The Experience Machine

1 - Unboxing The Prediction Machine

Hallucinations, from a predictive processing perspective, are not the same as our usual trippin’ balls perspective. Strong predictions (EG - feeling our phone vibrate when we’re under stress, even if it’s not in our pocket) can create these sensations.

Our brain, as part of it’s normal function, is always creating predictions, and this is what we subjectively experience. We don’t objectively consume sensory input.

Our previous predictions and experiences are always at play, and they’re unavoidable.

We can’t just think ourselves happier, but we do have some flexibility in shaping our interpretation of our sensory input.

The Smart Camera Model of Seeing

Our older models of processing involve a feedforward (top down) model - which assumed our brains took sensory input and gradually got more data out of it. This was unaware of evidence of “downward (and sideways) connectivity.” (Page 9)

Flipping the Flow

Instead of brains being cameras, it appears they may do the opposite, as it’s more energy efficient, maintaining a prediction model. It takes sensory input, checks it against existing miniature models, and generates prediction error signals when it doesn’t line up. Winston’s work in computational neuroscience goes by predictive processing, hierarchical predictive coding, and active inference interchangeably.

Bad Radios and Controlled Hallucinations

Hermann von Hemholtz argued that we generate controlled hallucinations based on previous experiences, conserving energy use in the brain. (The implication here is, this may take part in how we can make predictions about noisy data - like being able to recognize a familiar song mangled by poor FM reception.)

The Frugal Brain

Linear predictive coding is more of a mathematical concept that compresses data by storing only the deltas. (Like in video compression algorithms where frames are compared, and we only need to store the differences.) They suggest our brains work similarly - we just know a lot more.

Human brains seem to benefit from intelligent prediction strategies of just that kind… thanks to the use of multiple “levels of processing.” … simple predictions are nested under less simple, more abstract ones… prediction errors are formed and pushed upward through the system.

Brains reserve bandwidth for prediction errors, as it’s more efficient. Our experiences are hallucinatory.

(This section also talks a bit about prediction hierarchy without explicitly mentioning it.)

The Power of Prediction

A few examples of prediction:

They show the 12 13 14 ABC image, highlighting that unconscious (masked) biases at work.
The Hollow-Face illusion which prevents us from seeing the concave representation.
A Mooney image, ala https://www.behaviouralbydesign.com/post/neuroscience-of-strange-and-beautiful-experiences. Predictions are easily permanently altered.
Sine Wave Speech - an auditory example, similar to above.
Think about Brainstorm or Green Needle while watching this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1okD66RmktA - this easily flips between one or the other.
Suggesting you can hear a familiar song in white noise will often cause you to hallucinate it faintly.
The Ponzo Illusion
The dress that I’m tired of hearing about. (But they do offer the explanation that we will often see the dress in a certain color depending on our masked assumptions on lighting.)
Experientially, if we looked at a tree, and we were not expecting to see a robin at the top of it, we’d likely initially not notice the robin, be surprised when we saw it, and then we’d see it clearly.

2 - Psychiatry and Neurology: Closing the Gap

Much in the same way we do not experience the direct stream of data from or photoreceptors (we see approximate concepts,) we do not directly experience information from our nociceptors. The of thought division between mental and physical, as well as psychological and neurological, is misleading.

While nociceptive pain describes sensory input, and neuropathic pain describes damage to pain reception systems, a third category of pain is nociplastic pain exists - pain without biological pathology.

Beyond Tissue Damage

Expectations both in and out of our awareness may shape our experience of pain. They cite an example of an fMRI study that showed religious images had an effect on how individuals subjectively rated their pain. I uh, think there’s some obvious flaws in this study with attribution.

When shown religious images, religious subjects rated a sharp pain as less intense than atheists shown the same image.

p37 - Andy Clark - The Experience Machine

If you did that to me I’d just straight up be pissed off and my pain would likely spike out of spite.

A more interesting study investigated precision in the prediction of pain processing. Researchers gave one group accurate information about the heat they’d soon be experiencing (low, medium, high.) In the second group, they asked them to expect an unknown level of intensity. When the subjects knew it would be high intensity, they rated it as extra painful, and low intensity experiences were underexperienced. The over-experience and under-experience effects disappeared in the ‘unknown’ group.

