Lisa Feldman Barrett

Movements.

And these movements, the preparation for movement, literal copies of those

Signals become predictions for what you will see and hear and smell and taste and think and feel.

So under the hood, your brain is predicting what movements it should engage in next, and as a consequence, what you will experience because of those movements.

So you act first, and then you sense.

You don't sense and then react.

You predict action, and then you sense.

Okay.

So right now you and I are having a conversation and I'm speaking and you're listening.

And what's really happening in your brain is that based on

many gazillion repetitions of listening to language, your brain is predicting, literally predicting every single word that will come out of my mouth.

And how surprising would it have been if I didn't say mouth, I said some other orifice of my body that words were coming out of?

That would have been pretty surprising.

Because your brain is predicting that.

Your brain is always predicting.

And it's correcting those predictions when they're incorrect.

Correct.

And, you know, I have this video that I often show when I'm giving a talk to scientists or to civilians.

I'm giving a talk and it creates a situation where they can predict something and they can feel that a prediction is not just this abstract kind of thought.

It's your brain is...