Biological Foundations of Prediction
The MIT Press eBooks · 2023
Adaptive behavior governed by predictions begins at the very lowest level of life and continues up through the phylogenetic tree.Gradient detection plays a vital role in survival and arises via pure biochemistry in single-celled organisms and then via neural circuitry in some of the simpler multicellular lifeforms.Many of the same neural principles then enable differentiation and prediction in the brains of higher animals.This chapter investigates several of these primitive mechanisms, starting with the biochemical and quickly moving up through the neurophysiological to our ultimate goal, the neuroarchitectural.At that level, a diverse collection of neural circuits appears to implement prediction, and in many different ways, but all of which have direct ties to the general concepts introduced in chapter 2. Noticeably absent from this chapter is one dominant predictive region, the neocortex, whose detailed investigation is saved for later chapters on predictive coding and brain evolution, where the building-block modularity of the cortex meshes naturally with both traditional predictive-coding implementations and theories of incremental cognitive emergence.