Interestingly - we don’t need to be aware of what is signaling the prediction.

Using standard techniques (such as rapidly flashing a visual cue so that it is registered only subliminally), it is possible to create strong (precise) nonconscious predictions of imminent pain.

p47 - Andy Clark - The Experience Machine

In summary of the rest of the section, we do not need to be consciously aware of these predictions, they still have an effect.

Placebo and Nocebo Effects

They highlight the effects of placebo, hypnosis, ‘impure placebos’ (Irving Kirsch would call these active placebos, basically where there’s side effects that make the placebo seem stronger,) and nocebo.

Self-Confirming Cycles of Pain

After conditioning subjects to associate a visual temperature cue to either high or low amounts of heat. This effected subjective ratings of pain, and was also observable under fMRI. The twist was that the heat pad was always set to about 48c.

Functional Disorders

Functional disorders are those with no observable physiological cause. Predictive processing may give theoretical insight to some of these.

Disordered Attention

In predictive processing theory, attention is precision variation. (Since I’m a hypnosis nerd, this might be more evidence that we should stop hammering on subjects to focus harder during a session.) This is adjustable - for example, when searching for a needle in a haystack. Or looking for your keys on a pile of familiar crap on your desk.

Precision estimation is the brain’s way of telling itself where, and by how much, to place its bets.

- P51, The Experience Machine

An explanation for some functional disorders could be “unwilled misallocations of precision as self fulfilling prophecies.” (P51, The Experience Machine)

Hoover’s Sign

A practical troubleshooting tool in functional paralysis. If you ask a normal person to lift one leg, they’ll exert downward force from the heel of the other. If you ask someone physiologically paralyzed to lift their non-responsive leg, the oppositional force will be missing. In a functional case, the oppositional force will still be there as the “good” leg is raised, revealing it’s not physiologically paralyzed.

Expectancy and Its Role in Chronic Pain

Predictive processing may not only be a component of, but an explanation for many types of chronic pain.

Altered Balances in Autism Spectrum Condition

There’s emerging research investigating if autism is related to overweighting incoming sensory input. (Instead of underweighting predictions.) Evidence against the underweighting hypothesis is present in Mooney images - NTs and neurospicy individuals both have no problems with them.

Enhanced Sensory Worlds

ASD individuals may receive more direct sensory input - making it difficult to do things like use interoception to accurately construct that they’re hungry.

The McGurk Effect

Not this guy.

A practical example of the McGurk effect is in ventriloquism. Voices are observed from the puppet, not the speaker. There’s an example of this phenomena here. NT’s are more likely to be influenced by visual input.

Altered Balances in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia could be the byproduct of a highly-weighted incorrect prediction error signal.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Researchers presented two mildly angry looking faces, A and B. First, 30% of the time, after face A was presented, they delivered a small shock, with B never having a shock. After a while, they switched the shock to 30% on face B. They measured how much the subjects anticipated the shock by checking their electrodermal response (sweating.) The predictive processing model best fit the responses they saw. Individuals with PTSD overestimated, outside of their awareness, the likelihood of being shocked. Those that overweight this expectation may go on to be more likely to develop PTSD.

So Which Balances Are Best?

Some individuals, who hear voices but did not have a psychosis diagnosis, were more able to accurately predict obfuscated and muddled speech in the background. Paranoia may serve an advantage in dangerous environments.

3 - Action as Self-Fulfilling Prediction

Interestingly, according to predictive processing, predictions of bodily sensation (the feelings of movement) cause action.

The brain predicts how things would look and feel if the action were being successfully performed, and by reducing errors relative to that prediction, the action or movement is brought about.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, P70

Ideomotor Theory

William James in the mid 19th century came up with the idea that it’s the end representation of the effect (grabbing your cup of coffee off the desk) that causes physical movement, rather than controlling a bunch of micro-movements along the way. Interest in this perspective was renewed by the advent of cognitive psychology, and fits neatly into the predictive processing model. This doesn’t just occur with coffee, but we can see it in Ouija boards and Chevreul’s Pendulum.

