Epicenter of brain's predictive ability pinpointed by scientists Now, Uni­ver­sity Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor Lisa Feldman Bar­rett at North­eastern has reported finding the epi­center of those predictions.Array"The unique con­tri­bu­tion of our paper is to show that limbic tissue, because of its struc­ture and the way the neu­rons are orga­nized, is pre­dicting," Bar­rett said. "It is directing the pre­dic­tions to every­where else in the cortex, and that makes it very powerful."For example, when a person is instructed to imagine a red apple in his or her mind's eye, Bar­rett explained that limbic parts of the brain send pre­dic­tions to visual neu­rons and cause them to fire in dif­ferent pat­terns so the person can "see" a red apple.Bar­rett is a fac­ulty member in the Depart­ment of Psy­chology and is director of the Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Affec­tive Sci­ence Lab­o­ra­tory. A pio­neer in the psy­chology of emo­tion and affec­tive neu­ro­science, she has chal­lenged the foun­da­tion of affec­tive sci­ence by showing that people are the archi­tects of their own emo­tional experiences.ArrayCommon sense tells you that seeing is believing, but really the brain is built for things to work the other way around: you see (and hear and smell and taste) what you believe. And believing is largely based on feeling. In her paper, Bar­rett shows that your brain is not wired to be a reac­tive organ. It's wired to ask the ques­tion: "The last time I was in a sit­u­a­tion like this, what sen­sa­tions did I encounter, and how did I act?" And the sen­sa­tions that seem to matter most are the ones that are inside your own body, which are called "interoceptions.""What your brain is trying to do is guess what the sen­sa­tion means and what's causing the sen­sa­tions so it can figure out what to do about them," Bar­rett said. "Your brain is trying to put together thoughts, feel­ings, and per­cep­tions so they arrive as needed, not a second afterwards."