Inside the Predictive Brain & Body

Why Community and Contradiction Matter More Than We Think

When a Book Becomes a Prediction Error

When a book disrupts what we think we know, we are most likely experiencing a prediction error. I want to tell you about the prediction error that has kept me captive for nearly two years.

I have been dipping my toes into the world of neuroscience for a while now. Mostly through books written by respected academics. Through this I have come to know us, humans, as predictive organisms. An idea widely supported through science, although the real-world implications and applications of this idea is lagging.

The book that caused me to return to its arguments and reflect on it repeatedly took a strong determinist stance on free will (arguing essentially that we do not have it) by building its argument from the point of ‘pre-conscious action initiation’ – that is, when we act before being aware of deciding to act. Although determinism is one of several competing interpretations of “pre-conscious action initiation”, and a minority one at that, I have always believed that minority views can offer powerful insights. So, I spent time thinking it through and reading other books. I didn’t come out a determinist, but it did set me off on an interesting journey that connected directly to my long-standing questions around how people change and grow.

This feels especially relevant in our organisations today, where constant change has been the order of business for most of my professional life - at a scale quite different from what 20^th century careers and lives may have experienced.  

The book was Robert M. Sapolsky’s Determined. As a neuroscientist who also serves as an expert witness in the criminal justice system, he often argues that acts of transgression are rarely premeditated but instead are driven by neural circuits that we have no control over. He explains in detail what activates when in the body and brain, showing how actions can begin before conscious thought and decision-making.

What stayed with me most was the book’s final chapter, which felt contradictory to the argument that preceded it. In it, he sets out what comes across as recommendations and implications for society of his determinist stance (which for me, implied I had the agency to respond). I still wonder whether this reflects an underlying belief in agency, or whether he was simply constrained by the limits of language. This apparent contradiction has occupied my thoughts precisely because the rest of the book presented such a cohesive case for determinism.

My ongoing reflection on this apparent contradiction is what I understand as my mind trying to resolve a prediction error. A prediction error occurs when the brain, which builds its model of reality from past experiences, encounters something that doesn’t match what it expected, and gives it enough weight that it surfaces into conscious thinking, i.e. we become aware of noticing it.

At this point it is worth mentioning, our bodies discard most prediction errors unconsciously and automatically. The things that don’t match what we have come to expect are mostly not even brought into our consciousness because it is not energy efficient to do so. Interestingly, people vary in how their internal systems weight these errors, with the knock-on effect that some become aware of more inconsistencies between new inputs and familiar models than others. How, and why, this is not the same for all is a complex and much-debated topic.  

How Prediction Challenges the Stories We Tell About Change

The fact that I read this book in 2024 might tell you something about the how prediction errors can linger, even if the most common response to a prediction error is to not even notice it. Sapolsky’s persuasive argument for determinism — that human beings do not possess free will and that our actions and choices are driven by causal factors — forced me to fully engage with the possibility that it might be true as I read the book. He presents a compelling case grounded in his interpretation of a field he knows deeply. His work made me examine why his argument both resonated and unsettled me. The further reading I then did, enhanced my understanding of the views presented to me in Determined and gradually allowed me to integrate the idea of prediction into my own worldview.

The result is that it left me questioning whether we overestimate how quickly and fully people can change and whether prediction is the full story. These questions are relevant in our work contexts because our performance management systems in organisations often assume adaptability is universally possible. With our children, we often operate the same way, expecting them to meet our expectations as if they always have the capacity to do so.

Could the Missing Piece be Community?

My own thinking, initially shaped by philosophical and theological perspectives on free will, is shifting toward a more communal, relational, social or cultural understanding of agency. Perhaps this is why my evolving view clashes with the cultural norms many of us grew up with.

Western life has long centred on individualism. We emphasise individual responsibility, individual choice, individual strengths, weaknesses, success, failure, and traits. In doing so, we pile enormous pressure on individuals to perfect the roles they play and to meet evolving expectations of what “perfection” looks like. These expectations have shifted over time but remained fundamentally individualistic.

Today, we are caught in an unusual tension: we try to uphold ideals of individual perfection while also aspiring to kindness and support for others … perfectly. This shift reflects our growing awareness of hardships beyond people’s control, such as mental health, abuse, neglect and other traumas, disability and neurodivergence, which previously carried far more stigma.

The Weight of Individual Expectations

To me, this all feels increasingly untenable. As I watch how we try to shape one another into the ideal employee, leader, parent, partner, ideal … you name it; I keep asking myself: “To what end?” What is the real goal? Of course, organisations have visions and objectives, and for many of us, aligning with those structures occupies much of our waking hours. But is that truly the goal?

