Our brains predict the world—but learn most when they get it wrong

by Dominic Tran, Reuben Rideaux, Ziyue Hu, The Conversation

edited by Lisa Lock, reviewed by Andrew Zinin

Lisa Lock

Scientific Editor

Meet our editorial team
Behind our editorial process

Andrew Zinin

Lead Editor

Meet our editorial team
Behind our editorial process Editors' notes

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

peer-reviewed publication

trusted source

written by researcher(s)

proofread

The GIST Add as preferred source

Few moments in a soccer game are more electrifying than the penalty kick. The goalkeeper stands, waiting for the kick—and even before the ball is struck, they must predict where it is going and spring into action.

Their prediction will be built on years of reading run-ups, body positions and foot angles. But if you asked them after the game how they knew where the ball was going, they would struggle to describe the process. If the kick fooled them, however—if they were surprised by where it went—they will be able to replay the events with near-perfect clarity.

We wanted to know why this happens. Why does the brain skim over expected events, but store the finest details of what catches it off guard? This is part of a bigger debate among neuroscientists about whether the brain saves energy by prioritizing what it expects or what surprises it.

In new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, we showed that the brain doesn't have to choose. It does both, just at different moments and for different jobs.

Bringing the penalty kicks into the lab

To study this, we recruited 40 people and asked them to watch flashes of dots popping up at different locations around a circle in a semipredictable pattern. They were told to press a button, indicating the side on which the dot appeared, as fast as they could.

Think of it as a stripped-down penalty kick: Sometimes the dot shows up in the top right, where you (the goalkeeper) would expect, and sometimes it doesn't. Pressing the right button is when you catch the ball, and the wrong one is when you miss it, when your prediction fails you.

While participants completed the task, we recorded how fast they reacted to each dot, how accurate their response was and how well they remembered its location afterward. Would they remember the location more clearly when the prediction was wrong?

At the same time, we also recorded their brain waves (via electroencephalogram, or EEG) and pupil changes (eye tracker), tracking both neural and physiological activity going on in the brain.

The tricky part, however, was making sure we were really measuring prediction, not just the brain getting bored of watching the same thing over and over again. So we specifically designed the patterns in which the dots appeared to keep expectation separate from that kind of simple fatigue.

The brain in its two acts

We found people reacted faster to dots that appeared where they expected, just like our goalkeeper already moving pre-emptively.

But when they were asked to recall exactly where that expected flash was, their memory was worse. Instead, they located surprising ones more sharply.

The brain activity told us why. It seems prediction works in two acts.

First, before the flash even appears, the brain gets a head start, priming a response. That's the speed. And those milliseconds matter. Imagine a swerving car, a falling glass or a ball already flying past you.

Then, when the expected thing arrives, the brain shrugs. If I already knew that, why bother looking closely? Instead, it spends more energy on surprises, capturing them in crisp detail to refine future predictions of the world.

So the decades-old debate over whether the brain favors the expected or the unexpected is a false dichotomy. It does both.

One process is motor: It acts fast on what it predicts, getting the body moving before the moment arrives. The other is sensory: It looks closely at what it failed to see coming and encodes those instances in sharp detail. Each process comes one after another.

The brain doesn't just predict the world. It also learns from the moments when its predictions fail.

Beyond the penalty kick

Why does any of this matter? Because getting the balance right between prediction and surprise may be one of the brain's most fundamental operating principles.

When it goes wrong, the consequences can show up clinically. A brain that leans too hard on what it expects, or fails to properly learn from what surprises it, is thought to underlie symptoms in a diverse range of conditions (such as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders).

Understanding how a healthy brain manages this balance is an important step toward understanding what happens when it breaks down.

It's also a blueprint for building more biologically grounded artificial neural networks. The same trick—acting fast on the expected and encoding the surprising in detail—is exactly what could teach a neural network when to coast and when to pay attention, which could mean it uses less energy to do the same job.

Journal information: Journal of Neuroscience

Key medical concepts

ElectroencephalographySchizophreniaAutism Spectrum Disorder

Clinical categories

Neurology Provided by The Conversation Who's behind this story?

Lisa Lock

BA art history, MA material culture. Former museum editor, paramedic, and transplant coordinator. Editing for Science X since 2021. Full profile →

Andrew Zinin

Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success. Full profile →

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Citation: Our brains predict the world—but learn most when they get it wrong (2026, June 23) retrieved 23 June 2026 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-brains-world-wrong.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.