Let’s begin with an experiment. Imagine you have a glass container. You place cold air in one side and hot air in the other. Now, you’re going to test which way heat flows—will the cold air move towards the hot, or will the hot air move towards the cold? Before running the experiment, you make a prediction based on your understanding of the world. Perhaps you grew up hearing, “Close the door, you’ll let the cold air out!” so you assume the cold air moves towards the hot. That’s your expectation.
When you run the experiment, however, actual happens—whether you see it or not. In this case, actual reveals that heat flows from hot to cold, not the other way around. But here’s something critical: you never directly experience actual. What you experience is your reality, which is shaped by how your subconscious prediction machine handles this pattern and your overall expectation.
The subconscious prediction machine is constantly running. It operates below the surface of your awareness, predicting the world around you, anticipating what comes next. It does this by relying on patterns, not through error correction or feedback loops. Once a pattern is set—like the belief that colors in the shade are darker than colors in the light—it remains fixed. You can see this clearly with the checkerboard shadow illusion. Even though you intellectually know that two squares are the same color, your subconscious prediction machine never “corrects” the perception. The pattern is locked in, and reality persists in showing you the illusion.
In the same way, your subconscious prediction machine holds two main models: one for your body and one for the world around you. The body model governs all those automatic functions you never think about—your heartbeat, your digestion, the growth of your hair. It never asks for your input. It doesn’t scream for attention when something unusual happens. These patterns are well-established, and your body runs them flawlessly without you ever consciously participating.
The world model operates similarly. It predicts how the external world will behave, like whether the temperature of a room will be comfortable or whether the color of objects will change in the shade. These models are deeply ingrained and shared across all human experiences. You don’t need to learn individually that colors in the shade appear darker—that’s a pattern your subconscious already knows.
So, what happens when actual deviates from what your subconscious predicted? Attention is called into play. But, contrary to what we might think, this is not error correction in the traditional sense. The subconscious prediction machine isn’t “learning” to fix its mistakes. Instead, it asks a simple question: Is this the new norm? When you walk into a lecture hall and the temperature is significantly different than expected, your subconscious doesn’t instantly update its model—it simply signals for attention. Attention gets stolen, your focus shifts to the temperature, and only then does your mind ask if this situation is something that needs a model update. The model itself isn’t trying to “correct” an error. It’s simply deciding whether to recognize a new pattern.
When patterns are in place and predictions are correct, attention remains free, allowing you to focus on other parts of reality. But when there’s a mismatch, attention is hijacked, narrowing your focus until the discrepancy is addressed. The key to experiencing a more harmonious reality is to ensure that your subconscious predictions align well with the actual world. When this alignment occurs, attention is free to explore the richness of reality. But when predictions are constantly off, attention is perpetually drawn to resolving surprises, collapsing your experience into a narrow focus.
Your subconscious prediction machine doesn’t care about being “right” or “wrong.” It cares about maintaining its patterns. When those patterns are disrupted, attention will step in to determine if the model needs updating. In this way, attention is a mechanism that helps manage surprise, not error. The more aligned your subconscious predictions are with the world around you, the less attention is hijacked, and the more expansive your experience of reality becomes.
So, as we move forward, it’s important to understand that while you can’t directly control the predictions your subconscious makes, there are ways to influence the patterns it relies on. The knobs and levers you have at your disposal will allow you to shape how the subconscious prediction machine works, ultimately freeing your attention to experience reality in a more holistic and harmonious way.
Page 10, Love, The Cosmic Dance