Your mind needs chaos

where do we learn the most? We learn at this Goldilocks zone, which is that healthy boundary between order and chaos, right at the edge where our predictive models necessarily break down

too much certainty is a problem for us, especially when that certainty drifts from real-world dynamics. So in order to protect our prediction engine, our brain and nervous system, from getting into what we’ve called the bad bootstrap, that is from getting very, very certain about something that’s wrong, it really behooves us to occasionally inject ... See more

anything that gets you out of your ordinary mode of interacting with the world so that you can check to see how good it is or how poor it is, is gonna be a benefit for us

This idea is common now, especially, in the West, that meditation might be more about relaxation, or maybe addressing stress. But that’s not the meat of the program. The center of that program is a deep, profound, and progressive investigation about the nature of who we are and how our own minds work. It’s a deep investigation about the way our emo... See more

You wrote that the brain evolved to seek out the “edge of informational chaos” — a place where our predictive models begin to break down, and in those uncertain zones, we actually have much to learn.

Rather, in our brain’s pursuit to plan, survive, and achieve our goals, it has learned how to guess what the world is actually like based on incoming sensory data. Those predictions are always uncertain, at least to a degree, which is why the goal of predictive processing is often described as minimizing that uncertainty.

But an optimal relationship... See more

one of the latest big theories in neuroscience says that humans are fundamentally creatures of prediction, and not only is creativity not at odds with that, but it actually goes hand in hand with improving our predictive power. Life itself, in this view, is one big process of creatively optimizing prediction as a survival strategy in a universe oth... See more