The Predicting Brain: A Predictive-Processing View of Vipassana Meditation

In this article I will outline a model from neuroscience that helps us understand what may be happening in our meditation practice. The model is called predictive processing, and it helps us understand how brains and nervous systems create our perception of reality — ourselves and the world around us.

I have found this a powerful framework to explain the progress in Vipassana Meditation and also to give us a helpful pointer towards how it is good to practise. How to move closer towards clear seeing and not to meditate ourselves further into delusion and the resulting suffering.

From Simple Organisms to Perception

To understand predictive processing, we can step back a few billion years and imagine a very simple organism, something like a basic bacterium. Even such a simple organism needs a few basic structures and capacities in order to survive.

It needs a boundary, a cell membrane that distinguishes inside from outside, a basic kind of "skin." It needs sensing, some way to sense the world around it and some way to sense itself. Simple sensory receptors can respond to aspects of its environment like temperature, osmotic pressure, acidity, nutrients or harmful substances, while the organism is also sensitive to its own internal state — energy, chemical balance, damage and so on.

It also needs some basic way of processing and integrating this information. A bacterium does not have a nervous system, but changes in its receptors can change the internal chemistry of the cell and influence what happens next. And finally it needs action, some ability to respond — to move towards or away from something, alter its metabolism, open or close channels in its membrane, divide or become dormant.

So already at this very basic level we have something like:

Sensing → Processing → Action → New Sensing

The organism only has access to the sensory information available to it. It does not somehow directly know the world around it. From changes in temperature, acidity, pressure, chemicals and its own internal state, it needs to respond in ways that keep it alive. Is this nourishment or danger? Are conditions getting better or worse? Should I move towards this or away from it?

Even some bacteria have a very basic form of memory, effectively comparing the chemical conditions they encounter now with those they encountered a few seconds earlier. This allows them to respond not only to what is present, but to whether conditions are getting better or worse. Already a basic level of memory and sense of change can significantly increase an organism's chances of survival.

As organisms and eventually nervous systems become more complex, this capacity to integrate present sensory information with previous experience becomes enormously more sophisticated. Instead of simply responding to individual sensations, the nervous system can organise sensory information into an ongoing experience of what is happening. This is roughly what we call perception.

Perception is different from sensory information. It is the organisation and aggregation of sensory information into some kind of experience of ourselves and our environment, based both on the information available to us now and what we have previously learned about the world.

And this is where predictive processing comes in.

Predictive Processing

The basic idea of predictive processing is that the nervous system does not start from zero every moment and reconstruct reality entirely from incoming sensory information. Instead, based upon its structure, previous experience and current state, it already has expectations about what is probably happening. These expectations or predictions are continually checked and updated by sensory information.

When sensory information fits reasonably well with what is expected, there is little need to dramatically change our perception. When something does not fit, there is what is called a prediction error — a difference between what was expected and what is being sensed — and our perception can be updated.

So rather than perception working only as:

Sensory Information → Bottom-Up Processing → Perception

predictive processing suggests an ongoing interaction between:

Top-Down Predictions ↕ Bottom-Up Sensory Information

Our perception is therefore something like an ongoing best guess about what is happening, continually constrained and corrected by what we actually sense.

The interesting question for meditation is: if so much of what we consciously experience is already organised perception rather than sensory information alone, can we learn to see some of this construction happening?

Learning to Construct Self and World

We humans do this at an extraordinarily sophisticated level. We have hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling and touch, but also interoception, proprioception, thermoception and nociception, to name a few of the basic senses. And of course we have our previous experience, memories and many preprogrammed tendencies and perceptions.

An infant, when they first come into the world, is not a blank slate. There is already some basic relationship to warmth, comfort, hunger, pain and unpleasantness. Safety and nourishment become associated with the smell of the mother, the sensation of skin, warmth and sucking.

As the baby grows and learns more complex movement and action such as rolling, crawling, grabbing, walking, saying yes, saying no, talking and socialising, its perception of reality becomes more and more sophisticated. The baby gradually learns the regularities of objects and people through time and space. Papa can disappear around a corner without disappearing from existence. There is increasingly some expectation of what has happened, what exists outside present sensory experience and what might happen next.

More and more, the infant and child develops some kind of internal model of itself and its environment. This perception includes some model of themselves — where they are, where their body is, what they are doing, what they did and what they might do next — and some model of the world — who is around, what is around, where things are and what might happen.

