Episode
Is Your Brain Burning Premium Fuel on Bad Data?
- Podcast
- The Buoyant Leader
- Published
- Mar 9, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 388
- Processing state
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Summary
Your brain uses about 20% of your body’s total energy budget all by itself, before a single muscle moves or a single molecule of food gets digested. Which means it has to be ruthlessly efficient in how it spends those calories. It achieves efficiency by predicting what’s about to happen based on past learning. But not only that. It also predicts what’s happening right now . That sounds weird, right? I mean, why does it need to predict, when it can just watch and listen and find out? Because tracking reality in real time is a colossal expenditure of energy. If your brain did that, there would be no energy left for action. Your Brain is Always Seeing Its Own Simulation In his book The Experience Machine , Andy Clark explains this using the metaphor of how streaming software handles video. Rather than looking at every single pixel in every single frame of a video, the software’s algorithm focuses only on the differences between each frame and the next. That way, a video can be rendered using a fraction of the data. Similarly, your brain is constructing your reality, and checking the data from your senses for errors; things in your environment that don’t align with the prediction. Faced with prediction error, your brain updates, in one of two ways. It either updates its model with the new information, or instructs you to act on the world to bring reality in line with the model. Those two options — update the model, or act on the world — are both functional. But your brain has a third trick up its sleeve, and this one actually keeps you from learning. When Prediction Goes Wrong The third trick is to ignore error signals from the environment. Your brain does this when it’s more confident in its model of the world than the evidence of your senses. Basically, it’s refusing to…