Your Brain is a Prediction Machine

Whether you are aware of it or not, your brain is constantly making predictions - and these predictions have an enormous influence on your beliefs, expectations and overall experience of life. In this week's podcast we explore the predictive processing framework and how this helps us understand our emotions, decision making, confidence, common mental health problems and even gambling.

Audio-Essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Curmi is a consultant General Adult Psychiatrist who completed his training in the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust. In addition to general adult psychiatry he has a special interest in psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation.

Intro Excerpt from: The Matrix (1999)

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Transcript

You have found the Thinking Mind podcast. 2s Welcome back to the Thinking Minds podcast. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist. Today we're going to be talking about the brain as a prediction machine and how our beliefs and expectations shape our experience of life. 11s As we've explored a lot on this podcast, there are many ways to think about the brain given how complex it is. One of the ways you can think about it is as a prediction machine. And this way of thinking about it is backed up by a lot of recent neuroscience. And within neuroscience this is called the predictive processing framework. Thinking about the brain in this paradigm can go a long way towards helping us understand things like our emotional responses, how we make decisions, confidence, gambling, and even mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. So what does it mean to say the brain is a prediction machine? Essentially, this means that the brain has a mental model about how things work, how the world works, how events are likely to unfold, how things are likely to go in relationships with other people, and how things are likely to go for us in our lives. The brain is essentially using this mental model to try and anticipate what's going to happen next, and then compares the mental model with the sensory input from the world about what actually does happen, and then updates that mental model accordingly. This is how our minds learn and develop throughout our lives. For example, if a child sees a dog in a park and gets bitten by the dog the next time the child sees a dog, it's much more likely to have a fear response, because now the child's mental model will now contain the notion that dogs can be a threat. This explains why we have a lot of our emotional responses. Normally, we experience an emotion. If something doesn't go the way we thought it was going to go. If things go better than we thought, we experience joy and enthusiasm and euphoria. If things go worse than we thought, we experienced fear, sadness, helplessness. That's why if you don't prepare well for an exam and expect to fail, but then you scrape a pass, you might find yourself being more enthusiastic than if you work really hard, expect to do well, and then get a B, even though you objectively performed better. In the second instance, the emotional response you experienced is reflective of the difference between what you thought might happen and what actually happened, rather than merely being a reflection of the outcome. 1s This speaks to the importance of beliefs and expectations in terms of influencing how we see the world and determining our life, happiness and life satisfaction, which is something people have known for a long time. 1s Like most of our psychological life, a lot of our beliefs and expectations are mostly unconscious and influenced by many things, including our personality, our life experiences, our family, our culture, and so on. But we can become more aware of them. And then once we become aware of our expectations, we can decide to consciously alter them. This is especially important for any area of our life we're trying to improve in. Because our expectations can be set too high or our expectations can be a little misguided, or they can be flat out wrong. 1s By setting our expectations correctly, we can make it such that we're much more likely to exceed our expectations, which our mind will perceive as a win, causing a sudden flush of motivation which will propel us and keep us going. For example, if you're trying to get into a workout routine and this is not normally part of your week, if you set yourself the goal to go to the gym for two hours a day for five days a week, you're setting your expectations and therefore your criteria for winning quite high. Which means if you only end up going for one hour, three days a week, on some level you still feel like you're losing, even though you're doing way more than you were doing previously. This sets you up to fail because it's very difficult to keep yourself motivated in that context. If, on the other hand, you consciously set your expectations low, say that you should just get to the gym and spend five minutes there three days a week. You've now set up the conditions that make it much more likely that you'll experience a win, i.e. meeting or exceeding your expectations, which will motivate you and make it much more likely that you'll continue to build that habit across time. Similarly, our expectations of relationships will have a huge impact on how we experience our relationship. For example, mainstream culture has largely conditioned us to think that the challenge of relationships is merely finding the correct person, and that once you do, you will find yourself happily ever after. If you go into a relationship with this expectation, this will make it difficult. When you find out that maintaining any type of long term relationship requires a lot of proactive effort to understand the person you're with, to continue to understand yourself and the dynamic you create together to keep levels of intimacy high and resentment low, to keep the relationship healthy and vibrant. 