Your brain does not work the way you think it does…
…and nobody teaches us how we perceive and respond to the world around us. Understand your brain to help you get ahead, make changes, and feel better!
In her book1, psychology professor Lisa Barrett writes that “Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do.” Neuroscientists often remind us that what we experience daily is, in essence, a finely tuned hallucination—shaped by the world around us, influenced by our bodies, but ultimately crafted by the brain. This ongoing illusion colours every sensation, every action. It’s how our brain assigns meaning to the sensory data it receives, a process so seamless, so ordinary, that we barely notice it at all. Yet, it’s this very hallucination that defines our reality.
It’s the normal way that your brain gives meaning to the sensory inputs from your body and from the world (called “sense data”), and you’re almost always unaware that it’s happening.
People tend to feel like we’re reacting to what’s actually happening in the world. In truth, your brain is constantly pulling from its vast archive of memories and past experiences, assembling what it believes to be your reality. It cross-checks this constructed version with the sensory data flowing in from your heart, lungs, metabolism, immune system, and the world around you, adjusting on the fly. Remarkably, as Dr. Barrett points out, in a way that “defies common sense,” you’re not responding to reality as it unfolds. Instead, you’re acting on predictions your brain is making about what’s coming next, long before the present moment fully arrives2.
Predictions turn mere flashes of light into the objects you perceive. They convert shifts in air pressure into familiar sounds, and chemical traces into smells and tastes. Predictions are what allow you to read these squiggles on the page and comprehend them as letters, words, and ideas - writes Barrett. They’re also why it feels oddly incomplete when a sentence is missing its final.
Don’t believe me? Let’s see how this sentence will make …
It’s the brain's relentless anticipation, turning fragments into the world we understand.
Similar things happens with emotions. We experience things like anger or anxiety as feelings caused by outside events. But really, as Barrett says, “Emotions don’t happen to you—they are made by your brain as you need them.”
It may seem like a subtle distinction, but the implications are profound: the more you understand emotions, the finer they are crafted by your brain. And this is not always beneficial to your mental well-being.
Let that sink in. In the world, where children and adults are taught to embrace their emotions and consider their feelings as the unerring source of truth and happiness, the reality-check can be harsh. The more you know about emotions, the harder it becomes to live a life where you are in control of your own happiness.
People nowadays focus on "managing" emotions once they surface (that is what’s called emotion regulation), but when you grasp that emotions are something you construct in the first place, you gain the power to shape how (and if) they emerge in the first place.
Why does this happen?
If we construct the reality around us, including our emotions, does that mean we have the power to change how we feel?
Short answer is… Yes!
Pause and think what this means for managing the anxiety and stress stirred up by something disruptive. If your actions are shaped by your past experiences and predictions, how much control do you really have over what you do?
Take a moment to write some reflections on your own emotions and patterns of managing them. Reflect on the last few days. If you already keep a daily journal, read through your entries over the last week. What emotions did you experience? How often? How did you manage these? Were there differences between how you experienced and managed “positive” emotions versus “negative”? What strategies “work” for you?
If you let your past experience and external factors trigger emotional responses, your decisions, well-being, happiness and future no longer depend on your choices.
That’s why advertising is designed to stir up your emotions (to prevent you from making rational decision). This is why politicians will aim to anger or upset you. Once somebody controls your emotional responses, they can predict and control your behaviour.
What is the brain for?
The brain’s primary role isn’t thinking, seeing, or feeling—all the things we tend to associate with being human. Its most crucial task is far more fundamental: ensuring your survival and maintaining your health.
Every thought, every emotion, every action you take is ultimately in service of this underlying goal. We don’t perceive our mental life this way, but beneath the surface, this is exactly what's going on.
The technical term for this phenomenon is called allostasis. In essence, your brain's job is to predict your body’s needs and meet them before they even arise. It’s a master at budgeting resources like glucose, oxygen, salt, and all the nutrients your body requires to function. This delicate balance is not just about keeping you alive in the moment—it’s about ensuring you can fulfill your most important evolutionary task: passing your genes on to the next generation. Beneath every thought and action lies this primal instinct to keep the body prepared for survival and, ultimately, reproduction.
Your body operates with limited resources, and every action—every movement, every new thing you learn—comes at a cost. Each time your brain gears up to move your body or absorb new information, it’s conducting an internal audit.
Figuratively speaking, your brain is constantly asking, Is this a good investment? Is this worth the energy? It weighs the balance, deciding whether the effort will pay off. This silent calculation underpins every step you take, every lesson you internalise, always managing the body's precious reserves.
Brain - the ultimate prediction machine
Let’s take baseball as an example. The batter steps up to the plate, bat in hand. A major league pitcher hurls the ball at speeds ranging from 80 to 100 mph (110-160 km/h), giving the batter a mere 400 to 500 milliseconds to respond. That’s nowhere near enough time to see the ball, decide to swing, plan the motion, and then execute it.
