of Wealth here.

Going Deeper: Live Diagnostic Sessions

For founders and investors who want guided support, the Subconscious Wealth Briefing provides weekly live pattern insight sessions and diagnostic tools to uncover your specific wounds with direct guidance.

Get access to the Subconscious Wealth Briefing here.

Citations and Research Referenced

Libet, B. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The behavioural and physiological basis of the will. Brain, 106(3), 623–642.

Haynes, J.D., et al. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11(5), 543–545.

Fried, I., et al. (2011). Internally generated preactivation of single neurons in human medial frontal cortex predicts volition. Neuron, 69(3), 548–562.

Perry Mardon is the author of The Great Book of Wealth and creator of the Wealth Pattern Savant diagnostic methodology. He has helped over 65 Australian business owners create more than $47 million in automated wealth through subconscious pattern diagnosis and passive income system development. His work draws on 38 years of consciousness practice and direct operational experience managing businesses for ultra-high-net-worth entrepreneurs.