Brain Predicts Actions: Rethinking Perception in Social Interactions - Neuroscience News

While we feel like we are reacting to what is happening around us, the way it actually works is that your brain constructs what is likely to happen next drawing on your rich experience of what’s happened before. The latest science tells us that our every waking moment is dominated by predicting which actions we need to take next.

According to Friston's way of thinking, which he calls active inference, the brain is not the body's helmsman or puppeteer, but its dreamer. Brain and body are bound up in a mutual project to predict the world successfully. Sometimes the brain does the work, sometimes the body.

Our brain has a host of regions, termed the “action-observation network,” that’s sparked when we watch others do something in our “motor repertoire”