Explanation

Our senses open up a portal to the outside world – and suddenly we are suddenly flooded with information!

Information in itself isn’t that useful. We are still trying to check off our shopping list – how do we know if a cool touch is water or stone? Something that will quench our thirst or something we probably shouldn’t consume? To make use of our senses, we need to weave together this information to tell a story about what we’re sensing and whether it will meet our needs. We call these stories “models” (see “What is a model”).

Our experience of the world isn’t coming directly from our senses. Instead, our brains project our models — our predictions or best guess of what’s happening in the world. It’s like we’ve filmed our environment and are replaying it on the screen inside our head.

However, we need to act in the real world based on that video replay: like using the fancy cameras on your car to reverse, instead of looking over your shoulder the old school way. It works well (unless the camera is broken – more on that in a minute). Scientists call this video replay a “controlled hallucination.”

These models don’t just repeat the world back to us, they are organized as stories with cause and effect. The brain uses these models to predict how different inputs (things we sense) cause outputs (things we need), so we can optimize our interactions with the world to meet our needs.

Solution: The brain maintains working models of the world to make sense of sensory information, and to figure out what to do with that information so we can effectively meet our needs.