How the brain shapes reality – with Andy Clark

30 thoughts on “How the brain shapes reality – with Andy Clark”

1. 24:57 The correct answer is two people. One balanced in One direction. One balanced in the opposite. Literally how we make train wheels. Two opposites complete the whole. Opposites attract. That being said, you'll never see a train wheel and a truck wheel on the same axle.

2. 10:30 “Our confident forecasts tweak our own experiences ever so slightly. “ ok. That’s not very surprising, because our expectations influence our perception. Doesn’t mean that our expectations are having any influence over the world around us, like prayer or mind control really working.

3. If you assign extra weight to the predictive model, and become delusional, is this a bit like being a fundamentalist Christian? 🤔 “spuriously self-affirming predictions “

4. I am neuro-divergent, ASD, and a higher sensitivity to light at a time of chronic stress began to cause me to experience chronic migraines over a period of about a decade. It was a trauma response following a period of extreme and prolonged stress. The high anxiety re-wired my brain for a while. Healing from the psychological trauma allowed my nervous system to calm down. I’m now experiencing fewer headaches and lowering of intensity. But it’s a process that has taken years and required help at the root cause, which was psychological and not physical.

5. He talks a bit of jargon and garbled half-thoughts at the end and his reliance on the overhead, which doesn’t come over so well on a video is tiresome

6. Although it certainly sounds weird, I interpreted the sine wave speech verbatim for all three before the normal version was played.

7. It’s almost like the brain or even maybe the entire nervous system, including the nerves and the spinal cord, would “examine” the set of receptor responses by comparing it (pairing it up) with the combined achieve of all the RELEVANT previously stored impression set accumulated from previous life experiences from the moment of conception. No wonder that this will appear to us as a prediction from that particular perspective but I would rather call this “the procedure of removing redundancies before storing (or normalizing) the new incoming stimuli for archival.” In order to recognise the similarity and subsequently remove the redundancy before storing, the nervous system runs the stimuli (thinking) until the brain flashes the previously stored case: if the overwhelming majority shows agreement, the system will take that similar memory segment as an increasingly precise and firm template and the result will be both the level of similarity and the set of differences. The system, at this point, somewhat modifies the memory and/or(?) starts a new one depending on the extent of both the similarity and difference. If a stimuli does not ring any bell, or contradicts with some, then we are surprised:) Are you?

8. damn, this made a lot of sense.

9. I am a clinical psychology PhD student who has grown a strong interest in predictive coding over the past year and a half, but have still found it difficult to fully understand. This video was great at communicating the concepts to a broad audience and I definitely learned some new things! Thank you! These conceptualizations make me wonder, however, how autism and psychosis could be as highly comorbid as they are when they seem to have diverging mechanisms within the predictive coding framework.

10. I have worked with that builder and his entire family….

11. Well I'm not even a minute in and already I can't take this guy seriously. You're telling me the guy was in America and he stepped on a 15 centimeter nail?! Completely unbelievable. We use freedom units here, bub!

    (And because sarcasm doesn't travel well electronically, this was a joke 😉 )

12. 51:28 for me, meditation (typically) is not about enhancing capability or control. It is about reducing sensory inputs to create a more ideal environment for me to practice seeing reality as it is (at least as close as I can “see” from my own perception/sense-organs) instead of what I think about it.

    Meditation definitely seems to be complementary to what you’re discussing in this video.

13. The predictive manner in which our brains work is why spirits can walk among us and we just see them as normal people..the last time you were in a crowd you probably walked past one and never realized it.

14. Fentanyl did not exist at that point in time… it was most likely morphine or another synthetic opiate.

15. Who believes the story of the construction worker and the nail, and why?

16. First time I’ve heard the term “autism spectrum condition”, and I am here for it

17. It really seems much of this was understood at least 2500 years ago, just not in the Western world.

18. Strangely I did not have any difference in experience between the first and second time hearing the sine wave speech. Does anyone have a possible reason for this?

19. Such a great lecture! I learnt a lot!

20. Predictive processing says perception is not passive input but an active loop: the brain predicts what is about to be sensed, compares that prediction to incoming data, and updates the next prediction. What matters is where the signal is, how often it is sampled or updated, and how strongly mismatches are weighted. Neuroscience uses different words, but the underlying structure is consistent.

    Position → Structure / State (Somatic nervous system)
    The somatic system stabilizes spatial information: where the body is, where objects are, edges, orientation, boundaries. In predictive-processing terms this is the model state — what the brain thinks currently exists. Prediction begins with position because without a stable “what/where,” there is nothing to compare incoming data against.

    Frequency → Updating / Timing (Autonomic nervous system)
    The autonomic system regulates when predictions are refreshed: saccade timing, sampling rate, rhythm, and pace of updating. In predictive-processing language this is the update cycle — how often prediction errors are checked and integrated. Faster updating increases sensitivity to change; slower updating favors stability. This is why arousal, stress, or calmness directly alter perception.

    Intensity → Precision / Salience (Limbic + Enteric systems)
    The limbic and enteric systems assign weight and value: how important a prediction error is, whether it should be amplified or ignored. Predictive processing calls this precision weighting. High intensity means prediction errors drive learning and behavior; low intensity means they are suppressed. This is where emotion, motivation, belief, and meaning enter perception.

    These three are not separate steps in experience — they are fused into a single perceptual event. Each cycle produces a result that immediately becomes the prior for the next cycle. That’s why perception feels continuous even though it is built from discrete updates.

    Why this matters
    Illusions occur when positional structure and timing are correct but intensity weighting is wrong. Learning occurs when prediction errors are given enough weight to force model change. Disagreement happens when two nervous systems stabilize different positions, update at different rates, or assign different precision to the same data.

    Plain language:
    Your brain is constantly asking: Where am I? How often should I check? How much should I care? Predictive processing is simply how the nervous system turns those three questions into a world that feels real.

21. I love how this predictive precision-weighting model (sensory vs prediction) gives an idea on what autism actually is.

22. One year later, this talk and the book becomes more relevant than ever as the frontier lab and AI startup doubling down on "world model" and continuous learning.

23. 21:05???

24. 33:14, so you can inform the brain through language for what it should expect? Is that then the memory of "its higher heat" being used in the prediction to make the mind focus on the heat as if it was? Its strange to me how a semantic memory can instruct the prediction to percieve more heat… or maybe the word heat is linked to the sensation and so the unconvious prediction links th3 sensation to a word that way, and ita not really understanding the memory its just looking at the memory link???

25. Epic!

26. There's a third input: Senses, Prediction, Feedback(Other people's predictions, memes, etc.)

    I appreciate the acknowledgement this system can go wrong alongside standard injury, as someone whose suffered medical 'professonals' who claim structural damage & genetic issues develop from belief itself. These are zealots who are discrediting & building resentment for strong science just because they want all patients to fit into one model. No one is immune from predictive programming I suppose.

27. This makes me curious about the connection to ASD and HEDs

28. Thank you so much from Formosa Argentina

29. Very interesting ❤

30. "How the Brain Deceives You" might be a more accurate title.

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