Putting these ideas together, we perceive ourselves as stable over time in part because of a self-fulfilling prior expectation that our physiological condition is restricted to a particular range, and in part because of a self-fulfilling prior expectation that this condition does not change. In other words, effective physiological regulation may depend on systematically misperceiving the body’s internal state as being more stable than it really is, and as changing less than it really does.
