E 78: How Your Predictive Brain Creates Stress (and What to Do About It)

So today we're talking about something called the predictive brain.

And I really do hope that once you understand this, you're going to start catching your own brain doing something totally fascinating.

Because guess what? Your brain doesn't just respond to what is happening right now.

It is constantly using what has happened before to anticipate what might happen next.

And most of the time, this is absolutely incredibly helpful.

Our brain wants to conserve energy.

Our brain wants to maximize our time and our effort.

And so it does this.

And this pattern is very helpful.

But sometimes our brain predicts stress before the stressful thing has ever even happened.

Sometimes the brain takes one piece of information and leaps five steps into the future.

And sometimes we actually predict reality before pretty accurately.

And then we get mad because reality doesn't match the invisible version of the reality that we think should be happening.

So today, we're going to talk about all three types of those.

Let's start out a little bit with the science for all of you science geeks out there like me about what is a predictive brain.

There's a framework in neuroscience and it's actually called predictive processing.

This is just the really simplified idea is that your brain isn't just passively receiving information from the world and then figuring out what it means, right? Your brain uses previous experience and current context to generate expectations about what is likely to happen, what is likely to encounter.

And then it compares those expectations with incoming information.

Okay, but get this, when what happens differs from what was expected, researchers call that a mismatch or a prediction error.

And these prediction error signals are an important part of learning because they give the brain information that can help update its model to the world.

And this is a very, very good thing.

This involves neuroplasticity.

This is how our brains can change.

This is how you can change.

This is how you can change your own patterns.