How minds differ
When one error changes everything
In shortFor some people one small mistake changes the whole picture, from ‘this went wrong’ to ‘I am no good’.
The idea
The brain predicts at many levels at once: the next sound, the next minute, what kind of day it is, what kind of person I am. Usually a surprise is dealt with at the lowest level that explains it: the bus was late, nothing more. In some people a single surprise travels all the way up: one wrong answer becomes ‘I’m stupid’, one change of plan becomes ‘the whole day is ruined’. In others, surprises hardly travel up at all, and the big picture does not change even when it should.
What to try
- After a bad moment, name its size: ‘that was one part of the morning, not the whole day’.
- Ask which level it belongs to: this task, this lesson, this week, or me.
- Keep a note of the good parts of hard days, so the higher levels get evidence too.
The common mistake
Responding to ‘I’m stupid’ by arguing with the conclusion, without going back to the single event that started it.
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Short, plain pieces by the researchers and good writers.
Books
How the predictive brain shapes what we see, feel and do, with many everyday examples.
See on Amazon ›The core book on the theory of constructed emotion: why emotions are constructed rather than set off.
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The science behind itHow strong the evidence is, the model, videos and references.
How strong the evidence is
A way of thinking A lens for interpreting what a child does, not a rule from trials.
In hierarchical predictive processing, each level predicts the level below and receives its prediction errors; higher levels encode slower, more abstract regularities (Kiebel, Daunizeau and Friston, 2008; Clark, 2013). Precision decides how far an error propagates. If low-level errors are given high precision and there is little intermediate structure to absorb them, a local error can force a revision of high-level beliefs about the context or the self (a whole-system update). Conversely, very precise high-level priors stop errors from updating the model at all. Barrett, Quigley and Hamilton (2016) and Badcock et al. (2017) describe how inflexible high-level beliefs about the body and the social world can keep mood low. For formulation: find the level at which the person explains an event, test whether helping them explain it lower down changes the response, and look for missing intermediate concepts (‘a bad lesson’, ‘a hard Tuesday’).
References
- Kiebel, S. J., Daunizeau, J., & Friston, K. J. (2008). A hierarchy of time-scales and the brain. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(11), e1000209.
- Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204.
- Barrett, L. F., Quigley, K. S., & Hamilton, P. (2016). An active inference theory of allostasis and interoception in depression. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 371(1708), 20160011.
- Badcock, P. B., Davey, C. G., Whittle, S., Allen, N. B., & Friston, K. J. (2017). The depressed brain: An evolutionary systems theory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(3), 182–194.
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