Research recently completed by investigators at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience indicates how “realistic” our interactions with the world around us actually are. Qin, Michon, Keysers, and Gazzola found that “if we observe actions in . . . meaningful sequences, our brains increasingly ignore what comes into our eyes, and depend more on predictions of what should happen next, derived from our own motor system. ‘What we would do next, becomes what our brain sees’, summarizes Christian Keysers. . . . our brain does not simply react to what comes in through our senses. Instead, we have a predictive brain, that permanently predicts what comes next. The expected sensory input is then suppressed. We see the world from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. Of course, if what we see violates our expectations, the expectation-driven suppression fails, and we become aware of what we actually see rather than what we expected to see.”
“When We See What Others Do, Our Brain Sees Not What We See, But What We Expect.” 2023. Press release, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, https://nin.nl/news/when-we-see-what-others-do-our-brain-sees-not-what-we-see-but-what-we-expect/#