Just a moment...

Despite its focus on uncertainty minimization, uncertainty itself has been shown to be intrinsically valuable, with agents being shown to seek uncertainty, find pleasure in its resolution, and to aim to occupy a band of uncertainty which lays at the edge of the agent ’ s ability to cope.

Recent evidence shows that humans are attracted to, and find pleasure in, relatively uncertain and volatile environments precisely because those environments afford excellent opportunities for error reduction at a better than expected rate — i.e. they offer optimal error dynamics that are essential for maximizing learning

Errors with high precision are considered ‘ newsworthy ’ by the system, and will therefore drive further processing, while low precision renders errors relatively impotent within the system.

We explain below how reward systems in the brain evolved to track and encourage our engagements with information at the edge of our own understanding (at the edge of informational chaos) where we find the most error-reducing opportunities, and how horror content co-opts these systems