"I am a worrier, and have been for most of my life. At some point, someone dear and smart teased me that I worry about the wrong things. The things that hit me, she noted, were never the things I worried about. For a while that left me feeling like an incompetent worrier-until my research caught up. I realized that the things I worry about often don't end up hurting me precisely because worrying helps me diffuse them ahead of time."
"Our brains strive for certainty. Knowing what to expect helps us survive and prosper. Over the past two decades, a wave of discovery has emphasized how obsessively the brain pursues predictability. Many now describe the brain as a "predictive organ," because so much of its computation is geared toward anticipating what comes next. From dodging a ball hurtling toward us to preparing for a job interview, we constantly use memory to approximate the future, leaning on what we know to generate expectations."
Brains operate as predictive organs that constantly anticipate future events by using memory and prior experience to generate expectations. Predictability aids survival and prosperity by reducing surprise. Predictive coding theory proposes that the brain minimizes unexpected events by refining internal models. Worry can function adaptively: rehearsing potential threats diffuses them ahead of time and prepares responses, while failure to anticipate leaves one unprepared. Attention to subtle co-occurrences and regularities in the environment strengthens predictive accuracy. Anxiety and depression often correlate with reduced capacity to form useful future predictions. Everyday cognition produces many small and surprisingly accurate predictions.
Read at Psychology Today
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