How Our Minds Operate Like AI…

And how dreams help us see the world freshly again

Our brains and artificial intelligence share something fundamental: they are both pattern-recognition machines. Each builds models of the world, relies on past experience, and predicts what comes next. The difference is that while AI engineers openly admit their systems “hallucinate,” we humans are less inclined to recognize that our inner voice, too, is an imperfect narrator that is creative, biased, sometimes generative, and too often critical and misleading.

Cognitive neuroscientists suggests that up to 99 percent of what we perceive, think, and believe is filtered through prior expectations (e.g. Bar, 2009; Friston, 2010). We don’t so much encounter the world as it is, but rather, as our nervous system predicts it will be. Our brains are prediction engines, constantly updating models and compressing complexity into recognizable shapes. This is why genuine change feels so elusive: the mind does not greet novelty with a blank slate but with an entire archive of assumptions, impressio…