Yet, a brain built on prediction is fast enough to make it possible. The batter’s brain, drawing on experience and finely honed predictions, anticipates the trajectory and speed, allowing the swing to happen before the conscious mind can catch up. This predictive power is what makes baseball, and other split-second sports, feasible.
Here’s what’s really happening: based on all the information that the batter has about the situation, his brain is automatically computing the swing, making a prediction about, in a moment's time, where will the ball be. And so in the blink of an eye, his brain predicts the action, and then predicts his sensations. His brain predicts: “What will I do in a moment from now? And the last time I acted this way in this situation, what did I see ? What will I feel in my joints? When the bat strikes the ball, what will I hear?”
So, what actually happens? As the batter faces the pitch, sensory information is being collected through his eyes, ears, and other senses. If the incoming data matches the brain's prediction—where the ball will be, how fast it’s travelling—then his motor response goes ahead as planned.
That’s why people who have been doing something for a long time are much better at doing it than those who are just starting. Experience can easily beat the quicker reaction times of younger people.
However, if something unexpected occurs—a gust of wind alters the ball’s path, or a tendon misfires—the brain registers that the prediction was off. It then adjusts the response, but this adjustment takes significantly more time.
It’s all about efficiency
Prediction and correction are far more efficient ways to operate than constantly reacting. Your brain is essentially running a predictive model all the time—making educated guesses about what’s going to happen and then comparing those guesses to the real-time sensory data flowing in from your body and the world around you.
The same mechanism is responsible for making you enjoy watching magic tricks. The outcome does not match the prediction, which puts your brain on high alert.
This constant feedback loop minimises the feeling of uncertainty, which is, in fact, a metabolically efficient way to operate. Rather than wasting energy on endless reactions, the brain conserves resources by staying one step ahead—refining its predictions to ensure the system runs smoothly. By predicting rather than reacting, the brain reduces the need for sudden, energy-draining corrections, allowing it to manage the body's resources with remarkable efficiency.
Education - the best gift for your brain
Quantity of possible predictive choices that you brain can make, and the quality of those predictions, depend on what you brain already knows about the world and your surrounding (objective) reality.
The more accurate information your brain has about the world, the better it becomes at navigating life’s complexities. But consider the flip side: what happens when your responses to the world are driven by internally generated emotions, rather than the objective reality?
When your brain constructs its predictions based on feelings rather than facts, your perception becomes distorted. This can lead to misguided actions, skewed judgments, and ultimately, a life shaped by illusions, rather than truth. This is why you might sometimes keep asking yourself how is it possible that someone gets certain outcomes, and you don’t, yet you believe you are doing the same things.
The consequences of building a worldview (perception) based on personal reality shaped by feelings and emotions will ripple through every decision, every relationship, every moment—clouding clarity and disrupting balance.
Quenching thirst
Consider the following fact: it takes up to 20 minutes for water to reach your bloodstream. If so, why when you drink a glass of water you immediately start to feel like your thirst is quenched? This is not yet a biological reality.
Your brain plays a kind of a neurological trick on you.
Another example: You know that feeling when the first drop of rain hits your skin, and you instinctively know more is coming? Curiously, you have no “wetness” sensors in your skin, so how is it that you feel those drops of water? It’s your brain, again, at work. What you perceive as "wetness" is a prediction—your brain interpreting a mix of sensory inputs, like temperature and pressure, and combining them with past experiences of rain. In this way, the brain constructs the sensation of wetness even though there’s no direct sensor for it. It’s not the skin telling you it’s wet; it’s your brain telling you what’s happening.
Every single thing that you do, and every single thing that you feel and think—basically everything you experience—is some combination of what's going on inside your brain and what's going on outside your skull.
Don’t believe everything you think.
-M. D. Zatonski
Your brain doesn’t have direct knowledge of what’s happening inside your body—it only receives raw sensory data. That data reflects the effects of various causes occurring within your body, but the brain has no way of knowing exactly what those causes are. It has to make an educated guess.
The same goes for the outside world. Your brain isn’t "seeing" reality; it’s interpreting wavelengths of light, changes in air pressure, and chemical concentrations. These, too, are effects of unknown causes. This challenge is known as a reverse inference. So, how does your brain tackle this? It relies on past experiences to predict and guess the causes behind the incoming sensory data.
The second best gift - experiences
When your brain tackles the reverse inference problem, it’s not asking, “What is this?” Instead, it’s asking something more like, “What does this resemble? What is this similar to from my past?” It’s making educated guesses about what will happen next so it knows how to act to keep you alive and well. Constantly, your brain draws from your past to create your present reality.
