If you read popular science books about the brain, you might have encountered a new “grand theory” called predictive processing. If you haven’t yet, you will. Over the last two decades, it has gone from obscure idea to increasingly dominant paradigm. And it’s such a broad and all-encompassing theory that it seemingly has something to say about everything: how the brain works, why it’s structured the way it is, what that means for how we perceive the world—but also horror movies, mental health, cancer cells, and perhaps even endurance sports and adventure.
I’ve been trying to get my head around predictive processing for five or six years now. It can get complicated if you dig into the mathematical details. But I recently read a book called The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality that does a good job of conveying the theory’s essence in an accessible way. It came out last year and is by Andy Clark, a cognitive philosopher at the University of Sussex who is one of the theory’s leading proponents. The book got me thinking about how predictive processing applies to some of the…
