Predictive processing — the neuroscientific framework proposing that the brain is fundamentally a prediction machine that continuously generates and refines top-down generative models to anticipate incoming sensory data, resolving discrepancies through prediction-error signals — appears in the depth-psychology corpus as a productive bridge between biological mechanism and experiential meaning. Lisa Feldman Barrett deploys the framework most extensively, arguing that emotion is not a reflexive response to stimuli but a constructive act of prediction rooted in the body-budgeting interoceptive network. Daniel Siegel imports the predictive-coding vocabulary to articulate how attachment relationships sculpt the 'predictive social brain,' shaping allostatic regulation from infancy onward. Hugh McGovern's Jungian synthesis treats hierarchical generative models as the neurological substrate for archetypal simulations, linking Friston's free-energy principle to the collective unconscious. Wolfram Schultz grounds the dopaminergic reward-prediction-error signal in animal learning, supplying the biochemical currency through which prediction updates drive plasticity. Felix Schoeller mobilizes the framework for aesthetics, showing how violations of musical expectation generate dopamine-mediated pleasure. Running through all these positions is a shared tension: whether predictive processing exhausts the meaning of psychological phenomena or whether — as the Jungian and phenomenological voices insist — something irreducible to Bayesian inference persists in the symbolic and imaginal life of the psyche.
In the library
21 substantive passages
An increasingly popular hypothesis in neuroscience is that the brain runs internal models that function as Bayesian filters for incoming sensory input, driving action and constructing perception and other psychological phenomena. This hypothesis is often called predictive coding.
Siegel presents predictive coding as a leading neuroscientific hypothesis, synthesising Barrett, Hohwy, Friston and Clark to frame the brain's top-down prediction signals and bottom-up error signals as the engine of perception, action, and psychological life.
Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience... Prediction is such a fundamental activity of the human brain that some scientists consider it the brain's primary mode of operation.
Barrett advances the constructionist thesis that all perception — and by extension all emotion — is an act of predictive simulation rather than passive sensory registration.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
The interoceptive network issues predictions about your body, tests the resulting simulations against sensory input from your body, and updates your brain's model of your body in the world.
Barrett specifies that the interoceptive network is the site where predictive processing most directly generates felt emotional experience, linking bodily budget predictions to the construction of affect.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
A prediction originates as a multisensory summary, representing the goal of the concept, in a portion of the interoceptive network known as the default mode network.
Barrett locates the origin of conceptual predictions in the default mode network, integrating the predictive-processing account of emotion with the neuroscience of the conceptual cascade.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
we seek to explore how recent advances in the neurosciences provide clarity on the neurological conditions under which archetypal content becomes more especially salient and how the hierarchically structured organization of the brain affords the emergence and experience of the collective unconscious and archetypes.
McGovern positions predictive processing and the free-energy principle as the neural scaffolding through which Jungian archetypes — understood as hierarchical generative models — become consciously salient.
McGovern, Hugh, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience, 2025thesis
the manifestation of these simulations occur via the mechanisms of hierarchical generative models... in terms of variational free energy minimization, Bayesian model selection.
McGovern argues that archetypal representations are instantiated through hierarchical generative models governed by Bayesian model selection and variational free-energy minimisation.
McGovern, Hugh, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience, 2025thesis
The brain in general is a predictive organ, preparing for what comes next... 'the social brain is really the predictive brain, which develops as a function of social experience aimed at allostasis regulation.'
Siegel endorses the view that the social brain is fundamentally a predictive organ, and that early attachment relationships literally sculpt the neural networks responsible for predictive allostatic regulation.
Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
activation in more anterior portions of the insula during the anticipatory period, before the onset of isoproterenol action, consistent with a predictive processing role (Barrett and Simmons, 2015; Seth and Friston, 2016).
Hassanpour provides neuroimaging evidence localising predictive processing to the anterior insula during cardiorespiratory anticipation, supporting the EPIC model of interoceptive prediction.
Hassanpour, Mahlega S, The Insular Cortex Dynamically Maps Changes in Cardiorespiratory Interoceptionsupporting
the EPIC model... proposes that PE computations happen in cortical regions where the laminar architecture supports comparisons between bottom-up afferent interoceptive signals, and top-down interoceptive predictions.
Hassanpour details the cytoarchitectonic conditions under which the insula implements interoceptive prediction-error computations, providing mechanistic support for predictive-processing accounts of body awareness.
