Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active

#85 · 🔥 269 · 💬 205 · one year ago · www.mpi.nl · giuliomagnifico · 📷
Our brain works a bit like the autocomplete function on your phone - it is constantly trying to guess the next word when we are listening to a book, reading or conducting a conversation. Their findings are published in PNAS. This is in line with a recent theory on how our brain works: it is a prediction machine, which continuously compares sensory information that we pick up with internal predictions. Brain research into this phenomenon is usually done in an artificial setting, Heilbron reveals. "Studies of this kind do in fact reveal that our brain can make predictions, but not that this always happens in the complexity of everyday life as well. We are trying to take it out of the lab setting. We are studying the same type of phenomenon, how the brain deals with unexpected information, but then in natural situations that are much less predictable." The researchers analysed the brain activity of people listening to stories by Hemingway or about Sherlock Holmes. For each word or sound, the brain makes detailed statistical expectations and turns out to be extremely sensitive to the degree of unpredictability: the brain response is stronger whenever a word is unexpected in the context. "In fact, our brain does something comparable to speech recognition software. Speech recognisers using artificial intelligence are also constantly making predictions and are allowing themselves to be guided by their expectations, just like the autocomplete function on your phone. Nevertheless, we observed a big difference: brains predict not only words, but make predictions on many different levels, from abstract meaning and grammar to specific sounds."
Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active



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