Those predictions (of what we would see and feel as the right movements unfold) then act… as motor commands… predictive processing provides… how the “idea” of a successful action can be the very thing that brings that action about.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, P73-P74

Here’s some more reading on the topic:

(The book does NOT go to this level of antfucking. I just nerd-sniped myself and got PO’ed at NLP’s bastardization of TOTE.)

The concept of controlling the goal rather than the process (of moving all the joints individually) is referred to as the “passive motion paradigm.” If you’re familiar with inverse kinematics (IK,) you can think of it like that.

Seeing Seagulls

They provide a quick story explaining how predictions across cognition and our senses are interconnected. As an example, they heard seagulls outside, expected to see them, did not see them from the corner of their vision, got a prediction error, then turned to look, prediction errors being sent in a loop until they turned their head to look at the birds out their window.

Top level predictions, in a hierarchical sense, funnel down into lower level predictions.
The top level prediction (sort of like a goal) is to see (sensory evidence / perception) the seagull.
Hierarchically, this is a prediction error - they didn’t see one.
Those ‘errors’ filter down to proprioception - their head wasn’t turned to see the window where the seagulls were expected.
‘Errors’ in their position were corrected, they looked outside.
The errors were resolved. They saw the bird.

One Wiring Diagram to Rule Them All

The bidirectional flow of information in our motor cortex suggests something pretty wild - in order to move, we need to ignore accurate information about our current position to generate the errors to resolve the system.

… When I want to move my hand… forcibly downgrading genuine sensory information associated with the currently immobile state of my arm, while upgrading its own prediction of the proprioceptive signature of the grasping motion… my brain needs to downplay some perfectly accurate information about my own bodily state.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, P77

Precision weighting can be thought of as the predictive processing brand of attention. We reduce the amount of weighting we give to our current position, and increase the weight on the prediction, creating error correcting signals.

Neat tidbits:

The motor cortex seems to be ‘wired’ similarly to sensory regions of the brain
The ‘shift of attention’ to what’s supposed to be accurate to move reminds me of motor challenges in hypnosis. (EG, try and move that hand, and every time you move it - you just notice how stuck it is.)

What Tickling (Really) Teaches

Erich von Holst in the 1950s theorized that motor instructions came with an ‘efference copy’ - an anticipatory simulator of the outcome. There’s a temporal component to this - they were able to (if I’m reading this right) able to allow people to tickle themselves by adding a randomized time delay to a robot that would tickle them, breaking the prediction.

Predictive processing doesn’t need an ‘efference copy’ to explain this phenomena. Motor prediction (and changing the prediction in general) is intrinsic to motor movement itself. You can’t tickle yourself since you can’t surprise yourself.

Lessons from the Outfield

The intuition of Sense-Think-Act does not match up with the way predictive processing (uh) predicts actions. Instead, there are higher level goals, that go into ‘active sensing.’ Instead of an outfield catcher calculating an arc, the model is integrated. That is to say - sensory input (proprioceptive, vision, sound) is integrated with movement (and the feeling of movement with interoception) to catch the ball, taking just enough input from all channels to correct ‘errors’ and predict the feeling of the ball in the mitt. Wind, resistance, or your hand being in the wrong place would all be ‘errors’ in the model, making correction automatic.

Embodied Expertise

Predictive control happens in layers. For instance, when driving, the plan (inferred policy, getting to your friend’s house in time) activates ‘lower levels’ of prediction (how the car should behave on the highway, or having restraint when driving in sketchier areas and not flipping off other drivers when you get cut off.)

The book implies trained athletes can train mentally by imagining things. I think this works in some places (like chess) but I think this has more to do with reducing anxiety with other sports (like hockey.)

The Long Game (and the Role of Optimistic Predictions)

In summary…

Motor movement according to predictive processing works by expecting the ‘sensory signature’ of the ‘desired outcome’ (EG - feeling the ball in your hand, or getting to work on time)
‘Inner models’ have more temporal depth
Movement is created by creating ‘counterfactual predictions’ (your hand is really here, fix what’s ‘wrong’ about your proprioception)
A lot of this happens outside of awareness - this isn’t supposed to reflect your subjective experience (So, my dumbass trying to apply this one-to-one to hypnosis wasted time.)

