THE EXPERIENCE MACHINE

A grand new vision of cognitive science that explains how our minds build our worlds One of the most important books yet published this century Spectator For as long as we ve studied the mind we ve believed that information flowing from our senses determines what our mind perceives But as our understanding has advanced in the last few decades a hugely powerful new view has flipped this assumption on its head The brain is not a passive receiver but an ever active predictor At the forefront of this cognitive revolution is widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark who has synthesized his ground breaking work on the predictive brain to explore its fascinating mechanics and implications Among the most stunning of these is the realization that experience itself because it is guided by prior expectation is a kind of controlled hallucination We don t passively take in the world around us instead our mind is constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see This even applies to our bodies as the way we experience pain and other states is shaped by our expectations and this has broader implications for the understanding and treatment of conditions from PTSD to schizophrenia to medically unexplained symptoms From the