Many of us recognise our systems, schools and workplaces alike, as environments that relentlessly and intentionally tell us what to do, who to be, and how to act. Schools do this overtly, while at work this happens more subtly – often through job descriptions, responsibilities, tasks and performance management. In this cultural reality of interconnected behaviour, some people meet expectations while others do not. This reinforces the illusion that outcomes must be rooted in personal agency.

Roles and expectations have always been socially, systemically and culturally constructed. The depth and quality of individual outcomes are intricately linked to the depth and quality of the people, culture and communities that surround us. Linked - but not, in my view, determined. Even from the same situation, two very different individuals can come. This is likely why we have held on to the idea that these differences must come from something within us: individual grit, choice, application or flaw, or genes. We take credit for our successes just as easily as we blame others for their failures. We contextualise our own failures through highlighting external factors and minimise the individual contribution another has to their success by pointing to external factors that made the success possible.

However, we cannot continue to believe we are the sole authors of our own successes while also believing others are the sole authors of their failures. Both require greater nuance and a willingness to shift how we think about human behaviour and outcomes.

Inside the Predictive Mind and Organism

What, then, is personal change and choice if not individual acts? I wouldn’t claim to have a definitive answer, given the many brilliant minds across disciplines exploring these questions. My sense is that we are beginning to explain more of what humans have observed and experienced for as long as we’ve existed. The felt sense of personal agency, as well as the shame or disappointment we feel when we fail or let others down, emerges from internal systems that predict the action we should take based on our body of past experiences. These experiences shape our expectations of what should happen and, importantly, what is most energy-efficient or feels most rewarding. The outcomes of our actions, as do other inputs, then feed back into this body of past experiences, influencing how we act in the future.

I wonder whether the contradiction I felt on reading Sapolsky’s book relates to the difference between higher-level predictive modelling and low-level autonomic prediction? In what I am sure is a gross over-simplification given that these processes often run concurrently and aren’t cleanly separated into brain or body regions: When we engage in reflective, analytical, creative or “flow” states, we are most capable of “consciously” integrating new complexity into our existing models of the world. But when we operate in low-level autonomic mode (which includes the popular understanding of fight-flight-freeze modes), prediction errors are less likely to be assigned enough weight to allow us to notice; while conversely large prediction errors, such as trauma, are more likely to distort our internal models.  

I consider the writing of this article a “higher-level” process. I got out of bed early this morning. Something my body is thankfully adjusting to, making it less energy intensive each time. I reread what I had written yesterday and waited for the thoughts that would inevitably surface as I sat with the questions that have occupied me for over a year.

Something beautiful happens when prediction errors linger. They don’t leave us until they are resolved and integrated. They help us learn or know how to respond when we encounter something similar in future. This idea is consistent with how substantial changes emerge. Change, by its nature, involves incorporating something new or unexpected into our worldview. It is not about ignoring prediction errors, but about considering them and when appropriate allowing them to reshape us.

We Change Together or Not at All

My personal view is that society has always included people who move through the world “efficiently”, whose bodies more readily discard prediction errors and notice only those that “scream out” at them. Others, meanwhile, have internal systems that tend to assign more weight to prediction errors. Could these be the “slow processors” among us who, perhaps through practice, engage with prediction errors at a depth and pace that our “more efficient” counterparts could never match had their internal systems surfaced the prediction errors in the first place?

I feel like I need to stress at this point, that the word “error” is somewhat misleading. Prediction error is a term that refers to something that does not match our internal systems’ expectations, it is not consistently true or false.

I don’t know many people who describe their reality as encountering a contradiction, wandering through many different books, then returning to that contradiction two years later finally feeling ready to integrate what happened on the day it first appeared. Or perhaps we don’t talk about it when it happens to us this way. This, however, is how I move through the world. Something is incongruent and it sticks with me as I search for the reasons why both things exist yet feel irreconcilable. When I then eventually find a way to make sense of the incongruence, my internal system gives me a sense of reward that propels me to keep going – a momentary burst of energy that tells my body this is something worth doing.

And because I am connected to you, and because you may not process things in the way I do, I share these insights in my excitement to connect with you over something that feels as though it could change how we live day to day. I put it out there. The truth is, very few people in my immediate surroundings respond as I hope they would; with sparkly eyes and hands clapping. Most don’t quite know what to say.

I also share these ideas because I know that if I can create a prediction error for someone else, in a way that it surfaces into their conscious thought (for they may have discarded it had it been presented another way), then that prediction error; now aligned more closely with their efficient system, might actually be noticed. And if it is, they may take not two years, but a few minutes or a day, to integrate this potential into their own body of past experiences. My sharing might even shift their predictive responses in future. That is communal change.

