How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Early in life, you build up concepts from detailed sensory input (as prediction error) from your body and the world. Your brain efficiently compresses the sensory input it receives, just like YouTube compresses video, extracting similarities out of differences, eventually creating an efficient, multisensory summary. Once your brain has learned a concept in this manner, it can run this process in reverse, expanding the similarities into differences to construct an instance of the concept, much as your computer or phone expands the incoming YouTube video for display. This is a prediction. Think of prediction as “applying” a concept, modifying the activity in your primary sensory and motor regions, and correcting or refining as needed.