Predictive Processing

We do not simply perceive the world. We anticipate it.

Predictive processing is an influential framework in neuroscience proposing that the brain is constantly generating predictions about what is happening and what is likely to happen next.

One related idea is the Bayesian brain. The brain combines incoming information with prior expectations, or priors, shaped partly by previous experience, to infer what is most likely happening.

In other words, we never encounter the present entirely as a blank slate.

Psychoanalysis has described something similar in psychological language for more than a century. Transference describes how expectations formed in earlier relationships shape present ones. Repetition compulsion captures our tendency to recreate familiar patterns. Projection and projective identification describe ways the internal world can shape what we perceive, and sometimes what unfolds between us.

Winnicott captured something particularly haunting about this:

“clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.”

By “breakdown,” Winnicott meant an early primitive agony that could not be fully experienced or integrated at the time. What belongs to the past may therefore continue to be lived as a catastrophe still waiting to happen.

Other therapeutic traditions have different languages for related phenomena: schemas, internal working models, core beliefs, conditioning, implicit relational knowing, emotional learning, complexes, parts, and attachment expectations.

Different languages. A remarkably similar observation:

The past does not remain only behind us.

It becomes part of what we expect to find ahead.

Jung approached the same mystery from another direction:

“when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”

What we experience as fate may sometimes be the past continuing to predict the future.