Andy Clark - The Experience Machine (Allen Lane, 2023) ****

There is this great quote by author Anais Nin: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are", and it might have been a subtitle for this book by Andy Clark, cognitive scientist at the University of Sussex. 

He describes convincingly how our brain shapes our perception by what we have experienced before, in an approach of increased efficiency and economical use of energy, in order to make predictions. Instead of each time generating a full perception from scratch, our brain selects what it expects, and adjusts when it is presented with unexpected visual stimuli: "the brain is constantly painting a picture, and the role of the sensory information is mostly to nudge the brushstrokes when they fail to match up with the incoming evidence" (p. 5). This is of course not rocket science, but Clark gives lots of examples of situations in which this operates, including for instance the sensation of pain, and other bodily experiences that are more generated by the brain than by an actual physical cause, such as the "aesthetic chill" or goose bumps. 

He also explains how the counter-intuitive mental images we make of an action may precede the action, instead of the reverse. It's the mental image we have that makes the action take place. 

"Predictive processing suggests a much more thoroughly entwined process in which the way your body feels to you is itself altered by what you know about the overall context. This is because all those sources of infor­mation and evidence (raw bodily signals plus all the knowl­edge you are bringing to bear on the situation) mesh together, feeding influence back downward and impacting neuronal processing at all stages. In this way, even your bedrock bodily sensations may be altered by the way they are currently being framed by your own higher-level thoughts and ideas". 

The experience of our brain can also lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. When you feel high levels of distress or feel threatened, this can predictively contribute to perceiving the world as more stressful or threatening in a very literal sense. On the other hand, fictions and narratives can also lead to the opposite effect and break down stereotypes. 

Clark goes much broader than the typical psychology experiments in cognitive science, expanding the scope to our human physiology in a way that is really refreshing and fascinating, such as the following factoid: 

"Consider coalitions of neurons that are already located out­side the brain. An increasingly familiar example can be found inside the human gut, where upward of 500 million neurons in the gut wall already relay important information to the spi­nal cord and the brain. This circuitry helps regulate serotonin and other neuromodulators. The so-called gut-brain is by a long margin the largest cluster of neurons outside the brain, and an essential part of the nervous system. It is pretty clearly part of what makes you who you are and has a major influence on what you think and feel. This already gives the lie to the idea that your mind consists entirely of "what the brain does." But there's more. Our gut is also alive with (mostly) help­ful bacteria, which together comprise the "microbiome." These gut bacteria (unlike the neurons) are not even "genetically you." But they too make essential contributions, and have been shown to affect learning, memory, and mood as well as basic bodily regulation. Such links are not surprising given the deep role of bodily information in the construc­tion of the mind. For example, gut bacteria manufacture up to 95% of the body's serotonin, which has large impacts on mood and is one of the neurotransmitters implicated in the precision-weighing process" (p. 164-165)

He also goes a step further, and includes our everyday tools, such as our smartphone, as extensions of our mind. And much more. I have so many annotations in the book that will take a full essay to integrate them. This is not the objective here, so suffice it to say that I can recommend this book to any person interest in the workings of our mind. 

Clark's book is solid, comprehensive, well-written, at many times an eye-opener, and as said, includes many other disciplines such as physiology, medicine, computer sciences and more to paint a broad picture of the mysterious workings of our brain as a prediction machine. 

He concludes: 

"WE ARE what predictive brains build. If predictive processing lives up to its promise as a unifying picture of mind and its place in nature, we will need to think about ourselves, our worlds, and our actions in new ways. We will need to appre­ciate, first and foremost, that nothing in human experience comes raw or unfiltered. Instead, everything -  from the most basic sensations of heat and pain through to the most exotic experiences of selfhood, ego dissolution, and oneness with the universe - is a construct arising at the many meeting points of predictions and sensory evidence". 

It's a humbling message. The question now is how to make sure that this is known by as many people as possible.