A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World
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Physics Black Holes Evolution Home A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World Comment Save Article Read Later Share Facebook Copied! Copy link Email Pocket Reddit Ycombinator Comment Comments Save Article Read Later Read Later neuroscience A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World By Conor Feehly August 24, 2026
biology cells cognitive science energy information theory memory neurons neuroscience All topics Every moment of our lives, our bodies are awash in sensory signals. Photons hit our retinas. Waves of compressed air collide with our eardrums. Volatile molecules bind to receptors in our nostrils, and chemicals slather our taste buds. Pressure and heat activate nerve endings in our skin. We are able to navigate this torrent because the brain does an enormous amount of data compression. Through a process known as categorization, the brain turns the messy, noisy, information-rich world into objects, people, concepts, and emotions that we can understand and act on at the level of experience.
In neuroscience’s traditional view, categorization happens at the very end of sensory processing. The brain passively receives sensory details, then decodes their features and matches them to stored templates in memory, like a clerk shuffling through a neural filing cabinet. But this approach to categorization struggles to account for the extraordinary flexibility in the way we assign labels to features of the world. On a clear day on an open street, a sudden rhythmic patter is a pigeon taking flight, yet when we’re walking down a dimly lit alley at night, the same sound is the shuffle of a stranger’s footsteps. How can the brain categorize similar sets of sensory signals in radically different ways for different situations?
Two of the world’s leading neuroscientists have brought an updated understanding of brain function and structure to this question. In the pages of Nature Reviews Neuroscience , Lisa Feldman Barrett , who studies the psychology and neuroscience of emotion at Northeastern University, and Earl Miller , who studies how the brain carries out goal-directed behavior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, collaborated on a new view of categorization. They describe how the brain constantly reconstructs its categories moment to moment based not only on senses and memory, but on the body’s immediate physiological needs.
Lisa Feldman Barrett has led research showing that our nervous system constructs emotions to manage energy and behavior.
At the heart of their framework is a counterintuitive insight. While we may have the impression that our categories reflect an objective reality, the researchers argue that the brain projects categories onto the world in response to the body’s survival needs. Before we are even aware of our sensory impressions, the brain is already preparing the body to behave in ways that maintain the energetic resources that power our physiological systems. In this way, the brain’s predictions — rather than the cumulative effects of sensory information — ultimately shape and limit how we categorize objects and features of the world.
The duo’s framework is “a fresh perspective on categorization,” said Luiz Pessoa , a neuroscientist from the University of Maryland. Their idea of “the maintenance of the energetic constraints of life as fundamental to how we structure our categories,” he said, is “really important to pursue.”
Also new in Barrett and Miller’s framework is the hypothesis that categorization doesn’t happen in a particular area of the brain, but across the entire organ and beyond. To understand how organisms form categories, they argued, neuroscientists have to look all over the nervous system, from head to toe.
For many years, these two influential neuroscientists were in the same orbit, but had never collaborated directly.
Miller measures high-level electrical patterns in the brain to better understand the mechanisms driving a model of neural computation known as predictive coding . Predictive coding regards our perceptions as products of the brain’s predictions, rather than a scene built from sensory signals it passively receives.
Typically, if we are experiencing a normal sensory scene (relaxing at home, say) without any novel information, the brain generates predictive signals about the environment (known as feedback signals) that will dominate incoming sensory (or “feedforward”) signals. But if something unexpected happens — an event that deviates from the predictive model — the sensory feedforward signals, such as those arriving in the visual cortex, run up against the predictive feedback signals. This difference creates prediction errors. When sensory signals violate your predictive model, they might enter conscious experience as a feeling of surprise.
“Your brain has to constantly make predictions about what’s going to happen in the next few seconds because it’s got to filter out most of the incoming sensory information,” Miller said. “It can’t process it all, so it’s mainly looking for things that mismatch predictions because it’s more informative.”
In her work, Barrett has applied these ideas of prediction and anticipation to our theoretical understanding of emotions. Central to her work is the concept of allostasis: how an organism predictively regulates its energy use. In her view, emotion categories — fear, happiness, anger — resemble predictive “action plans” that the nervous system…
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