The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

by Andy Clark

here’s the twist—these experimentally biased experiences induced expectations themselves. Seeming to experience higher or lower levels of pain in the ways cued by the geometric shapes created a feedback loop in which participants’ own experiences appeared to confirm their (false) cue-based expectations. This “false confirmation” cemented their misguided belief in the predictive power of the different cues. You might have expected subjects to learn, over time, that the cues were not reliable, but this did not occur. But then again, how could it? Each time the heat was applied, the different geometric cues caused them to experience its intensity in line with the false expectations they had learned. So every exposure seemed (subjectively speaking) to simply confirm the predictive power of the cues!