4 - Predicting The Body

Minimizing prediction error doesn’t mean to avoid surprise and novelty. Predictive processing works with our interoception to keep us alive.

Escaping the Dark Room

Homeostasis is internal body regulation. Early cybernetic research suggested self-regulation systems through feedback. Where homeostasis centers around returning to a set state, allostasis is about predicting needs in anticipation.

Homeostasis on Wikipedia

Allostasis on Wikipedia

We avoid the “dark room” because if we just sat there, we’d die, an indication of allostasis.

Curiosity and Prediction Error

Estimations of error dynamics track how well we are currently doing at minimizing prediction error versus how well we (our brains) were expecting us to do… Things are going better than expected if we are fluently eliminating more (and more important) errors than anticipated. Things are going worse than expected if we are encountering more errors, or dealing with them less fluently, than anticipated. The feeling of “being in the zone” in sports reflects unexpectedly good error dynamics of this kind.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, P93

Predictive Body Budgeting

Lisa Barret talks about allostatic predictions as part of regulating for events. EG - if you’re thirsty, you’ll take a drink of water. While it takes about 20 minutes for the water to hit your bloodstream, the relief is immediate (as a prediction.)

Embodying Emotion

According to interoceptive predictive processing, feelings and emotions are what result when we integrate basic information about bodily states and general arousal with higher-level predictions of their most probable causes—for example, heart attack versus exercise.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, P98

The anterior insular cortex (AIC) may be implicated in this process, it’s in a great position (anatomically) to integrate interoception, proprioception, and exteroception.

Given predictive processing, expectations and context influence processing at all stages. Similar to how we don’t experience a ‘raw feeling’ of an emotion, we also don’t experience pain as the raw sensory (bottom up) input.

Wiring the Mesh

Evolutionary psychology (go figure) got the development of mammalian brains mostly wrong up until recently. (In my own words - the triune brain is a good example of this fuckup.) Historically, this was seen as ‘higher’ brain nuggets inhibiting ‘lower’ functions. Modern research shows evidence of two way influence across brain structures.

Seeing from the Heart

Playing a sound of a heartbeat that doesn’t match with a participant increases the ‘salience’ of the moment. (There’s a study where they played a heartbeat on headphones to someone viewing images of attractive women. If the heartrate didn’t match the actual heartbeat, they rated the women as being more attractive. ) False feedback increases perceived intensity.

Depression, Anxiety, and Bodily Prediction

Lisa Barret sees anxiety and depression as a disorder of allostasis. The predictions (self regulation) are out of whack. Predictions aren’t being updated.

Immunizing Ourselves to Positive Information

Again, predictions may not be updating. Individuals with depression may reject positive evidence. (From a predictive processing standpoint, they don’t update their priors / prediction errors like other folks. They’re overweighting negative outcomes. I’m not sold on this. Why would prediction errors be weighted poorly in relation to emotion, but be fine elsewhere? )

… They read my mind. They said this is testable on an EEG - but how the F do you get neuronal granularity on an EEG?! This might just be beyond my pay grade as a home gamer.

Aesthetic Chills (They’re Multiplyin’)

Psychogenic chills, AKA piloerection, AKA goosebumps, according to the salience detection hypothesis, happens when we resolve uncertainties, as in music.

Aesthetic chills are a physiological marker of this sudden increase in estimated importance (precision).

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, P109

You can artificially induce chills via a few cooling (peltier) components and a vibrotactile unit. Early research shows it increases reported emotional intensity. (I’m not sure I’m sold on this emulating frisson, but it sounds neat! An ice cube going down my back would probably make me report an emotional response too - but I should probably read the study before judging.)

(The experiment was done by the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab. )

Ch4 Book Club Topic List

Homesostasis, allostasis

interoception, exteroception, proprioception

“Error dynamics” - maintaining an ideal balance of success/failure on predicting errors

Lisa Barret and How Emotions are Made, allostatic load

Psychogenic chills / aesthetic chills / frisson / goosebumps / ASMR

“Frisson prosthesis”

Interlude: The Hard Problem - Predicting the Predictors?

