The Human Brain Has the Potential to Predict the Future

 According to this latest research, the human body can know that something big is about to happen before it happens. If this is true, this study suggests that there are basic things about the laws of nature yet to be discovered. We make thousands of small predictions every day—when the bus will arrive; who will knock on the door; whether the glass will break when it falls, etc. Currently, researchers at the University of Washington in the United States, as one of the pioneers in predictive studies, are beginning to reveal the mysterious insights of the brain's prediction of daily things through a series of experimental plans.

 This sounds a bit like a Gypsy fortune teller, but early patients with neurological diseases such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease will benefit from this research. In these diseases, patients suffer from segmented consciousness different from the normal flow of consciousness in their environment, leading to mental disorders.

 Researchers focused on the midbrain dopamine system (MDS), an ancient evolutionary brain system that provides information received by the brain when unexpected events occur. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to find that the brain's dopamine system can encode prediction errors when test subjects are asked to select what will happen in videos of daily life events.

 Dr. Jeffrey M. Zacks, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, stated that predicting recent events is crucial for guiding behavior and is also a key component of predictive perception, language processing, and learning theory. He is the head of this research, the report of which will be published in the upcoming issue of "Cognitive Neuroscience".

 Zacks said, "This has great advantages for predicting what is about to happen." He and his colleagues are building a theory on how to predict what is about to happen. At the core of this theory is the important belief in predicting the future, which is a mental model that can maintain the prediction of what is about to happen. Sometimes, this mental model needs to be upgraded, especially when the environment changes unpredictably. He pointed out that when we watch videos recording daily life activities, we can predict what will happen next in the video. Successful prediction is related to a smooth flow of subjective conscious experience, but many failed predictions show that the brain's conscious flow is disrupted, accompanied by the active state of the brain's dopamine system (MDS) that controls attention and adapts to unpredictable changes.

 Zacks conducted experiments on young, healthy test subjects, letting them watch videos of daily life events, such as: washing a car, building LEGO bricks, or doing laundry. The test subjects watched the video for a while, then the playback stopped. At this time, some pictures were shown to the test subjects for selection, asking what the plot would be like in the video 5 seconds later, while avoiding similar pictures inconsistent with the occurring scenario. The playback stopped halfway through the video, before another event activity (event boundary), and in the other half of the video, the playback would stop halfway through the event activity.

Julia Mossbridge, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, said, "This finding is that things can be predicted without any clues, which indicates that the bodily effect is real but very weak. So the question is how is this achieved?" However, other scientists are skeptical of this claim. They believe that some biases in the study led to seeing an effect that does not actually exist.

Many studies have shown that bodily responses include changes in heart rate, pupil dilation, and brain activity. In most trials, scary pictures were randomly interspersed with more neutral pictures, so theoretically, participants had no idea which picture would appear next. To find out if this effect is real, Mossbridge and her team analyzed dozens of such trials. As part of the analysis, they rejected any trials with biases and flaws.

They still found a "hunch" effect, detecting changes in bodily arousal seconds before the event occurred in the trials. These findings suggest that people's bodies subconsciously predict the future when something important is about to happen, even when they are unaware of it. Mossbridge told "Life Sciences," "For example, if you are a stock investor who has invested a lot of money in a stock, you might be able to predict the movement of your stock ten seconds in advance."

The paper does not claim that people are wizards or possess supernatural, extraordinary powers. Instead, the authors believe that hunches are real, and the bodily reactions following the laws of nature are simply reactions that are not yet understood. But others are skeptical of this hunch. Cognitive scientist Rufin VanRullen of the Center for Brain and Cognition said in an email that although the statistical methods used in this study are sound, it does not mean that hunches are real. VanRullen was not involved in this research, he wrote, "All of this indicates a statistical tendency among scientists looking for these so-called hunch effects to actually find them." Kyle Elliot Mathewson, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in an email that, on the contrary, it is likely that these trials were biased, perhaps inadvertently missed by the authors of the study.

Mathewson added that it is also possible that many researchers have looked for this result, failed to find it, and forgotten about it. He, like VanRullen, was not involved in this research. He said that those studies were never published, so the overall effect in the published studies is biased. According to the researchers, to explain their research results with this bias, at least another 87 unpublished studies need to be confirmed to have no effect. Mathewson wrote, "Between psychology labs and psychology surveys, I can imagine that these numerous failed trials undoubtedly will not be published."

 Researchers found that the test subjects' prediction accuracy for the entire event activity video was over 90%, but the prediction accuracy for crossing "event boundaries" was less than 80%. At the same time, the test subjects lacked confidence in their predictions. Zacks said, "Crossing 'event boundaries' is the most difficult to predict the future, and the test subjects know they have difficulty. When the video stops, the test errors generated by the test subjects will increase significantly."

 Zacks and the research group are very interested in the test subjects' brain systems, hoping to reveal how the brain system predicts new events. In the fMRI experiments, he and his colleagues found significant activity in several midbrain regions, where the substantia nigra and the striatum nuclei are located, and the substantia nigra is the starting point of the dopamine signaling system.

 Zacks stated that the substantia nigra is the hardest part of the brain to invade in Parkinson's disease and is also an important brain region that controls activity and makes appropriate decisions. The fMRI experiments suggest two critical points of brain activity: when the test subjects make a choice; the brief moment when feedback is given on whether the test subjects' answers are correct. He emphasized that this experiment proposes a "stress test" for laboratory prediction theory, and researchers hope to further upgrade the prediction mechanism to better diagnose early stages of neurological diseases and provide treatment plans for patients.