A common saying goes, “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.” Philosopher Andy Clark wrote a book on this topic. His thesis is centered on the predictive processing theory, suggesting that the brain’s main function is to make predictions. He writes in The Experience Machine:

Nothing we do or experience—if the theory is on track—is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we—consciously or nonconsciously—were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom—the product of deep-set predictions. We can no more experience the world “prediction and expectation free” than we could surf without a wave.

In particular, some of the most curious implications—to me!—are what this means for limiting beliefs and negative emotions:

But among the most notable and devastating characteristics of chronic depression, anxiety, and many other psychiatric conditions is their surprising resistance to new information. This suggests that where such conditions really take hold, there is also a problem with either generating or learning from the prediction error signal…. 

Overweighted expectations and underweighted new information would result in a kind of permanent or semipermanent lock-in of the existing model, leading us to continue with depressive behaviors that actually serve to reinforce the bad model, and that lend false justification to our prior expectations. For example, we expect not to go out and explore new opportunities, leading us to stay home, and then find that new opportunities (as predicted) keep on failing to present themselves.

An illustration:

For example, suppose that you experience a succession of unexpectedly negative social events—your partner leaves you, you argue with your boss, a neighbor complains to you. These all result in “social prediction errors” (errors in the prediction of socially important events). You may start to compensate by mistakenly increasing the weighting on small social cues, including all the many signals (facial, verbal, and those involving body language) that help us navigate stressful or important social situations. Faced with all that extra noise, now masquerading as information, you may start to adopt what has been described as a kind of “better safe than sorry” strategy so as to avoid most social interactions, since their outcomes seem increasingly unpredictable.

There’s a good reason why putting yourself out there is generally good advice:

If you seldom place yourself in challenging situations, you will certainly reduce or eliminate many sources of unexpected prediction error. New higher-level explanations (your neighbors all secretly hate you, the boss probably didn’t want to hire you in the first place) may then kick in. The result is a familiar pattern of anxiety-inflated responses to small perceived slights, and then protective disengagement combined with new and increasingly negative images of ourselves and our relations to others. Such maladaptive patterns are often seeded by early experiences such as abuse or neglect that lead us to believe that social rewards are unlikely and social outcomes unpredictable.

It reminds me of two quotes, both of which illustrate the same point. When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was asked about the Fire Phone’s failed rollout, he responded, “If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now — and I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.” 

Similarly, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once complained, “Our hit ratio is way too high right now. So, we’ve canceled very few shows … I’m always pushing the content team: We have to take more risk; you have to try more crazy things. Because we should have a higher cancel rate overall.” There was too much customer satisfaction; the company wasn’t taking enough creative risks.

Clark suggests that persistent cognitive appraisals of negative evidence contribute to depression (he cites this paper, this one, as well as this one). If you collect artifacts of positive evidence (e.g., a happiness folder, or a confidence portfolio, or a brag sheet), as well as reminders of positive opportunities and futures (e.g., an action board), you could find them to be a surprising source of energy. They help break negative narratives, and reinforce positive ones.

On a final note, I wouldn’t go so far as to say the brain is only a prediction machine. Our brains do more than just fill in the blanks; they can imagine, speculate, and energize each other. Still, Clark offers a fascinating premise and I’m bought in that expectations are inherently a part of our worldview; we can no less stop expecting than we can stop experiencing. 

It’s up to us to decide how we set our expectations, how we manage other people’s expectations of us, and how we adapt to what’s really happening in front of us. 

See also pronoia, and lucky girl syndrome.