Qualia (subjective experience) is the “hard problem of consciousness.” The “meta” problem of consciousness is our tendency to want to separate body from mind.

Simple Sentience

Just because something appears sentient, doesn’t mean it’s actually sentient. (It also doesn’t mean it lacks sentience. Fine.)

Expecting Ourselves

We label experiences (as qualia.) The label isn’t the experience itself. The cause of the experience is separate from the label.

I’m… not impressed or surprised with the explanation of the “strange inversion,” but here it is for folks playing along at home.

Applied to the taste of the honey, Dennett’s strange inversion works like this. The specific and elusive “taste of the honey” is nothing but the subtle complex of responses it happens to evoke in me… Tasting like honey is then simply the way I label things that predictably evoke, in me, that specific complex of (actual and possible) responses. In other words, the facts about my web of possible responses are not the result of the experienced taste… The web of behaviors and responses comes first, and the puzzling, ineffable taste is really just a handy label for that web.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, P117

All new behavior, responses, and expectations are based on previous behavior, responses, and expectations. 🤷

Further reading courtesy book club - multiple drafts model.

Simple Self-Models

We don’t have direct awareness of our internal mechanisms. The idea is that this is a feature - not a bug. The ‘function’ of all this is to keep us alive - more accurate self-awareness into the mechanisms of what generates our qualia would likely be useless (and computationally expensive) overhead.

Questioning the Philosophical Zombie

Andy Clark argues the idea of the philosophical zombie (lacking qualitative consciousness) feels unlikely. I don’t think their counterargument is particularly compelling.

5 - Expecting Better

Expectations help us predict quickly, but it’s not always accurate.

Perceiving What You Feel

Affect and interoception effects our decision-making. Lisa Feldman Barrett calls this “affective realism effects.” (Our interpretation of reality is contextual. We could perceive danger inappropriately in the dark when we’re sleep deprived and over-caffeinated.)

Similarly, an individual who has just experienced anger (induced in a controlled experimental setting) has been shown to be more prone to identify an innocent object as a gun than those who had been caused to feel a different prior emotion, such as sadness. The upshot is that, to use an evocative phrase from this literature, you will sometimes “perceive what you feel.”

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, P127

Responding to Predictive Bias

Fearful, aroused shitty people are primed to do shitty things.

Helpful Fictions

Fiction primes us. We’re not always aware of or fully able to control our biases.

Participants with anorexia were first encouraged to experience a virtual body with a healthy BMI (body mass index) as if it were their own. To encourage this, subjects used a VR headset to view the abdomen of their healthy BMI VR body being touched and stroked with a soft brush while simultaneously feeling an identical touching and stroking routine applied to their real abdomen.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, pp129-130

This can probably be easily recreationally applied. Time to yell at a few friends to buy brushes and touch themselves. </phrasing.>

Improving Interoception

Sarah Garfinkel did a study that trained anxious participants to be able to more accurately predict their heart rate with biofeedback. Their anxiety fell as accuracy improved.

Closer to the Truth?

As with Mooney images - you can’t un-predict a prediction. (Their suggestion is that accuracy is often an illusion and difficult to define. Accuracy is more about application to context than ‘realness.’)

The Active Keyboard

Weights between ‘prediction’ and ‘sampling/sensory input’ are often out of our control. (Or, minimally, require active intervention to shape.)

There’s mention of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty explaining experience as a mobile keyboard. I didn’t quite ‘get’ the book’s explanation, but this paper seems to suggest that as our behaviors become automatic, we experience the output of a pipe organ as music. I’m uh - frankly not particularly interested or compelled by this metaphor, so I’m moving on.

Keeping It Real

We should see our ‘predictions’ / subjective experiences as a best guess, but not as accurate and final conclusions.

6 - Beyond the Naked Brain

This is not the hot toaster boyfriend fantasy I asked for.

