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Our brains are "predictive organs," constantly minimizing surprises through refined predictions.

Anxiety and depression often link to a diminished capacity for useful future predictions.

To enhance prediction, attention to subtle co-occurrences and regularities is crucial.

I am a worrier, and have been for most of my life. At some point, someone dear and smart teased me that I worry about the wrong things. The things that hit me, she noted, were never the things I worried about. For a while that left me feeling like an incompetent worrier—until my research caught up. I realized that the things I worry about often don’t end up hurting me precisely because worrying helps me diffuse them ahead of time. The things I didn’t worry about, I didn’t anticipate—and so I wasn’t prepared. This is one reason we are so captivated by the future.

From Moses to Zarathustra, from Cassandra and Nostradamus to the Oracle, religion, mythology, literature, art, and pop culture have never ceased to invoke prophetic figures. It is comforting to peek into the future, and the alleged ability to do so is treated as a superpower. But by studying the brain and how it is shaped by the environment, I have learned that we all make small—and surprisingly accurate—prophecies every day.

The Brain's Need for Predictability

Our brains strive for certainty. Knowing what to expect helps us survive and prosper. Over the past two decades, a wave of discovery has emphasized how obsessively the brain pursues predictability. Many now describe the brain as a “predictive organ,” because so much of its computation is geared toward anticipating what comes next. From dodging a ball hurtling toward us to preparing for a job interview, we constantly use memory to approximate the future, leaning on what we know to generate expectations. Predictive coding, a leading theory of brain function, holds that the brain aims to minimize surprise by refining its internal models through error-correcting predictions—our everyday “prophecies.”

Consider also the default mode network (DMN), a large-scale cortical system vigorously active when external demands are low. The DMN is the seat of much of our mind-wandering—by some estimates, nearly half of our waking life. Far from idle, this spontaneous mental activity rehearses possibilities and simulates near and far futures. In fact, a diminished ability to generate useful predictions often accompanies anxiety and depression, revealing how deeply our well-being depends on a stable sense of the future.

A more flattering explanation for our fascination with the future is that we are curious creatures. We are curious about science and technology, the arc of our relationships, even the surprise party we suspect is being planned for us. Yet much of this curiosity still serves our anxious desire for certainty. Curiosity yields meaning, and meaning confers the feeling of understanding and control. This may explain why many people feel uneasy with abstract art or amorphous concepts; we need labels for what things are and what is coming. A favorite meditation exercise is to notice sounds—say, a truck passing or a bird chirping—without naming them. To treat them as raw frequencies without meaning. It is not for the faint of heart.

The Foundations of Prediction

To predict, we rely first and foremost on previous experience stored in memory. Our inability to foresee the shape of extraterrestrial life or the feel of life after death is understandable: we lack reliable data from the past. But in everyday life, we are remarkably good prophets, and we can become better. Becoming a modern prophet takes two components: noticing and remembering.

It may sound disappointing, but the world tends to have a very predictable structure. Of course, there are surprises—sometimes major ones—but our environment is highly regular. A chair tends to appear next to a table. An office tends to contain a computer. A beach vacation calls for a swimsuit. We call these statistical regularities. The brain picks them up through experience. A kitchen contains an oven with high probability, a shoe with low probability, a samurai sword with something close to zero. We use these ever-accumulating statistics to predict what is likely to happen, when, and where. Encoding the statistics of life is the foundation of planning, preparation, and flourishing. The more we extract and retain, the more accurately we can forecast.

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Using this anticipatory prowess requires attention. We must attend to what unfolds to store it in memory, and we must attend to new situations so we can recognize their similarity to old ones and deploy the corresponding probabilities. You complete your friend’s sentence midway. You know how to behave in a foreign supermarket. You are less awkward at your second office party. These feel mundane only because we execute them effortlessly; nevertheless, understanding consequences is prophecy—from within.

Challenges in Achieving Accurate Predictions

Yet while we generate predictions to achieve certainty, we also stand in their way. Largely outside awareness, our mood and dispositions bias our perception of the present and therefore of the future. If only we noticed all regularities and consistently activated them, we might be über-prophets. But we are rarely attentive enough to capture subtle co-occurrences, and we are often too distracted to notice the analogies between present and past that would let us anticipate what comes next. Despite our sense that we perceive the world as it is, our preoccupations, conventions, biases, fears, and desires filter reality, and distorts what Immanuel Kant called “the thing-in-itself.” After a week of silence at a Vipassana retreat, I finally noticed the intricate details of a common flower. How much more silence would it take to discern the many details of a complex social situation unfolding before me?

Interestingly, the biblical prophets were already instructed in practices that enhance prophecy in ways that resonate with the modern brain. Maimonides emphasized overcoming superficial desires and cultivating undistracted imagination. In The Guide for the Perplexed, he suggests that shedding wants and habits yields certainty. Other scholars highlight isolation, meditation (through prayer or otherwise), and continuous observation of nature and the inner world. Aryeh Kaplan even proposed that biblical prophets practiced structured meditation, with mantras and specific postures. The Talmud teaches that “prophecy rests only on one with a settled mind.” Whether one reads these as prerequisites for divine revelation or as conditions for clear perception, the point aligns with neuroscience: when the mind is uncluttered, cognitive resources can register the subtle patterns that make our prophecies accurate.

The “prophet,” ancient or modern, sees clearly because of a lifestyle that enables attention (to regularities), retention (in memory), and recognition (of parallels). This clarity demands minimizing personal distortions. The prize is objectivity—extracting oneself from the scene to see it as it is. Rollo May, in The Courage to Create, suggested that artists are modern prophets, sensing social currents before the rest of us. I find myself drawn to artist friends, perhaps because they are less occupied with the logistics of life. They often describe a situation with piercing insight and sober perspective. Like the prophets, they avoid trivialities, and in doing so their perception sharpens. When you see things as they are, you see the future better.

© Psychology Today