ABSTRACT
To ensure survival, any creature needs to predict what is likely to happen next. The brain is predictive (Clark, 2013), not in the sense of predicting lottery numbers or the weather, but rather in its attempts to foresee forthcoming interpersonal moments. If we do not know that the sun will rise tomorrow, or if we cannot predict the mood of an inconsistent parent, we can feel anxious and then watch harder for clues about what to expect. We try to imagine the future by making sense of the present, and do so by using past experiences. Similar brain areas are active in both, and damage to certain regions disrupts both memories and predictions of the future (Coste et al., 2015). If my father usually hugs me lovingly when he sees me then I probably expect this in the future from him, and maybe from other adults too. We are making predictions outside of consciousness almost all the time, in fractions of seconds.