With growing age, the child starts to include more and more symbolic and abstract information, particularly language. Language helps us to remember, categorise and aggregate enormous amounts of information, which helps us to act, navigate and make choices intuitively or consciously about what to do and what not to do. Most of this happens organically and intuitively. We don't need to consciously construct a world every morning when we wake up. It is simply there.

How Do We Experience This Internal Model?

Importantly for meditation, this internal perception does not only exist somewhere abstractly in the brain. We actually experience it, and much of it seems to appear in the form of mentally simulated sensory experience.

We can see something without actually seeing it through our eyes — a mental image. We can hear words and voices without sound entering our ears — mental chatter or inner speech. We have a mental and felt image of our body and where it is in space.

Experiments on body ownership show how far this construction runs. Sit someone down, hide their real hand from view, and stroke a rubber hand in front of them at the same time and in the same rhythm as their hidden real hand, and within a few minutes most people report something strange: the rubber hand starts to feel like it's theirs, and their actual hand starts to feel like it isn't. What's striking is that this isn't only a subjective impression. The real hand's temperature drops, its motor readiness decreases, there are measurable shifts in immune response in that hand, and people become measurably worse at telling where it actually is in space. A change in what the nervous system currently predicts about which hand belongs to the body is enough to shift real physiology, not just a feeling.

We can remember or imagine something and immediately experience feelings, pleasantness or unpleasantness, impulses and bodily or energetic contractions associated with it.

Our perception of ourselves and the world therefore seems to involve a mixture of what is being sensed now and what is being remembered, predicted, imagined and constructed. There are mental images and spatial representations of ourselves and the world around us. There is mental chatter, words and imagined conversations. There are feelings and emotional tones. There are bodily and energetic contractions associated with fear, resistance, desire or pain. There are impulses towards movement and action.

All of these different experiences can be aggregated into the apparently simple and continuous experience of "me, here, in this situation."

We can see this particularly clearly when imagining the future. Perhaps you receive a message from someone saying, "Can we talk tomorrow?" Nothing is actually happening yet. The conversation does not exist. But almost immediately an entire experiential reality can begin to form. There may be an image of the person, imagined conversations, mental chatter about what they might say, a contraction around the chest or belly, unpleasant feeling and a sense of something looming somewhere in the future.

We are already experiencing something which has not happened.

Vipassana Meditation and the Construction of Experience

Vipassana Meditation is the systematic investigation of our phenomenological experience, our sensory reality moment by moment. It asks us to take a closer look at what we are actually experiencing: sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts and habitual responses, as well as awareness itself.

We can think of Vipassana as a deconstructive meditation practice in the sense that we are invited to investigate our ordinary predictions and perceptions and become increasingly sensitive to the experiences through which they are constructed.

Ordinarily, I don't experience "the construction of a cup." I experience a cup. I don't experience "the construction of myself." I experience myself. I don't experience "a perception of danger." There is danger. I don't experience "a thought about what this person thinks about me." I experience what I think they think about me.

Our perceptions are in this sense transparent. We see through the construction and experience the result as reality. Vipassana begins to make this construction more visible.

We systematically direct attention towards sensory and phenomenological experience rather than only towards our perceptions about what things are. Instead of simply experiencing "my leg," we might begin to notice pressure, warmth, vibration, tingling, a mental image of the leg and a sense of its location in space. Instead of simply "I am anxious," we might find contraction around the chest, movement in the belly, unpleasant feeling, mental images of the future, mental chatter and impulses to move away from what we are experiencing.

Instead of simply "I am thinking," we might notice mental sounds, words, images, bodily sensations and subtle intentions arising and disappearing. Instead of one stable experience, we begin to see the different sensory and perceptual processes from which it is constructed.

This does not mean that Vipassana allows us to completely get rid of prediction and arrive at some perfectly "raw" sensory reality. Even seemingly basic experiences such as colour, movement, bodily location and sensation are already shaped and constructed through our nervous system.

It may therefore be more useful to understand Vipassana not simply as moving from illusion towards raw reality, but from transparent construction towards seeing construction.

A concrete example makes this vivid. There's a well-known case of a construction worker who jumped down off a ladder and landed on a nail, which went straight through his boot. He was brought into hospital in agony, screaming in pain, and had to be sedated before they could even remove the boot. When they finally cut it open, the nail had passed cleanly between his toes. It hadn't touched him at all.