Therefore, sometimes you need to retrain your brain (provide it with a new set of experiences) to move forward in life. It will require you to change your perspective, force yourself outside of your comfort zone, and actively change and update the automatic assumptions that you are making about yourself, others, and the world.
It might be difficult to do this by yourself, and you might want to seek someone to help you achieve your goals.
Self acceptance - you can not rewrite your past…
The Ugly Truth: you can’t rewrite your past. That’s why you should run away from every psychotherapist who tries to “dig in your past” to change your future.3
The good news: you can change your future by transforming your present.
Every action, every word, every emotion you experience today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow. By reshaping what you do, feel, and think in this moment, you are essentially cultivating a different future, programming your brain for new outcomes and possibilities.
This is an active, uncomfortable process, that will take a lot of effort. You might need to change your old habits, force yourself to see things from a different perspective, change your environment, social circles, and even your inner dialogue.
When a lobster grows it needs to leave the shell that became too small for him to live in; it needs to become vulnerable, shed the old skin. Only then it is able to build a larger space for him to grow.
If you want to grow, you will also need to become vulnerable. Do not be afraid to leave your old shell behind.
Only you are in charge of your life and your emotions.
The bottom line is that we bear more responsibility for ourselves than we often realise, and we also carry more responsibility for others than we might care to admit.
Sometimes, responsibility isn’t about fault—it’s about being the only person who can change a situation. It’s not about blame or culpability; it’s about capacity. The actions and experiences your brain engages in today become the foundation for its predictions tomorrow. So, the effort you put into creating new experiences and learning new things today is an investment in the person you’ll become.
While some people have control over many aspects of their lives, and others face greater limitations due to circumstances, everyone holds power over something. And in that, lies the potential for change.
You don’t have to wait to be perfect to be able to help others.
What about anxiety?
To truly grasp feeling of anxiety, we need to return to your brain’s most essential task: managing the systems of your body in an energy-efficient way. Think of energy efficiency as a budget.
Just as a financial budget tracks income and expenses, your body’s budget tracks vital resources like water, salt, and glucose—monitoring them as they are gained and lost.
Every time your brain learns something new, it’s like a withdrawal from this body budget.
Conversely, actions like healthy eating, Zone 2 workouts, or sleeping serve as deposits, replenishing those resources.
So, what is stress? Technically, everything can be thought of as a stressor, as stress is defined as your body’s reaction to external stimulation.
Consider familiarising yourself with this Solutions Manual on Managing Stress before reading further.
There is another way to think about stress: Stress occurs when your brain makes a withdrawal from the body budget.
“Healthy” stress (eustress), happens when this withdrawal is followed by a replenishing deposit. The “unhealthy” stress (distress) is like continuously spending without putting anything back—driving the body’s budget into a deficit.
This is a simplified explanation, but it highlights the core truth that running a body requires biological resources. Every action you take, or don’t take, is an economic decision—your brain is constantly making predictions about when to spend and when to conserve. The same goes for everything you learn or don’t learn.
Everything you think, feel, and do stems from your brain’s core mission: to keep you alive and well by managing your body’s budget. You may not consciously perceive every thought, every moment of anxiety, joy, anger, or awe, each hug we give or receive, every act of kindness or insult we endure, as a deposit or withdrawal from our metabolic resources. Yet beneath the surface, that’s exactly what’s unfolding. Each of these experiences is part of the ongoing balance sheet your brain is quietly maintaining, constantly ensuring your survival.
Poor Predictions
When your brain can’t predict well (when there is too much uncertainty; when you lack experience or education; when your brain is hijacked by emotions; etc.) your brain may attempt to learn something new so that it can predict better next time.
Learning involves the release of a whole set of chemicals, some of which are related to making you feel jittery and on edge. In the short term, learning is a good investment of energy, because it's likely to pay dividends in the future. The key is to replenish what you've spent, to keep your body budget solvent.
If the uncertainty goes on for too long you may end up running a deficit, which leaves you feeling constantly worked up and unpleasant. In western cultures, we have learned to make sense of these feelings as anxiety.
Making sense of uncomfortable, heightened arousal as anxiety might lead us to act in ways that only further burden our body budgets, rather than trying to pay down the debt by getting enough sleep, eating healthfully, giving and receiving support to loved ones, and so on. Eventually, this can sometimes lead to bigger problems.
You may now see that they way out of anxiety is usually not through pharmaceutical interventions, or can not be found in psychotherapist’s office.
It is all on you. You have to…
Stop Spending
What does that mean for a brain? Think about today’s social landscape—why do people seek comfort in echo chambers of like-minded individuals? Sure, social media plays a role in constructing those chambers, but that’s only part of the story.