The way we process prediction errors is not the same for all of us. This diversity in our internal processes shapes both how, and how quickly, we can change. If we could accept how interconnected we really are and approach our differences with a sense of fascination for their evolutionary value, perhaps we could rethink what is reasonable to expect of one another. If we could shift from seeing my success as separate from your success, how might that change the way we live and work together?

It is not easy, because my success will never feel like a success to you, in the way it does to me. Your body of past experiences will not allow you to have the same felt sense about it and so it will not feel to you that it could ever carry as much weight as the felt sense that drives you to action. That is okay, I don’t think you need to feel it to accept it. I think, when I begin to validate the felt senses that drive you as your truth and when you do the same for me, we begin to reinforce the growth patterns that take place in our respective bodies and mutually benefit from their different outcomes. This does not happen just in our heads, internally it is far more interconnected than we could ever have thought.

Whether the change we want to see is personal or collective, it is always communal. I am not sure if there is a first mover and to look for that first mover is possibly a question for another thinker. I think of change as a dance that can be in or out of sync, the more in sync the more health and beauty we would see around us, and the more out of sync the more apparent it would be that the individuals performing the dance are slowly breaking and that our society is breaking. The question is not how we change ourselves; the question is: How do we dance together and tolerate the sense that we are not fully in control as we wait to see what unfolds?

Dancing together, however, is a skill that we are no longer practising. I can only speak from my own vantage point, but from where I stand what I see is:

• We attack, blame and belittle our leaders, questioning their competence and character whenever we feel dissatisfied with our own living or working environments. This plays out across politics, the C-suite, organisational management and middle management alike.

• We, helped along by algorithms, turn our social media feeds into echo-chambers that amplify the fears, worries and hardships of our own mini-world. In doing so we reinforce the “realness” of a particular lens that feels comfortable, even as it becomes harder to question. The crowds that mirror our views strengthen our internal models, making alternative perspectives feel increasingly distant.

• In the workplace, attempts to collaborate across our differences often resemble appeals to have our differences recognised, rather than a genuine practice in listening and communicating across a natural divide.

• The communication of the “I” has become extreme, swinging between self-promotion and amplifying need and hardship. These expressions respond to signals that the loudest and most convincing stories will be acknowledged - whether for progression or for protection and support. Both are rooted in a very real human desire to feel safe, seen and cared for.

• Our public wellbeing strategies frequently overlook a core element that has existed throughout human history. We talk about movement, rest, nutrition, connection, meditation and breath. But we have lost deep reflection from the everyday guidance for health and wellbeing.

The Lost Art of Reflection

Why have we let go of this? I suspect it is because the spaces where deep reflection is traditionally practised are not culturally neutral. They tend to be associated with spirituality, religion, or therapy. Realms often viewed as either esoteric or indicative of personal or intellectual fragility. Movement, breath and even meditation have become acceptable pillars of public health guidance; but to recommend reflection is to invite people into a terrain that can feel exposing and unpredictable. It brings things up. It carries risk.

The result is widespread uptake of low-level sensory prediction and autonomic regulation practices, while our awareness of higher-level conceptual model updating processes remains limited. As I write this, I realise how easily these ideas could be conflated with older distinctions like the “rational” versus “emotional” brain, though it is important to note that those frameworks don’t map neatly onto what predictive processing describes.

In focusing so heavily on the former, autonomic regulation, at the expense of the latter, higher-level conceptual model updating, we easily end up feeling like victims of our nervous systems unless we learn how to calm and regulate them. It may even be fair to say that our nervous systems are in crisis, given the levels of chronic stress surrounding us. Regulation, however, is only part of what our bodies need. We are missing the process of stepping back from the onslaught of inputs so that we can reflect, engage in meaning-making and consciously allow ourselves to consider the events and information that jar against our expectations and hopes. These moments of reflection give our systems the time they need to integrate new insights into a more considered worldview. And even though predictive processing shows how much of our behaviour emerges from prior patterns, it also demonstrates that higher‑level reflective processes can update those.

It isn’t only moment-to-moment regulation we need to develop. But also, the slow, deliberate and collective work of model updating.

When I used to swim 8-10km a day, six days a week, I swam my fastest ever 50-metre sprints. Right now, we are trying to sprint without doing the training.

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About the Author

Deoné Duffy is a coach and speaker who works with individuals, leaders and organisations who are ready to ask difficult questions, think differently and do differently.

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