Hassanpour, Mahlega S, The Insular Cortex Dynamically Maps Changes in Cardiorespiratory Interoceptionsupporting
Your brain computes prediction errors speedily by comparing the prediction to actual sensory input, and then it reduces the prediction error quickly and efficiently... Without prediction error, life would be a yawning bore. Nothing would be surprising or novel, and therefore your brain would never learn anything new.
Barrett explains the functional necessity of prediction errors for learning and novelty detection, grounding the psychologically vital experience of surprise in the mechanics of predictive processing.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting
our brain continually predicts upcoming events based on implicit knowledge. Dopamine signals violations of expectations, or prediction errors, driving learning to update expectations.
Schoeller applies predictive processing to aesthetic experience, arguing that musical and narrative pleasure arise from dopamine-coded prediction-error signals triggered by expectation violations.
Schoeller, Felix, The neurobiology of aesthetic chills: How bodily sensations shape emotional experiences, 2024supporting
Psychedelics could thus enable the brain to liberate archetypal simulations, causing a liberated or anarchic quality to message passing... the relinquishment of typical top–down, hierarchical causation in the brain and the liberation of bottom-up flow may mean that phenomenological (archetypal) visions can shimmer into perceptual awareness.
McGovern proposes that psychedelics disrupt normal hierarchical predictive processing, releasing bottom-up archetypal content into perceptual awareness in a manner consistent with Jungian phenomenology.
McGovern, Hugh, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience, 2025supporting
'Reward prediction error' then means the difference between the reward I get and the reward that was predicted... Once I get the same can again and again for the same button press, I get no more surprises; there is no prediction error, I don't change my behavior, and thus I learn nothing more.
Schultz provides the foundational empirical account of the dopaminergic reward prediction-error signal, the biological substrate upon which broader predictive-processing theories of learning and motivation are built.
Processing of prediction errors rather than full information about an environmental event saves neuronal information processing and, in the case of rewards, excites neurons with larger-than-predicted rewards.
Schultz demonstrates the computational efficiency of prediction-error signalling over full information transmission, anchoring the information-theoretic logic of predictive processing in dopamine neuroscience.
The enclosed particles behave as if inferring, using Bayesian logic, the nature of the changing environment which lies outside the boundary... Friston understands the brain in t[his framework].
Mizen situates Friston's free-energy principle and its Bayesian inference framework — the theoretical foundation of predictive processing — within a depth-psychological account of self and boundary.
Mizen, C. Susan, The Self and alien self in psyche and somasupporting
Mental models are basic components of implicit memory. Our minds use mental models of the world in order to assess a situation more rapidly and to determine what the next moment in time is most likely to offer.
Siegel's account of implicit mental models as predictive schemata anticipates the predictive-processing framework, grounding top-down anticipation of experience in developmental memory structures.
Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
That future unit will contain expected feelings, that is, predictions made by internal models of the world and of others' behavior based on heredity and experience. If the present conditions do not match the expected conditions, the dissonance can immediately produce increased salience in the ongoing present moment (e.g., surprise).
Craig describes an interoceptive temporal model in which future affective states are predicted by internal models, with prediction-error dissonance generating heightened salience — aligning his global-emotional-moment theory with predictive-processing principles.
Craig, A.D. Bud, How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2014supporting
Each visual detail is unpacked into even more detailed predictions in turn, for (say) colors, shirt texture, and so on, each of which involves more prediction loops and cascading and unpacking.
Barrett details the hierarchical cascade of predictive unpacking across cortical levels, demonstrating how high-level concepts generate progressively fine-grained predictions down to primary sensory cortex.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting
the anterior insula involved in the processing of temporal predictions (Limongi et al., 2013) as well as the influence of self-regulation on functional connectivity.
Paulus notes the anterior insula's role in temporal prediction processing as part of a broader account of insular connectivity relevant to interoception and addiction.
Paulus, Martin P., Interoception and drug addiction, 2014aside
the anterior insula involved in the processing of temporal predictions (Limongi et al., 2013) as well as the influence of self-regulation on functional connectivity.
Paulus references temporal prediction processing in the anterior insula within a connectivity-based account of insular function in addiction and interoception.
Paulus, Martin P., Interoception and drug addiction, 2013aside
predictive processing as a model of perception. Ann N Y Acad Sci 2020;1464:242–68.
McGovern cites predictive processing as a model of perception in a bibliographic reference, acknowledging the framework's relevance to the neuropsychological synthesis without elaborating upon it in this passage.
McGovern, Hugh, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience, 2025aside