



I studied philosophy and am doing my PhD right now. One thing that always fascinated me was "Philosophy of Mind". There you are thinking about what the mind is and how mind and brain are hanging together. At the same time, I am an audio engineer and always heard the tipp to not rely too heavily on spectrum graphs. We heard it all: Use your ears not your eyes!





But how comes our eyes are deceiving us sometimes? As I learned about these new theories how our brain works it finally all made sense.





Our brains are prediction machines





One of the most hyped theories of how our brain works is predictive coding or predictive processing. Wikipedia states the following about it:





"Predictive coding (also known as predictive processing) is a theory of brain function in which the brain is constantly generating and updating a mental model of the environment. The model is used to generate predictions of sensory input that are compared to actual sensory input. This comparison results in prediction errors that are then used to update and revise the mental model."





So your brain stores a model of your environment and tries to predict what will happen next. That means your brain is constantly guessing the future. For example, when you go for a walk with your dog on a foggy day and you know that usually there are some sheeps on the field over there. Your brain is guessing that the speck you are seeing in the distance is a sheep. As you come closer you see that this thing is not moving at all and it is not even white like the sheeps should be. That causes a prediction error and your model of the world gets updated. As you come even closer you see that the farmer is a funny guy and planted a figure of a dog there for whatever reason. Next time you walk there the predictions will be different than they were before you had this experience.









Sometimes our predictions are far off





Of course this process can go wrong. Look for example at this video: