Your Brain Predicted This Title BEFORE You Read It—Here’s How 🧠
Your senses are lying to you, and your brain wouldn’t have it any other way. (10min Read)
TL;DR Summary
Your brain predicts reality: It’s constantly guessing what’s next based on past sensory inputs.
Reference frames: Your brain creates mental maps to interpret the world and update them as you move.
Cortical columns and voting: Your brain's cortical columns work like mini-brains, "voting" on sensory input to create a unified understanding of reality.
Movement is key: Movement helps refine predictions, allowing your brain to confirm or update its sensory maps.
Reading this blog is an example: Your brain predicts each word and recalibrates when something unexpected happens (like a typo).
Your brain is adaptable: Neuroscientists like Dr. David Eagleman are showing how it can even learn new senses by repurposing sensory input.
Why it matters: Understanding this helps you break patterns, adapt to uncertainty, and embrace new possibilities in your life.
Your Brain is Predicting This Sentence
Pause for a second. Think about what you’re doing right now.
You’re reading, processing shapes on a screen, hearing the faint hum of your environment, maybe feeling the texture of your chair.
But you’re not just reacting to these sensations—you’re predicting them.
Your brain already guessed the meaning of this sentence before you finished reading it.
The fact that you understand this blog without consciously assembling each letter or sound is proof of your brain’s predictive genius.
But how does it work? How does your brain take the raw data streaming in through your eyes, ears, and skin and turn it into this seamless, meaningful experience?
The secret lies in a concept called predictive processing.
That’s fancy brain scientist talk that means your brain is less like a passive observer and more like a proactive fortune teller.
It constantly uses current and past sensory inputs, such as vision, hearing, and touch, to create your reality in real time.
Today, I’d like to explain how we know this, and how it works!
This one is gonna be a wild ride, let’s dive in.
Predicting Your World in Advance
Imagine trying to navigate a dark room.
You might grope around for a familiar object—a chair, a table—using your memory of the space to guide you.
That’s essentially what your brain does all the time.
Even right now, as you process this blog, your brain is working overtime to predict what’s next.
It uses reference frames—mental blueprints built from past experiences—to figure out what’s likely to happen.
Here’s the twist: these reference frames aren’t just abstract ideas.
They’re physical, neural maps in your brain’s neocortex, constantly updated as you move through the world.
Each sensory system (vision, hearing, touch) contributes to these maps, helping you create a cohesive understanding of what’s happening around you—and inside your mind.
Predictive Processing: Seeing the World Before It Happens
What does this mean for your senses?
Essentially, they’re less like camera lenses and more like confirmation machines.
Your brain predicts what it expects to see, hear, or feel and then checks whether the incoming sensory data matches.
When you look at a stop sign, your brain doesn’t build the image pixel by pixel.
Instead, it predicts the shape and color based on past experiences and uses sensory input to confirm or adjust the guess.
This is why you might not notice a typo in a familiar word—it’s not whot your brain expects to see.
For example, did you notice the “o” in the word “what” in the last sentence?
Predictive Processing in Action
The very act of reading this blog is an incredible example of predictive processing.
As your eyes scan these words, your brain doesn’t “see” every letter.
Instead, it guesses the next word based on context and adjusts if it gets it wrong. (Which is why you may have missed the “o” above.)
You’re pulling from past experiences—like recognizing the structure of this sentence or recalling what “prediction” means—to interpret what you’re reading.
As you move through each paragraph, your brain anticipates the flow, creating a mental rhythm for how the information unfolds.
This is why we love stories so much as a species, they make predicting things easier for our brain!
Think about it… Just the word “story” brings up so many predictions you can count on.
Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.
At the start, you meet the main character, and by the end, I bet you’d predict you’ll learn something.
It’s intoxicating for our prediction-driven brains.
So, how does it create these predictions or “reference frames”? And how do they create our reality?
The Brain’s Voting Mechanism
Imagine you’re in a room full of people trying to decide what’s for dinner.
Everyone offers suggestions, debates the options, and ultimately agrees on a single choice.
Surprisingly, your brain works in a similar way—constantly “voting” to interpret the world around you.
This process happens within cortical columns, the building blocks of your brain’s neocortex.
These cortical columns use a “voting mechanism” to build accurate predictions and understand the sensory input they receive.
This decentralized, consensus-driven process is at the heart of how your brain constructs reality.
What Are Cortical Columns?
Cortical columns are small, cylindrical structures in the neocortex—your brain’s outer layer responsible for higher-order functions like perception, memory, and reasoning.
Each column is like an independent mini-processor, responsible for analyzing specific sensory data, such as a patch of light, a fragment of sound, or the texture of an object.
But here’s the wild part: these columns don’t work in isolation.
They communicate and “vote” on their interpretations of the world, cross-referencing their predictions with one another to create a coherent perception.
Sounds complex, I know, but let’s break it down!
How the Voting Mechanism Works
Each cortical column forms its own hypothesis based on the sensory data it’s processing.
For example, if you’re looking at a coffee mug, one column might process its curved edge, while another focuses on its color or texture.
The columns share their guesses with neighboring columns like a network of advisors exchanging opinions.
This information travels through neural connections, updating the brain’s overall understanding of the object.
Through this back-and-forth exchange, the columns “vote” on what they collectively believe they’re sensing.
If the majority agree that it’s a coffee mug, the brain finalizes that prediction, and you perceive a coffee mug.
