Construction of experience: There's something to pay attention to here

Lisa Feldman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made brought to my attention the science of construction of human experience. Namely, that emotions, concepts, and every other sensation/perception--and even movements--are actively constructed by the brain of the person experiencing them.

I have two major dogs in this fight: The desire to understand my own human experience, and the desire to understand why arm pain patterns are frequently so confusing.

Per Dr. Barrett: "Your brain uses past experience to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest."

In other words, we are not simply passive recipients of sensory input from the world or even from our bodies. The nature of survival is such that our brains need to predict what might be coming next, based on past experience and the concepts we have developed. Sometimes we predict in ways that mostly match the state of the world and our bodies (at least enough for things to work well), while other times we for whatever reason ignore the corrective input the world offers to our erroneous (or at least dysfunctional) predictions.

Even when things are running smoothly, prediction (construction) is the name of the game. Yet, it covers its own tracks quite well, since our experience of the world feels as if we are passive recipients of objective sensory information.

Mounds of neuroscientific research are accumulating around prediction/construction. It's something to pay attention to. And I'll wager it serves as a doorway through which we find the answers to some long hidden clues about our experience.