Andy posits the idea of “extending our brains” as provocative but I don’t really feel it’s that novel, unless you’re particularly impressed by the idea of calendars, notebooks, and reminders.

Two core concepts they’ll be talking about will be:

Epistemic actions - things we do to improve our state of awareness, in preparation for a goal. Like checking your calendar to make sure your appointment is at a specific time.
Epistemic actions as controlled by prediction - the spicier take that brains don’t care where information is stored, as long as it’s accessible.

As a disclaimer, I’m a bit out of whack from personal life events. The book is still good, but I’m going to be a bit terse and salty with these notes. Maybe that’ll make the content more easily skim-able.

Leaning on the World

Introducing the idea that we extend thinking in to our environment. (EG, notebooks.)

Home Alone

Not much here. They talk about us being “natural-born cyborgs,” with the idea that we already extend our thinking with technology.

Acting for Information’s Sake

They argue that behavior and memory are bidirectional.

In their example, veteran bartenders, when taking a queue, will line up glasses appropriate to the drink they need to make. This serves as a memory aid. They do, however, have to develop the skill of using this memory aid.

Unifying Practical and Epistemic Action

They essentially present learning and experimentation as “predicting errors about the future.”

The story is that there’s a tradeoff between epistemic and ‘practical’ actions.

Looping Processes

External actions changing our environment (EG experimentation, taking notes, solving a math problem on paper) are an active part of thinking. Thinking is often experimental and iterative.

A Chip off the Mainframe

Okay, at least the pun is good.

They’re building up to the idea that we use ‘technology’ in the same way we use exteroception as well as interoception. There’s iteration in all three cases.

Thinking from the Gut

A story about the gut-brain axis and neurochemistry in rats. A general argument that our gut microbiome affects our mood.

Extended Sensing

We can improve mental models and get a ‘sense’ for them, even if we don’t understand their inner workings.

Early versions of such deep-weave technologies are with us already. A simple example is the North Sense—a small silicon device that is attached to the chest and that delivers a short vibration when the user is turned toward magnetic north.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, pp129-130

I remember hearing a story in Book Club™️ of D/s applications of a similar idea. If you toy with this - consider there may be unexpected detrimental effects when removing the external stimulus.

Again, (and again,) they remind us that our external devices (cell phones) already act as “woven resources.”

Is a watch really that remarkable to anyone but a philosopher? Biofeedback seems more compelling. The prose here is fun but reframing interacting and using our environment for learning feels closer to mental masturbation than a particularly novel insight.

Extended Minds

They namedrop David Chalmers and mention that they collaborated on a paper called The Extended Mind. (Which, again, echoes the rest of this chapter.)

For fuck’s sake if you have to make a computer metaphor about human behavior, then re-describe it as normal-ass human behavior, you haven’t introduced anything new, you’ve made a circular excursion.

There’s mention of the locus of control / volition / thought in a very roundabout way. (It’s put artfully, FWIW.)

Otto Goes to MoMA

They introduce the idea of “foraging loops” for information stored externally.

A Snapshot of the Debate

Do we lose part of our minds if we lose our external tools for thinking? Philosophers debate! I’m moving on to the next section.

Solving the Recruitment Puzzle

There’s a gradient of usefulness and applicability in using our environment to think. This section feels like flex-tape to stop the leak of “wait, not EVERYTHING is an extension of our thinking.”

Mind as Brain - Redux

They assert that it is natural for us to extend our thinking into our environment. In their words…

What must be avoided is the idea of recruitment as itself effortful and deliberative.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, p165

7 - Hacking the Prediction Machine

Expecting Relief

Placebos are good! They’ve shown improvement in pain, nausea, allergies, and emotional distress. They also show impressive and unintuitive physiological improvements when used.

A few anecdotes from the text:

Placebo injections for increasing red blood count worked. (However, I’d like to see the control group for this. Wouldn’t any injection increase red blood count in order to facilitate platelet production? My physiology knowledge sucks.)
Athletes running after being told they were given ‘pure oxygen’ will run more better.
Confidence not only depends on the person the treatment is coming from, but the modality of the treatment (blessing, surgery, pill, injection) itself.

