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Predictions filter what you notice
The predicting brain
Neuroscience calls this predictive processing. Instead of simply reacting to reality as it unfolds, the brain is constantly predicting what happens next: filling in missing information and making educated guesses about the future.
Predictions as a filter
Those guesses act as a filter. Someone who walks into a meeting convinced colleagues don't respect them notices the person checking a phone and misses the person nodding along. Someone who believes a partner is pulling away finds one distracted response more meaningful than ten moments of affection.
Collecting evidence
Once danger has been predicted, the brain collects evidence for the danger it expects, and the situation gets read through a conclusion reached before all the information arrived. The more frightened the person feels, the more certain that conclusion seems. The brain doesn't care whether the story it writes is accurate. It cares whether the story keeps you alive, which means it would rather make you anxious than leave you vulnerable.
Where did predictive processing come from?
Hermann von Helmholtz argued in the 1860s that perception is a kind of unconscious inference, with the brain drawing conclusions about the world from incomplete sensory signals. Modern predictive processing builds on that idea. Neuroscientist Karl Friston and philosopher Andy Clark developed the contemporary versions in the 2000s and 2010s.
Do expectations really change what people see?
In 1949, Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman flashed playing cards at participants, including trick cards such as a red six of spades. Participants often named them as ordinary cards, calling the red six of spades a black six of spades or a red six of hearts. Many only noticed that something was wrong after much longer exposures.
Why do anxious people spot threats faster?
In 1986, Colin MacLeod, Andrew Mathews, and Philip Tata used a dot-probe task to test attention. Patients with anxiety responded faster to a dot when it appeared where a threatening word had just been shown. Participants without anxiety did not show the same bias.
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