The Brain as Prediction Engine

• Perception is a controlled hallucination.
• Happiness depends on the results of our prediction engine, the brain.
• We feel good if our prediction is correct or if reality turns out better than our prediction → lowering expectations increases our happiness.
• Mental illness very often is a false model of the world. A model that predicts the wrong things and refuses to update on new data → depressed people often think they are depressed all the time; however, when ESM is used to track, we find they are only depressed about 10% of their time

the similarity to neural networks here is undeniable :)