Intro

Predictive processing (PP) is a theory in neuroscience that suggests the brain is fundamentally a prediction machine. Rather than passively receiving information, the brain shows us what it expects to perceive and compares these expectations to actual sensory data. When there’s a mismatch—the brain adjusts its prediction to better align with reality.

Implications:

• We do not perceive the actual world – we perceive the world generated by our brain. This is a combination of sensory data and prior experience (aka “priors”).
• This prediction is beyond visual – it is everything we experience, our sense of self, and our attitude (thoughts, feelings, assumptions).

WHY does the brain do this?

Raw sensory input is noisy, ambiguous, and incomplete. The world is too complex and fast-changing for the brain to process every bit of information from scratch in real time. Instead, the brain builds internal models to anticipate what it expects to encounter, allowing it to interpret and respond to sensory input efficiently.

PP in terms of brain regions:

• The default mode network is speculated to run continuous simulations of the world using priors. The temporal parietal junction is speculated to check the accuracy between these simulations and sensory data. When something is off, there is a detectable error signal in the brain, and priors are updated.

Hypothesis

• It’s speculated that deep equanimity occurs when this error checker is relaxed. It’s speculated that meditation, for example, harmonizes the top-down predictive world, with bottom-up sensory world, resulting in less conflict.

Reflection

With predictive processing in mind, we can imagine a mental health continuum:

• Extremely closed: we are over-dependent on our priors. Our feelings, intuitions, thoughts, are stuck in an inflexible loop. New sensory input and broader perspective are ignored. This may correlate with rumination and depression.
• Extremely open: we lose our sense of predictability and familiarity. Everything is highly novel. New associations and assumptions are formed.

Life is a balance between these poles. Though, we seem pitched toward becoming more closed as we age – accumulating priors and becoming entrenched in patterns and beliefs.

This raises an important question: how can we find balance? It would seem one clue is meditation, and more generally expanding our perspective through any means.

This circles back to the Relaxed DMN Hypothesis.

Further Reflection

Predictive processing provides a powerful lens for understanding a range of mental health conditions, each potentially involving dysfunctions in how the brain generates and updates its internal models. Examples:

• Anxiety: The brain overestimates the likelihood or severity of threats, constantly predicting danger even in safe situations. These hyperactive threat predictions dominate perception and can amplify physical sensations (like a racing heart), reinforcing the anxiety.
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): The brain generates persistent predictions of potential harm or incompleteness, leading to compulsive behaviors aimed at reducing prediction errors (e.g., checking, cleaning) even when the environment shows no real discrepancy or danger.
• Schizophrenia: The predictive hierarchy may become dysregulated, leading to either overly strong top-down predictions (delusions) or weakened priors that give too much weight to raw sensory data (hallucinations). The balance between expectation and perception is disrupted.
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): The brain’s model may become overly tuned to anticipate trauma-related cues, misinterpreting benign stimuli as threats and triggering fight-or-flight responses due to persistent prediction errors tied to past experiences.
• Eating Disorders: In conditions like anorexia, the brain may hold a rigid prior belief about body image or weight, resisting updating even in the face of conflicting sensory evidence (e.g., mirrors, comments from others), sustaining distorted self-perceptions.

In each case, the core idea is that mental suffering may result not just from emotional responses, but from deeply ingrained prediction systems that fail to adapt or learn properly from experience.

Relief

A likely means of shifting bad predictions points to the Relaxed DMN Hypothesis.

Discussion

This article has been posted to reddit for voting and discussion:

The Predictive Processing Wellbeing Hypothesis
byu/self-investigation inSelfInvestigation