From Christine McNulty
Diana Kwon discusses our brains making predictions to test against incoming data (1 October, p 30). This reminded me of a chat with the late, great neuropsychologist Richard Gregory.
He believed that the survival of our proto-human ancestors depended on their drive to abandon the constraints of “instinct” in which sense data drive behaviour directly. Volitional behaviour was more energetically efficient. So humans must construct falsifiable hypotheses, in order that testing them can resolve the ambiguity inherent in our perceptions. Non-human animals, he believed, experience no such ambiguity.
Oxhey, Hertfordshire, UK
