Imagine you are walking on warm sand, on a sunny summer’s day, holding hands with your partner. While perceiving this environment, your brain receives and needs to integrate a cascade of sensory information coming from both outside and inside your body: the warmth of the sand, the brightness of the sunlight, the salty smell of the air, the sound of your heart pounding in your chest, the warmth of your partner’s skin touching your hand.
We usually experience a ‘real me’ that is linked to the body and which lies at the core of all of our sensory experiences, emotions, memories, and thoughts. This ‘I’ or ‘me’ is somehow always there, even if only in the background – transparently, so to speak; and it is felt as being distinct from the world and other people (the sand and your partner, let’s say).
This sense of being a ‘real me’ connected with a real world ‘out there’ makes us feel present and immersed in the flow of our daily lives. But how exactly does this work?
In a seminal paper entitled ‘Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science’, Andy Clark1 proposed that the brain’s job is to predict whatever information is coming next based on the information perceived before.
Instead of being a passive sponge receiving information from inside and outside our bodies, the brain actively anticipates the world through the lens of past experiences. Whatever we have perceived and experienced before leaves traces, so to speak, in our nervous and perceptual systems. The brain uses these ‘traces’ prevailingly to spot danger.
This is why it’s so difficult to forget negative events: the brain wants to keep us out of trouble. Harmless information, like the colour of the doorknob at my hotel, will likely be treated as boring and erased from memory. However, the colour of the jacket on the thief that attacked me on the street stays with me. This is an important insight stressed by Clark and other researchers like Karl Friston2 and Jakob Hohwy. READ MORE...