The pain was real. It just wasn't caused by tissue damage. His nervous system, seeing a long nail sticking through his boot, generated an extremely confident prediction: there will be pain here. And that prediction didn't sit quietly in the background waiting to be checked against the facts. It actively shaped what got perceived. The pain was the construction, not a straightforward readout of the body.

If that man had been a Vipassana meditator, and had been able to drop the story and feel directly what was actually there in his foot in that moment, he might have found there wasn't a lot to feel at all: some pressure maybe, some sensation between the toes, and not much else. That's not a claim that pain isn't real, or that it's only in the mind. It's closer to the opposite: it shows how much of what we call pain is genuinely constructed, moment to moment, which is exactly why working directly with sensation, rather than with the story about the sensation, can change how pain is experienced.

Impermanence, Non-Self and Suffering

As our phenomenological clarity increases, things that appeared singular and stable begin to reveal themselves as many changing processes. We begin to notice perceptions themselves as experiences. We notice thoughts as experiences, mental images as experiences, the body image as an experience, feelings and energetic contractions as experiences. We notice intentions and impulses towards action arising.

And we notice how all of these are constantly changing.

This begins to connect naturally with the traditional insights of Vipassana. What appeared stable reveals itself as changing. What appeared singular reveals itself as many processes. What appeared simply "there" reveals itself as dependent upon conditions. And what appeared to be "me" begins to reveal itself as sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts and intentions arising and passing.

We begin to see impermanence. We begin to see the conditioned and constructed nature of experience. And we begin to see non-self — that these changing processes do not necessarily contain the stable, separate Self that we assumed was there.

We also begin to see the constant movement towards and away from experience. Pleasant and unpleasant. Want and don't want. Grasping and resisting. We can observe how quickly a sensation becomes a perception, how a perception becomes a feeling, how a feeling becomes an impulse, and how the whole construction can become "me" and "my problem."

And we begin to see how suffering arises as we identify with, resist, grasp at or attempt to stabilise experiences which are themselves constantly changing.

The Layers of Insight

This movement reflects what I describe elsewhere as the Layers of Insight. We can move from high-level, gross predictions and concepts with very little sensory awareness towards more and more refined sensory and phenomenological clarity.

At a gross level there is simply "I am anxious." With greater clarity there may be thoughts, images, unpleasantness, contraction, bodily sensation and impulses. With even greater clarity, those components themselves reveal further movement, instability and construction.

Concepts reveal perceptions. Perceptions reveal sensations. Emotions reveal sensations, feelings, thoughts, images and impulses. The body reveals pressure, vibration, warmth, movement, space and body image. Thought reveals mental sound, imagery, intention and bodily activity.

As perception becomes subtler, we begin to see the constructed nature not only of concepts but of our ordinary experience of Self and World itself. What seemed stable becomes movement. What seemed continuous becomes events. What seemed separate reveals relationship and dependence. What seemed to be "me" reveals processes.

This does not necessarily mean that underneath all these layers we finally discover some objectively existing bottom layer of reality. Rather, we become increasingly intimate with the construction of experience and see more clearly what is actually present in our conscious experience from moment to moment.

Through Vipassana, our whole system sees over and over again that its apparently stable perceptions are constructed, conditioned and changing. There can be a gradual disidentification with the stable and permanent perception of Self and World, allowing a freer flow of experience, wiser and clearer responsive action and perhaps a resting into more fundamental qualities of consciousness — ease, openness, clarity and compassion.

Bringing Insight Back Into Life

And then we get up from the cushion and live our life.

The point is not to stop using concepts and predictions. We still need them. The cup is a cup. A person is a person. We make plans, remember yesterday, imagine tomorrow and say "I" and "you." We need a functional perception of Self and World to navigate our lives.

Rather, the practice becomes bringing that momentary meditative insight back into living. Still being able to use concepts, predictions and our ordinary perception of Self and World while understanding more deeply their empty, impermanent and non-self nature.

We continue to construct reality, but perhaps we hold that construction more lightly. We become less convinced that our perception of ourselves, another person or a situation is simply how things are. There is more space for new information, more space for change and more space to respond rather than simply repeat what we already predicted.

Vipassana does not require us to stop constructing Self and World. It allows us to see, more and more clearly, the construction as construction.

If any of this is new territory, our free practice guide is a straightforward place to start, and if you'd like to sit with others without any commitment, the weekly community call is free to drop into. There's more of the research this piece draws on gathered over on the articles page.