Jo Marchant

And there's quite a lot of evidence now that actually what the brain is doing

It's always predicting ahead.

It's like we're not predicting the future exactly, but we're predicting the present.

The brain is running a model of what it thinks that this sort of all of these past sensations that have arrived mean for what is likely to be happening now.

And it's that model that we are perceiving.

So you and I would be building very different models of our world depending on

our past experience.

So I can give you a couple of examples.

I don't know if you remember the dress that went viral on the Internet.

I think it was in 2015.

And some people thought there was a photograph of a dress and some people saw it as white and gold and some people saw it as blue and black.

Do you remember that?

It was massive.

And essentially what seems to have been happening is that it was an ambiguous photo.

You couldn't tell from the photo itself what the lighting conditions were.

Was it an overexposed blue and black dress or an underexposed white and gold dress?

And depending on your previous experience, your experience with different lighting conditions,

And the kinds of environments that you've grown up in, different people's brains are jumping to very different conclusions about what is the most likely situation for this photograph.

And so different people with different backstories are seeing completely different things.

So when we say that your brain is predicting ahead what's likely happening now, it's using...