The Experience Machine
How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality
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A grand new vision of cognitive science that explains how our minds build our worlds
‘One of the most important books yet published this century’ Spectator
For as long as we've studied the mind, we've believed that information flowing from our senses determines what our mind perceives. But as our understanding has advanced in the last few decades, a hugely powerful new view has flipped this assumption on its head. The brain is not a passive receiver, but an ever-active predictor.
At the forefront of this cognitive revolution is widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, who has synthesized his ground-breaking work on the predictive brain to explore its fascinating mechanics and implications. Among the most stunning of these is the realization that experience itself, because it is guided by prior expectation, is a kind of controlled hallucination. We don't passively take in the world around us; instead our mind is constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see. This even applies to our bodies, as the way we experience pain and other states is shaped by our expectations, and this has broader implications for the understanding and treatment of conditions from PTSD to schizophrenia to medically unexplained symptoms. From the most mundane experiences to the most sublime, it is our predictions that sculpt our experience.
A landmark study of cognitive science, The Experience Machine lays out the extraordinary explanatory power of the predictive brain for our lives, mental health and society.
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"Human brains are prediction machines," contends Clark (Surfing Uncertainty), a cognitive philosophy professor at the University of Sussex, in this eye-opening study. Pushing back against the idea that the brain passively processes information from the senses, Clark argues that the organ is instead constantly predicting external reality based on previous experiences and adjusting mental impressions as new information arises. He highlights the surprising scientific research that backs up this claim, noting a 2001 study that demonstrated the power of suggestion on perception by asking participants to report if they heard the song "White Christmas" buried in a white noise recording; one-third said they did, despite the tune not featuring in the noise. Predictive processing, Clark suggests, can contribute to depression (through failure of the brain to alter negative expectations even when faced with "evidence of positive outcomes") and chronic pain (through false predictions that "innocent" bodily signals indicate physiological damage). This revelation opens new vistas for treatment, and Clark describes how cognitive reframing can teach patients to correct "aberrant predictions" and reinterpret pain. The mind-bending research upends conventional wisdom about how humans interact with the world around them, and the lucid prose ensures lay readers won't get lost. This head trip delivers.
