Not long ago, Dr. Jud spoke of “Predictive Processing “ at a Thursday weekly Mindshift meeting. After feeling some initial resistance, I noticed curiosity emerging.
My takeaway: The prefrontal cortex part of the brain, the conceptual thinking, planning part of the brain is always trying to predict the future, establishing habits that provide a sense of safety, efficiency and stability. An excess of incoming information bombards the brain so that it can’t possibly process everything it receives. It tends to fill in the blanks, based on context. And, it actually favors information that deviates from expectations or story, or what is called the Mental model.
Several weeks ago, as I walked my dog at dusk, it turned out to be a longer walk than planned. It had grown quite dark and I noticed the silhouette of a large dog standing very still like a statue across the street. “’Wow!” “ How odd I thought,” for a dog to be out on its own and standing so motionless. My curiosity peaked and I took a longer look. The creature was standing on the side of the street where there is a tract of land with a lot of brush and vegetation. Suddenly I realized that it was a wild boar that had captured my attention! I wanted to get a closer look, never having seen one before .. AND I wanted to walk me and my small dog to back to safety.
My brain filled in the blanks based on the context – my neighborhood with lots of dogs… it MUST be a dog. When I realized it was not, it was a WOW experience. It deviated from my humdrum expectation that someone’s dog was loose. Wow experiences make us naturally curious, wanting to know more, to move in closer, to maybe see in a different way.
This top-down model, originating in the PFC where we store our
assumptions, stories and biases based on past experiences and from where we” fill in the blanks” when we don’t know, keeps us locked in habitual ways of being. We become prisoners of our own comfort zones. We get attached to the view from our own subjective bias glasses.
How do we step out of the mental model and create a new way of seeing things? Grounding practice, being curious and attentive to one’s surroundings in the moment, helps us move into the space of opening to sensory input. This spaciousness enables us to no longer look only for deviations from what’s expected. It sparks a desire to pay attention to new sensory information and perhaps, thru noting, create a new model. Even asking, is there another way to see this?
Here’s a look at the gears through the predictive processing lens:
1st gear – Awareness I have a story , assumptions and expectations.
2nd gear – Is the sensory information I’m receiving now supporting my mental model? Perhaps a new model is needed.
3rd gear – BBO- new sensory data opens up space to be with whatever is happening. Sensory data never need be justified or analyzed. It just is. New, fresh sensory input refines the top down model, supporting habit change based on new collected data.