1s Your mistake in expectations may cause you to blame the general difficulty of being in a relationship on your partner, and come to the conclusion that you've simply found the wrong person again and end the relationship, only to continue the same pattern with a new person a few months later. Conversely, if you go into a relationship with the expectation that in the medium to long term, it's going to be a bit tricky and will require some effort and proactivity from both of you to maintain. Then, despite the fact that the level of difficulty is essentially the same, to feel a lot easier, and one is able to tackle these problems with a lot more ease and grace, and you're much less likely to simply blame your partner or blame yourself when things are hard. 2s Apologies for mentioning Buddhism again, but this is why the first proclamation of Buddhism that life is suffering is so cathartic to so many people because it resets our beliefs about how difficult life is supposed to be. This also runs counter to a lot of modern cultural conditioning, which subtly makes us think if we're not succeeding and totally happy at all times, if we don't have a six pack and $1 million that we're failing, that our successes and failures are entirely our responsibility, with no role of luck, chance, fate, or misfortune. 1s So if the brain is a prediction machine. What happens when things become unpredictable? When things become too unpredictable, particularly when that unpredictability is characterized by negative events? It's majorly disruptive. It produces a lot of stress and anxiety because it's a major signal from our environment that our mental model of the world is wrong in some catastrophic way. It can often, of course, cause people to become depressed. And one of the things we know about depression is that it causes us to become very pessimistic about ourselves, the world, and others. This is known as Beck's cognitive triad. 1s This is also one of the things that characterizes trauma. An event which can be traumatic for one person may not necessarily be traumatic for another person. This is because for an event to not be just difficult, but frankly traumatic, it will usually be outside of our normal mental map of what we typically think is likely to happen, for example, an earthquake or an extreme act of violence. This is why children are so vulnerable to trauma, because their mental models are so undeveloped and unsophisticated that they don't have the same context or ability to process negative events that adults do. When too many negative things happen over a long enough time period, it produces a phenomenon called learned helplessness, i.e. a strong but often incorrect feeling that nothing we can do can be effective to control our environments in our favor, and therefore it would be better to do nothing and just conserve our energy. Like many things in psychology, this can be useful in the short term, but deeply corrosive in the long term. Some people's whole lives unfold in this way, with negative events coloring their expectations and beliefs and behavior. Many people have had enough bad things happen to them that they are now stuck in a state of land helplessness. And for them, not trying has become their default. Often learned helplessness can be masked by cynicism, nihilism or misanthropy, others mitigated by developing a morbid passivity and a dependence on other people. 1s Your expectations can influence your emotions and vice versa in the very short term as well. For example, when you're in a bad mood and something negative happens, like you get caught in traffic, you're much more likely to hyper focus on that negative event and dwell on it, which makes your mood worse, which makes it much more likely that you will notice and hyper emphasize the next bad thing which happens to you. Not only that, but it will also change your behavior, making you generally less pleasant and more difficult person to deal with, which makes it much more likely that you're going to have more negative things happen to you, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, when you're in a good mood, even when negative things happen to you, you're much more likely to take it in your stride. And when something good happens, it seems that much better, that much more joyous and life affirming. Having this disposition will make it much more likely that you can make more good things happen to you in your interactions with others and your interactions with the world. 1s These ideas are in part captured in the book The Winner Effect by Ian Robertson, who we had on the podcast a few weeks ago. In this book, the author describes how when an individual experiences success, it makes it much more likely they will experience success in the future. This is, of course, for all sorts of reasons, including neuro biologically, that winning stimulates the release of all sorts of brain chemicals like dopamine and endorphins, and decreases the release of stress hormones, producing a sense of calm, confidence and well-being. Confidence itself is something that Robertson went on to go into in depth in his 2021 book, How Confidence Works. And here the idea of brain prediction comes in again, where Robertson defines confidence as a combination of predicting you can do something, and also predicting that if you do that thing, it will have a desired effect. For example, I can stop smoking and if I do stop, I will be healthier. Confidence then, has a lot to do with our beliefs about what we can make happen in our lives, and therefore, it's very important to understand that the brain is continually making a lot of these predictions all on its own, but that we can consciously step in and adjust this process. And that's crucial to building up our sense of confidence. Let's look at something