If conflicting data arises—say, the mug is unexpectedly hot—the voting mechanism adjusts, creating a new consensus, and a new prediction, thus a new perception of reality.
This constant recalibration ensures your brain’s maps of the world stay accurate and adaptive.
In this way, your brain is really like a ton of mini-brains all working together.
This may seem convoluted. Why do we need this voting system?
Great question.
It’s necessary because sensory input is noisy, incomplete, and often ambiguous.
By having thousands of cortical columns working in parallel and cross-referencing their interpretations, the brain creates a more reliable, unified understanding of the world.
Think of it like multiple witnesses describing the same event.
Individually, their accounts might differ, but together they create a fuller, more accurate picture.
Your Brain is Voting Right Now
Earlier, I mentioned how your brain is using predictive processing and your senses to read this blog.
But in reality, it’s your cortical columns voting that’s truly driving this process.
Visual columns interpret the letters and shapes on the screen.
Language-processing columns are predicting the meaning of each word and sentence.
Touch and proprioception columns handle the feel of your device or the position of your body as you sit or hold your phone.
All these columns are voting, recalibrating, and updating their predictions in real-time to make sense of this experience.
Experiment: Experience the Voting Mechanism for Yourself
Try this exercise to feel how your brain’s voting system works:
Close Your Eyes and Touch an Object
Pick up a familiar object, like your phone or a coffee mug, and feel it without looking. Notice how your brain quickly guesses what it is based on texture and shape.Introduce Ambiguity
Now put something unexpected on the object—a rubber band or piece of tape—and feel it again.Observe the Delay
Notice the slight pause as your brain’s cortical columns adjust their predictions and vote on what’s happening.
This delay is the voting mechanism at work, recalibrating your perception based on the new sensory input.
Movement and Sensory Perception
One last wrinkle I’ve got to add is movement.
This is something we take for granted too often, but it’s central to how our brain processes the world.
In fact, without movement, your senses wouldn’t work the way they do.
Movement isn’t just about getting from point A to point B—it’s how your brain gathers the information it needs to make sense of the world.
Your brain uses movement as a way to interact with the world, actively testing its predictions about reality.
Without it, sensory input would be static, and your brain wouldn’t have the ability to build the dynamic maps it relies on to predict and understand.
To understand just how little we think about this, but how important it is, let’s pretend we’re touring a house together.
The only difference is, you’re going to walk in, and sit in the middle of the living room without moving to tour the house, and I’m going to walk around it and explore.
Which one of us would get to know the house better?
Movement as a Key to Refining Predictions
Movement allows you to confirm or adjust your predictions, making your understanding of the space more precise.
Without movement, these predictions are static—they rely entirely on past experiences.
Movement introduces new sensory inputs, enabling the brain to detect discrepancies, update its internal models, and adapt to changes in the environment.
This isn’t just helpful—it’s fundamental to how the brain works.
Each cortical column in your brain operates with its own reference frame, and movement provides the information needed to align and synchronize these reference frames.
Movement is how you “ask questions” of your environment, such as:
Vision: Shifting your gaze to focus on specific objects.
Touch: Running your fingers over a surface to determine texture.
Hearing: Turning your head to pinpoint the source of a sound.
If your predictions don’t match the reality your movement reveals—say, you bump into a table you thought was farther away—your brain quickly updates its map to reduce prediction errors.
Without movement, your brain’s predictions remain hypothetical.
This is why movement is not just an accessory to perception—it’s a fundamental part of how we experience and navigate reality.
I wish I had time to tell you about how each sense uses “movement” in its own unique way.
Or, why static AIs, like ChatGPT, that can’t move shouldn’t worry us as much as they do, but alas, we’ve come to the end of our time together today!
Why Does This Matter?
By now, you might be wondering: Why does any of this matter to me day to day?
I love this question.
Every moment of your life is shaped by your brain’s ability to predict, adapt, and learn.
Your relationships, work, decisions, and even your sense of identity all depend on this predictive machinery.
Understanding how your brain works isn’t just fascinating—it’s empowering.
Think about it:
When you’re stuck in a pattern—whether it’s a habit, a mindset, or a relationship dynamic—it’s your brain clinging to outdated predictions. Recognizing this gives you the chance to introduce new “inputs” (movement, experiences, perspectives) to create better outcomes. This is how therapy and coaching work.
When you face uncertainty, your brain’s predictive system helps you make sense of it, giving you the confidence to act even when you don’t have all the answers.
When you learn something new, like a skill or a language, you’re rewiring your cortical columns, updating your maps, and expanding your understanding of the world.
The magic of your brain is its adaptability.
It’s not fixed or rigid—it’s constantly evolving, learning, and growing with you.
That means you’re never stuck.
You can train your brain to see the world differently, embrace change, and even imagine entirely new possibilities for yourself.
When life feels overwhelming, remember that your brain thrives on curiosity and exploration.
Move, ask questions, challenge your perceptions.
These simple actions ignite your brain’s predictive machinery, opening the door to growth and understanding.
The question isn’t whether your brain is ready to grow—it’s whether you’ll give it the chance.
So, what will you challenge your brain to predict next?
And, as always, until next time… Live Heroically! (I bet you knew I was gonna say that!) 🧠
Supporting Research
Eagleman, D. (2015). The Brain: The Story of You.
Hawkins, J., & Blakeslee, S. (2004). On Intelligence.
Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181-204.
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127-138.
Mountcastle, V. B. (1997). The columnar organization of the neocortex. Brain, 120(4), 701–722.