Why don’t more people seek out novel information that challenges their beliefs? The main reason is because it’s metabolically expensive. In practical terms - it will be uncomfortable for you to make changes.
When your body budget is already strained—maybe from lack of sleep, economic hardship, the stress of feeding your children, or fears about illness—those small daily stresses add up.
Every worry or anxious thought is like a small withdrawal from your body’s reserves, and when those withdrawals aren’t balanced by enough deposits, it’s like paying tiny taxes that eventually drain your system.
Over time, you might find yourself drowning in uncertainty or overwhelmed by “stress”. Persistent uncertainty is brutal on the human nervous system—it wears you down and keeps your body in a state of depletion.
A bit more on emotions
An emotion is essentially an automatic “thought” where your brain draws upon what you know about emotions—your "emotion concepts"—to interpret the changes happening in your body, such as a quickened heart rate or altered breathing. Your brain connects these bodily sensations with what’s happening around you, using this connection to shape your emotional experience.
Emotions do not exist outside your own perception. They only feel real to you, and to you only.
For example, you might feel a tightness in your chest, and depending on the context, your brain might interpret it as anxiety, determination, or even the onset of a respiratory infection. The interpretation of the actual sensations will often be ignored and replaced with a situational interpretations of what those sensations might mean, based on current environment and past experiences.
The more emotional concepts you’re familiar with, the more creative your brain becomes at guessing what’s causing these bodily sensations in different situations.
This flexibility may give you a greater capacity to understand what’s going on in your life, provided that you can manage your emotional responses. Conversely, it can “trigger” a default interpretation, often based on a single past event, which has nothing to do with current objective reality.
Those Emotional Concepts may help you understand your automatic responses after they have emerged, but they are also a key ingredient of constructing emotions in the first place.
Emotions don’t happen to you—they are made by your brain, often without a clear need. They are not built into your brain at birth. They are built by your brain using the emotion concepts that you have learned.
Your brain runs your body budget by predicting the causes of upcoming events in your body in a way that is linked to the situation that you are in, for the purposes of acting in a particular way. So ultimately, concepts are tools for making emotion.
More generally, concepts are tools for making new “meaning” of the physical sensations from your body, in the context that you're in, to guide your actions in a particular way. And the result is sometimes an emotion. It can be helpful or maladaptive.
Can you change your worldview?
To answer your question, we need to talk about affect. Right now, your brain is busy managing your body budget, while your body constantly sends sensory data back to your brain. This is happening continuously, even though you're likely unaware of it. That’s because you aren’t wired to consciously perceive this ongoing flood of sense data.
Evolution has provided a shortcut: basic feelings of comfort or discomfort, pleasantness or unpleasantness, feeling energised or fatigued. These simple sensations, which you might think of as mood, are what scientists refer to as affect.
Let’s say you're running a deficit in your body budget and you feel like shit. If you’re not someone with much emotional granularity, emotions might add up to something like “I feel like crap”, “I feel overwhelmed”4.
So, what’s your next move? Your brain hasn’t made a clear guess. Should you drink some water? Yell at someone? Go for a run? It’s hard to decide because your brain hasn’t formed a concept that points to a specific action. Without that clarity, it’s difficult to predict the right course of action.
And clarity comes when you put your emotions at bay. Only then you are able to regain ability to reason and think clearly.
Here is an example on how to use reframing to your advantage:
Like many people, I am weary, tired, stressed and under pressure. Under the hood, my brain is constructing concepts to predict and make sense of what is going on inside my body in relation to the situation I am in.
My brain will construct emotions: a feeling of anxiety, or depression, or hopelessness.
But instead, I can guide my brain to constructs a concept of an encumbered body budget, put the emotions aside, and instruct the brain to interpret physical experience in the moment into a lesson that will require an adjustment on my end.
This adjustment will later help to guide my next actions: I need to make sure that I rest; I need to add to my budget by making time to focus on what matters the most in the moment (on what is meaningful to me, not expedient; on what will make me move forward, not make me feel better). My reframed brain will further guide me to have a nutritious meal. I will make sure that I drink enough water. I need find time to nap, sleep or exercise, even though I really don't feel like it. I might need to make sure to connect with those I love.
Emotional granularity is knowing when not to make an emotion. Instead, my brain is making meaning of the sensory data, and the affective feelings that they cause, as a physical phenomenon. And what does this granularity buy you? It buys you the flexibility to make sense of your sensations and act on them differently depending on the context, tailoring your actions to the situation you are in.
The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit.
The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
- Marcus Aurelius
Now… how do you hone your brain’s abilities to not just make yourself better, but now apply all of this to help and influence others? Read this Solutions Manual to learn how this default mode of your brain can be used to influence the behaviours of people around you.
Michael Pollan - read more in his book titled How to Change Your Mind