like anxiety. When it comes to anxiety, your brain and body are normally making a prediction that something is more dangerous than it is. If you have social anxiety, you may experience the prospect of meeting new people as an extremely dangerous endeavor. If you have to go by how your body is feeling with an increased heart rate, sweating, and the feeling of terror in your gut, you'd be forgiven for thinking that you might die. One way you can think about this is that your mind is watching to see what you do next. If you take the experience of social anxiety seriously and decide as a result not to go out and meet anyone, your mind will likely infer that its mental model was correct. That meeting people is in fact a dangerous prospect, and the anxiety response will come back stronger next time. 1s This is why many people become agoraphobic when they get older, meaning they stay in the house more. The prospect of leaving the house becomes more anxiety inducing, and the more they obey that cue and stay in, the more that anxiety response is reinforced. The next time the possibility of leaving the house comes up. Conversely, if you were to act opposite to the anxiety, you're making a conscious choice to act in contradiction to your mental model. And again, your mind is watching. If you act in contradiction to your anxiety and go meet people, you may have some awkward encounters, but if you go about it in a reasonable way, your mind will learn that it wasn't so dangerous that nothing really that bad could happen, and that fundamentally, when it comes to socializing, your mental model was wrong and next time you'll have less anxiety as a result. 1s This process can continue such that not only can socialising become less scary, but also that it can become positively rewarding. And it's a skill you can achieve mastery at, and one which will allow you to improve your quality of life significantly. In this way, your mental model can tell you not only what's dangerous and what's not, but also how to excel at something. 1s We've talked a lot about what happens when negative events become too unpredictable. But what about when positive events become unpredictable? As we've already mentioned, unexpected positive events will give us positive emotions like happiness and euphoria and gratitude and so on. But there really can be too much of a good thing. Even when positive events become too intense and too unexpected, we can become untethered psychologically. A really good example of this is when people become rich and famous, particularly when this happens to young people. Having a rise in wealth, status and influence too rapidly can cause people to become psychologically isolated from others, can make them less empathic, more paranoid, driven to continue feeding the machine which gave them their riches and their fame, and to chase the high associated with this. This is why famous people often fall into the traps of sex addiction and drug addiction, among other problems, and commonly feel when they get really famous that they need to ground themselves somehow with physical challenges or spiritual practices. Of course, there's one other situation where unexpected positive reward can cause us problems, and that's gambling. One thing that's really important to understand about gambling is that the vulnerability to gambling is baked so deep in the mammalian brain that you can get a mouse addicted to gambling. And this has been done experimentally in the lab. Essentially, all gambling is is a situation where a game is set up, where effort is linked to reward in an unpredictable way. And scientifically, this is known as variable ratio conditioning. 1s Variable ratio conditioning is a way to encourage a behavior by giving rewards at unpredictable times. Imagine a mouse that can push a button in order to receive a pellet of food. Instead of getting a reward every time the mouse hits the button, or every other time in a predictable way. The mouse is given the food unpredictably. And what happens? The setup where the food reward is unpredictable is the scenario where the mouse pushes the button the most, and it's hardest to get the mouse to stop pushing the button. Unpredictable reward can make an activity hugely addictive. This applies to playing a slot machine, using a dating app, or checking your phone for messages. Even when you don't win or get a message, you keep trying because you don't know when the next reward is going to come. This kind of conditioning makes the behavior incredibly hard to stop, and that's why gambling becomes so problematic for some individuals. 1s So today we've talked about how the brain operates as a prediction machine with a mental model that is continuously updates. We've talked about the implications of this way of thinking and how it helps us understand our emotions and the short term and the long term, how it can even impact our mental health and other aspects of our psychology, like confidence. It's really important to understand how our mental models are influenced by the people around us our culture, our experiences, our instincts, and how our mental models in turn shape our beliefs, our expectations, and our overall experience of life. I think it's really important for people to understand how they can consciously calibrate their beliefs and expectations, both to be more effective and to succeed, but also to face life's challenges with more grace and more equanimity. What do you think? Do you agree with what we've discussed today? If you have any feedback, you can email us at Thinking Mind Podcast at gmail.com. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and philosophy. If you like the podcast, there's many ways you can support it. You can follow us on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen. Give us a rating, share with a friend, or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thanks for listening.