The Mind: A Miracle of Prediction
How does perception interact with movement?
When I think of how the mind-body connection works, I reach back to half-remembered high school biology: You want to go somewhere, or stand up, or drink some water. Neurons fire in the brain and send signals down through muscles telling them what to do. Then you do it. My lasting impression is of an utterly mechanical and static process.
But I’ve come to understand that mind-body dynamics are anything but static and mechanical. They’re instead dynamic and anticipatory, like the world’s most complex simulator. Take perception. At a basic level, perception frames how we see the world through visual cues, but when we’re driving, for example, perception gives us the ability to gauge upcoming road curvature even when we can’t see it.
According to neuroscientist and engineer Alain Berthoz and some of the researchers he cites in his book The Brain’s Sense of Movement, our perception is about movement in 3-dimensional space — not just position — including predicting future movement.
I tend to think of perception as looking at and assessing fixed points, which tracks with how I learned about the human body. You see a bend up ahead on a hiking trail, so you aim for it, walk there, and then look further for the next point. Static, mechanical. But…
