“A transformation begins when we approach our experiences with curiosity rather than certainty… It’s not about solving anything. It resembles a softening of the need to know, letting go, even briefly, of the notion that we must get it right.” — Jakob Hohwy
Your brain isn’t simply recording reality. It’s constantly predicting it.
Why can someone know they are loved and still feel unlovable? Why can we intellectually know something is safe and still be terrified of it? Why can resisting pain sometimes make it worse? And why are some beliefs so difficult to change, even when the evidence seems overwhelming?
Jakob Hohwy, one of the leading thinkers on predictive processing, explains how the brain builds a model of the world, and what happens when that model gets stuck.
Professor Hohwy is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and the Director of the interdisciplinary Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies. Jakob’s The Predictive Mind helped establish the predictive processing paradigm. His 2026 book, The Self-Evidencing Agent: Mind, Existence, and Predictive Processing, tells a fundamental story about how everyday experience arises as people seek out evidence for their internal model of the world and themselves.
In this conversation, we explore how the brain constructs our experience of reality, why old beliefs can survive contradictory evidence, and what predictive processing might tell us about suffering, anxiety, phobias, meditation, pain, therapy, AI, gratitude, and how to live in a world that keeps changing.
One idea kept resurfacing: maybe the goal isn’t to eliminate uncertainty. Maybe it’s to get better at updating our models when reality surprises us.
Some highlights from the episode:
- 03:00 Introduction to predictive processing
- 05:30 The brain as a prediction machine vs. recorder
- 10:00 What an expected text message can teach us about prediction error
- 13:00 Priors, evidence, and why some beliefs carry more weight than others
- 20:00 How unexpected failure can become a powerful learning signal
- 26:00 Why someone can be loved and still feel unlovable
- 32:00 Meditation, attention, and learning not to immediately react
- 35:00 Self-evidencing and how we test our models of the world
- 49:00 How the predictive brain compares with LLMs and AI
- 52:00 How we can change our experience of physical pain
- 1:02:00 Prediction errors and emotional suffering
- 1:10:00 Why holding beliefs too tightly can make us suffer
- 1:16:00 Why phobias can be rational
- 1:20:00 How avoidance keeps fear alive
- 1:27:00 The surprising predictive-processing case for gratitude
- 1:31:00 Attention is an amplifier of beliefs
- 1:35:00 Why getting new information itself feels like a reward
Resources / Links
- Site: https://research.monash.
edu/en/persons/jakob-hohwy/ - Book : The Self-Evidencing Agent: Mind, Existence, and Predictive Processing
- Book: The Predictive Mind
- Institute: Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies
- Paper: New Directions in Predictive Processing
- Paper: Computational Mechanisms of Gratitude Practice
