Which factors determine what we believe about our world, ourselves, our past, and our future? Cognitive neuroscience suggests that our beliefs are dependent on brain activity, specifically on the way our brains process sensory information in order to make sense of our environment. These beliefs (defined as probability estimates) are central to our brain’s predictive processing function, which enables it to predict the probabilistic structure of the world around us. These predictions could even be the fundamental building blocks of mental states, such as perceptions and emotions. Many psychiatr…
