Elahniverse Dictionary
Prediction Error
The gap between what the brain expects and what the body reports. The signal that forces the brain to update its model.
The brain does not wait for the world and then react. It predicts, constantly, running a model of what your body and surroundings are about to do, and then checks that forecast against what actually arrives. The mismatch between the two is a prediction error, and it is the only thing that forces the model to change.
In the theory of constructed emotion, this is how experience gets built. Feelings and perceptions are largely predictions the brain issues in advance; the incoming signal from the body either confirms them or corrects them. Learning is what happens when the correction is large enough to demand a rewrite.
Deliberate heat and cold are unusually loud prediction errors. They are strong, unambiguous body signals that refuse to be filed under "fine," so the brain has to update. This is one reason a physical practice can shift a mental pattern: it introduces a correction too large to ignore. See Story Follows State.
Mentioned in
Further reading
- Lisa Feldman Barrett, theory of constructed emotion, 2017 — the brain as a prediction machine that builds experience from forecasts corrected by the body