The Strange Case of the Honest Placebo

Placebos can be helpful in IBS, even when deliberately labeled as placebo with the instructions that you don’t have to believe in the effects, it will work. (There’s something to be said here about the ritual of care itself being the placebo, but the probably controlled for that in the study. Maybe the placebo pills act as a reminder of the ritual.)
Honest placebos work better when respectably packaged. (EG - blister packs and a good design.) This is making me think more and more of The Ritual Effect.

Training Your Placebo

“Dose extending” placebos can be surprisingly effective after delivering a non-placebo active drug.
There may be misattribution to negative effects to a drug or placebo, creating a nocebo effect. (EG, a patient has normal aches and pains, then blames them on the drug.)
Being told you’re not (genetically) predisposed to experience negative effects from a drug can affect the outcome.

Easing the Pain with Virtual Reality

Luana Colloca, a researcher in the neurobiology of pain, showed the effectiveness of using VR as a treatment to pain. VR was effective, opioid treatments were effective, but combining the two created an even more robust effect.

Clark suggests this is not merely a distraction, but creates its effects through immersion.

They present the idea that, in a relaxation VR treatment, a jellyfish moving at a slow pace can train us to breathe at a slower pace. This might be fun to run with in recreation.

Cautions and Tangles

Placebo research can be used to support pseudoscience and used unethically.

The Power of Self-Affirmation

Ugh. Fine. Self-affirmations can be effective. However, in contrast with this book’s glazing of them, I think the risks are often understated. In short, you can fuck yourself with overconfidence.

Reframing Experience

You can reframe your emotional reactions to a physiological response. EG - is the increased tension you feel anxiety, or is it excitement? (Ala Lisa Barrett’s take on constructed emotion.)
Ah, this could be useful! Researchers measured subjective reports of satiety in two groups. The groups were shown differing stimuli (photographs) regarding their future egg-laden breakfast; one being shown two eggs, the other four. Both groups were given three eggs. Intuitively, those having been shown two eggs felt more sated. Moreover, describing foods as “heavy” or “light” seems to affect ghrelin production.
Chronic pain is rarely only nociceptive, neuropathic, or nociplastic. It’s often a combination.

Clark brings up a good point - we can’t just reframe something as ‘in our heads’ and expect it to go away. We need to create counterevidence, or something for the patient to look for evidence of.

But there is an important burden of education here, for without a proper understanding (by both patient and physician) of the mechanisms involved, such attempted interventions can easily misfire. They will misfire if they are seen as suggesting that the pain or fatigue is not real, or is “only in the mind.” Instead, the point of the interventions is to push back against the misplaced predictions and precisions (each involving genuine neuronal changes) that are positioning otherwise innocent bodily signals in such a distressing and maladaptive way. To begin to reverse these changes, the idea is to provide new evidence able to drive a different set of predictions. At the same time, careful verbal reframing seeks to destabilize the old ones.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, p181

They highlight two core ideas:

While the pain is real, it doesn’t need to signify a threat.
The patient is to notice the feeling in as much detail as possible, “but not under the label of ‘pain’ or ‘hurt’.” (p181)

Pain Reprocessing Theory

The experience of pain is the byproduct of a prediction. They prescribe (reasonable) optimism and reframing.

Escaping Our Own Expectations

A suggestion that you can randomize your experiences for more variety if you get stuck in a rut.

Psychedelics and the Self - A Chemical Romance

A far-flung predictive processing take on how psychedelics (and VR experiences) can ‘shake up’ our predictions.

Loosening the Grip

More on how psychedelics can shake up our higher level predictions. (And a few warnings.)

Meditation and the Control of Attention

A predictive processing take on how focused-attention meditation can help adjust weighting.

Focused-attention meditation provides a good example. In focused-attention meditation, practitioners learn to maintain attention on a single object such as the breath. In predictive processing terms, upping the precision on that sole reliable object inevitably results in dropping the precision assigned to all other states, effectively down-weighting all the rest of the information flowing in from our senses. Once this skill is acquired, thoughts, memories, and sensations can also arise without capturing attention.

- Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, p190