An international collaboration of over 50 neuroscientists and researchers is pioneering a new approach to understanding the brain: the world’s first crowd-sourced and designed neuroscience study. The goal is to shed light on predictive processing, the brain’s ability to anticipate future events based on past experiences. The experiments began this week at the Allen Institute.
Our brains are constantly predicting the future, whether it’s expecting a bear after hearing a rustle in the forest or processing everyday visual information.
“Predictive coding is the idea that most of your brain areas might not be really encoding what you’re seeing, but rather, might be most interested in what’s different about what you’re seeing compared to what you expected,” explains Colleen Gillon, Ph.D., a researcher at Imperial College London who played a leading role in the collaboration.
