There is a long history of philosophers and scientists talking about related ideas, and today it is not uncommon for neuroscientists to say the brain learns a predictive model of the world. But in 1986, neuroscientists and textbooks still described the brain more like a computer; information comes in, it gets processed, and then the brain acts. Of course, learning a model of the world and making predictions isn’t the only thing the neocortex does. However, by studying how the neocortex makes predictions, I believed we could unravel how the entire system worked.
