The brain is constantly predicting. Predicting is metabolically more efficient than reacting.
The brain's job is coordinating and regulating the functions of the body in the most energy-efficient way. It's running a budget.
33:29 "The most effective way to run a system is to predict the state of the system and correct when necessary. It's not to wait and react to things. Reaction is more expensive metabolically than prediction - and [hence] a major selection pressure on a species, but also on an individual. An individual's ability, for example, to remain healthy and to be able to reproduce pass its genes onto the next generation is metabolic fitness, metabolic efficiency... In psychology, we don't experience every hug we give every, every emotion we experience, every thought we have, every insult we bear. We don't experience these things in metabolic terms, we experience them in psychological terms. But there's always a metabolic cost because there's always electrical and chemical signaling going on underneath the hood. And it turns out that the metabolic cost of signaling is a major, major concern that any organism system has to deal with.
45:45 "Your brain is running a budget for your body. It's not budgeting money, it's budgeting glucose and salt and oxygen... Depression is like a bankrupt body budget. It's basically your brain is attempting to reduce its costs, and in doing this, it will create fatigue, which will lead you to move less [, yielding] a reduction in cost. The brain is like trapped in its predictions. It's not going to update, it's not going to learn from prediction error because learning is metabolically expensive. So even if there are pleasant things in the world that could lead you to experience pleasure, you won't pay attention to them and you won't learn about them...because it's just too expensive. So basically, the brain is trapped in these predictions that will lead to more unpleasant or continuing unpleasant mood. So when you feel stressed, it's because your brain has predicted that a big metabolic outlay is going to be necessary in the next moment.
Depression is because your brain has predicted that a big emotional outlay is being predicted, and it's avoiding that energy.
transcript at https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/94541962
This is similar to research on the visual cortex, where the brain is constantly predicting what it's "about to see," rather than what it has seen. A simple MRI experiment demonstrated the brain predicts an expected movement of dots from a previously-established sequence. https://neurosciencenews.com/vision-event-experience-6797/
Likewise, a flash-card experiment concluded "visual representations are skewed toward future states" https://elifesciences.org/articles/78904
In a review, the author points out that "what we expect to hear or see interferes with, and even supersedes, what we actually hear and see." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6400266/
No comments:
Post a Comment