What If Your Brain Predicts What Your Body Will Feel?

I've been thinking a lot about interoception lately.

Interoception is our ability to notice and interpret signals coming from inside the body. Heartbeat. Breathing. Hunger. Fullness. Temperature. Tension. Pain. All of those little messages happening inside us all day long.

I've been exploring this through COSMOS SOMATICS, and the more I learn about the relationship between the brain, the body, perception, and experience, the more I think about how little attention I used to pay to my own body.

Then I came across a Reel about an AI prompt.

The idea was to ask AI to “unlearn” information—to temporarily set aside certain assumptions and look at a question differently.

That stopped me.

Because I started wondering:

What if humans need to do something similar sometimes?

Not erase our memories.

Not erase our experiences.

Simply become curious about the assumptions we're using to understand what's happening.

Your brain is constantly trying to figure out what's happening

One of the ideas I've been learning about is predictive processing.

The brain doesn't just sit there receiving information like a camera.

It's constantly trying to make sense of what is happening.

It uses information from the past, expectations about what might happen, and signals coming from the body and the outside world.

Then it updates its interpretation as new information comes in.

Think about walking into a room.

Before you've consciously figured everything out, your brain is already processing sights, sounds, smells, movement, temperature, and all kinds of information about what's around you.

The same thing happens inside your body.

Your brain is receiving signals from your heart, lungs, stomach, muscles, and other systems while continually trying to determine what those signals mean.

That makes me wonder:

How much of what I experience is the sensation itself, and how much is the brain's interpretation of that sensation?

Where does imagination fit?

This one caught my attention because I can get lost in my imagination.

Sometimes I can become so absorbed in what I think might happen—or what I hope will happen—that my mind starts building a version of the future before I've actually experienced it.

That made me curious about the relationship between imagination, prediction, and perception.

Mental imagery and expectations can influence attention, emotions, and how we experience sensations in the body.

That's fascinating to me.

Because sometimes the story in our head can become so convincing that we forget we're experiencing a prediction, an expectation, or an imagined possibility.

The future hasn't happened yet.

But our brains can still begin preparing for it.

What happens when you stop listening to your body?

I know something about this personally.

I think about the younger version of me as the ignorant Samantha.

I didn't understand my body very well.

I didn't always pay attention to the signals.

Maybe something hurt.

Then something else hurt.

You keep going.

You get busy.

You adapt.

You get used to things.

Eventually, you can become so accustomed to a sensation that you barely question it anymore.

Sometimes people seek medical care. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they follow up. Sometimes life gets in the way.

And sometimes a problem that deserved attention gets bigger.

I've learned that noticing something doesn't mean you immediately know what it means.

A sore knee is a sore knee.

A racing heart is a racing heart.

Tension is tension.

Fatigue is fatigue.

The first step is simply noticing.

Something is happening here.

That sentence has changed the way I look at my own body.

I went from ignorant to curious

That's probably the biggest change.

I went from ignorant to curious.

And curiosity feels completely different.

When you're curious, you don't have to immediately label everything.

You can observe.

You can ask questions.

You can look for patterns.

You can learn.

You can talk to someone who knows more than you do.

You can decide whether something needs attention.

And sometimes you discover that what you assumed was happening isn't quite what was happening at all.

That's what made the AI “unlearn” idea so interesting to me.

AI isn't literally deleting its knowledge because someone types an unlearn prompt. The prompt can change the context and the way the system approaches a question.

Humans have something similar available to us.

We can pause.

We can question an assumption.

We can look at something we've experienced a hundred times and ask:

What if I'm interpreting this differently than I used to?

That's curiosity.

My curiosity eventually leads me back to God

I can't separate this curiosity from my faith.

I've never really been able to get enough of God and His creation.

The complexity.

The beauty.

The things we understand.

The things we don't.

The more I learn about the human body and the brain, the more fascinated I become by how much is happening inside us every second.

And that curiosity strengthens my faith.

I've wondered whether my faith came first or my curiosity.

I think my faith probably came first.

Then I started looking at creation and thinking:

How does all of this work?

And once you start asking that question, it's hard to stop.

Jesus promised that this world would contain trouble and tribulation.

It does.

People hurt.

Bodies hurt.

People get sick.

Life can be incredibly difficult.

And still, there is the promise of peace that surpasses understanding.

I think about the Lord's Prayer:

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

And sometimes I add something quietly in my own heart:

Here in my heart.

That thought brings me back to curiosity.

To wonder.

To paying attention.

To wanting to understand the creation I'm living inside of.

So what are you missing?

That's the question I want you to sit with.

Have you been paying attention to your body?

What sensations have you been noticing?

What have you been ignoring?

What have you gotten so used to that you don't question it anymore?

And then look at your thoughts.

What have you been thinking about lately?

What have you been expecting?

What stories have you been telling yourself?

What possibilities have you been imagining?

You don't need to figure everything out today.

Start with a piece of paper.

Write down what you're noticing.

Write down a habit you'd like to change.

Write down one thing you could do differently.

Then keep paying attention.

That's how I started changing.

I didn't wake up one day with all the answers.

I became curious.

And I've discovered that curious people tend to keep a pen and paper nearby.

Or a voice recorder.

Even if they don't always remember to go back and listen to it.

That's okay.

The questions matter.

Because sometimes the question is where the change begins.

What have I been missing?

That's a question worth asking.

And maybe it's one of the places where COSMOS SOMATICS begins:

in the space between what we experience, what we perceive, and what we believe it means.