Your Brain is a Prediction Organ

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In a very real sense, predictions are just your brain having a conversation with itself. A bunch of neurons makes their best guess about what will happen in the immediate future, based on whatever combination of past and present that your brain is currently conjuring. Those neurons then announce that guess to neurons in other brain areas, changing their firing. Meanwhile, sense data from the world and your body inject itself into the conversation, confirming (or not) the prediction that you’ll experience as your reality.

In actuality, your brain’s predictive process is not quite so linear. Usually, your brain has several ways to deal with a given situation, and it creates a flurry of predictions and estimates probabilities for each one. Is that rustling sound in the forest due to the wind, an animal, an enemy fighter, or a shepherd? Is that long, brown shape a branch, a staff, or a rifle? Ultimately, in each moment, some prediction is the winner. Often, it’s the prediction that best matches the incoming sense data, but not always. Either way, the winning prediction becomes your action and your sensory experience.

So, your brain issues predictions and checks them against the sense data coming from the world and your body.

If your brain has predicted well, then your neurons are already firing in a pattern that matches the incoming sense data. That means this sense data itself has no further use beyond confirming your brain’s predictions. What you see, hear, smell, and taste in the world and feel in your body in that moment are completely constructed in your head.

By prediction, your brain has efficiently prepared you to act. When your predicting brain is right, it creates your reality. When it’s wrong, it still creates your reality, and hopefully, it learns from its mistakes: Your brain incorporates the prediction errors and updates its predictions, so it can predict better next time around.

Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do

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Cutting-edge neuroscience shows that your brain isn’t built for thinking—it’s made to predict your reality, and you have more power over that perception than you might think.

From the moment you’re born to the moment you draw your last breath, your brain is stuck in a dark, silent box called your skull. Day in and day out, it continually receives sense data from the outside world via your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. This data does not arrive in the form of the meaningful sights, smells, sounds, and other sensations that most of us experience. It’s just a barrage of light waves, chemicals, and changes in air pressure with no inherent significance.

Faced with these ambiguous scraps of sense data, your brain must somehow figure out what to do next. Your brain’s most important job is to control your body so you stay alive and well.

How does your brain decipher the sense data so it knows how to proceed? Your brain asks itself in every moment, figuratively speaking, The last time I encountered a similar situation when my body was in a similar state, what did I do next?

Your brain can draw on your lifetime of past experiences—things that have happened to you personally and things that you’ve learned about from friends, teachers, books, videos, and other sources. In the blink of an eye, your brain reconstructs bits and pieces of past experience as your neurons pass electrochemical information back and forth in an ever-shifting, complex network. Your brain assembles these bits into memories to infer the meaning of the sense data and guess what to do about it. Your past experiences include not only what happened in the world around you but also what happened inside your body. Your brain asks itself in every moment, figuratively speaking, The last time I encountered a similar situation when my body was in a similar state, what did I do next? The answer need not be a perfect match for your situation, just something close enough to give your brain an appropriate plan of action that helps you survive and even thrive.

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Process focussed

Michael Fred Phelps is an American former competitive swimmer and the most successful and most decorated Olympian of all time, with a total of 28 medals. Phelps also holds the all-time records for Olympic gold medals, Olympic gold medals in individual events, and Olympic medals in individual events.

During a conversation with Phelps ( You can watch the video here,) a question was asked … “In your last event in Rio, if you were to place second and come away with a silver, instead of gold, would that haunt you?”

Phelps’s answer was .. “No – because I know my coach (Bob Bowman) and I did absolutely everything we could do to prepare ourselves to win. I’m willing to accept any results that I get.”

Phelps response shifted the focus from outcome to process, and in doing so, revealed his mindset as it relates to focusing on the PROCESS instead of the outcome.

Phelps’ answer reveals why PROCESS-FOCUSED thinking is the mindset that we all need to adapt to really achieve top performance.

In conclusion: Stop focusing on and obsessing with the outcome. Focus on what you CAN control, which is busting your ass every day to succeed, and trust that doing so will allow you to achieve top-level performance.

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Don’t be surprised when you change

Something happens when we set scary goals. In the process of getting to that point, we become different people. The change doesn’t happen instantly, but when you look back to it after some time, you’ll notice that something changed.

This is completely normal. And, one major way of changing who you are is by setting big goals. Because for you to achieve certain things, you’ll be remolded in the process.

It’s the process of getting to your goals that actually makes you achieve those things.

In that process, you keep getting molded and remolded until you become a different person that most people won’t recognize.

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Which comes first? Goal or process?

When you set a goal, you are setting a specific result from the work that you want to undertake.

Some people say you shouldn’t commit to specific results, but instead, should keep your options open or focus on “the process.”

Yes, you need to focus on the process. But that process is a byproduct of the goal, not the other way around.

The goal determines the process.

The results you get along the way, which you should be relentlessly tracking, also influence and shape your process. If you’re not getting the results you want, you must CHANGE your process.