Our brains, it turns out, are veritable prediction machines. We are constantly making sense of the environment—and making guesses about what will happen. It’s called predictive processing: we actively think one step ahead and look at the environment accordingly. Our brains are more proactive than reactive. Whether our predictions are accurate or not, of course, depends on the inputs and the prediction-making process. Whether they improve in accuracy or not over time depends on our capacity and willingness to learn.
I think I see the predictive processing going on with students in physics classes.
