How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

If your brain were merely reactive, it would be too inefficient to keep you alive. You are always being bombarded by sensory input. One human retina transmits as much visual data as a fully loaded computer network connection in every waking moment; now multiply that by every sensory pathway you have. A reactive brain would bog down like your Internet connection does when too many of your neighbors are streaming movies from Netflix. A reactive brain would also be too expensive, metabolically speaking, because it would require more interconnections than it could maintain.12 Evolution literally wired your brain for efficient prediction. As an example of this wiring in your visual system, have a look at figure 4-1, which shows how your brain predicts far more visual input than it receives.

Brian primarily a prediction tool. This would be interesting for concepts related to dreams and deja vu