My Prediction Is…

I was excited to learn recently that neuroscientist/psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has a new book out: 7 ½ Lessons About the Brain. I haven’t read it yet, but I hope to ASAP!

My first exposure to Dr. Barrett’s work was through her 2017 book How Emotions Are Made, and it was mind-blowing to me to say the least.

It wasn’t just a new understanding of emotions that was so impactful to me as a therapist, but several of the ideas that Dr. Barrett builds on to communicate that new understanding of emotions.

I want to explore one of the ideas from neuroscience that Dr. Barrett talks about, that I believe overlaps a bit with my own philosophical leaning in psychotherapy: the predictive brain.

How do you typically think of your brain working? If you’re like me, maybe you have thought of it as first perceiving the world around us, thanks to incoming information from our senses, and then secondly reacting to those perceptions. In other words, sense data comes in, the brain makes sense of it, and then reacts.

I believe this understanding is baked into our larger cultural understanding of ourselves at this point, and it’s how I hear most clients talk about themselves. We notice something, and then we react to it.

Maybe we see someone make a face, and then we react by feeling angry. Or maybe we feel a feeling of hunger in our gut, and we react by heading to the fridge.

Dr. Barrett argues that this isn’t really how it works. Our brains are not reactive, but predictive.

It’s too slow for our brains to wait until sense data has come in and been processed before reacting. Think about any sport. There is literally not enough time for a baseball player who is up to bat to see, process, and react to an incoming pitch before swinging.

Thinking about it metaphorically, imagine you owned a popular cafe that was really busy around lunchtime, with people coming in to buy sandwiches or a bowl of soup. Would it make sense to wait until each person came in and ordered before getting together the ingredients or making the soup? That would be way too slow! Instead, you’d prep everything ahead of time and have it ready to go.

This is how the brain works too. It doesn’t wait for incoming sense data before figuring out what’s going on. Instead, it uses your entire past experience to construct predictions, its best guesses about what’s about to happen. It then checks those predictions against incoming data and makes corrections as necessary.

Dreaming is a good way of getting a sense of what brain prediction looks like. Brain prediction looks to us like simulation of reality. So by prediction, I’m not talking about a thought popping into your head saying “I think this is about to happen”. I mean that your brain full-on creates reality based on its past experiences, and then corrects on the go based on the input from our senses.

So even while awake, you are basically dreaming reality, except that this dream is bound by incoming sense data, keeping things on track and hopefully more in line with “reality”. At night, however, when there isn’t incoming sense data, the prediction function of our brain gets to wander wherever it wants.

Dr. Barrett calls this whole process a “prediction loop”. Predict, simulate, compare with sense data, resolve errors, repeat.

What does it feel like when your brain prediction makes an error? This could look like having a hallucination, or seeing an optical illusion. Or it could be that disruptive feeling when you think there’s one more stair while walking up a staircase, and take a step expecting the stair to be there. Or when you lift a cup that you think is full, only to discover when you pick it up too fast that it’s actually empty and lighter than your brain predicted.

This is HUGE for understanding ourselves and how we operate in the world!

Whatever we are perceiving, whether it is what we see, hear, or sense “outside” of us, or feel or sense in our own bodies, let us remember that what we’re working with is prediction-first. Our perception is not “out there”, but is our brain’s best guess, based on our past experiences, and corrected as we go by incoming information.

This means we need to realize that we are limited by our past experiences, and can hugely benefit from challenging ourselves through new experiences. The way we perceive and operate in the world starts with what we’ve experienced so far. And so, putting ourselves in new situations gives our predicting brain more information to work with, allowing it to have more options when making predictions.

Part of what therapy can offer us is a chance to explore our past experiences and come to understand how these shape our current perceptions, as well as a chance to challenge ourselves to take in new information and experiences so our brain can predict in new ways.

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