TEACHER: Kevin Lacroix
THEME: First Time For Everything
Kevin: The brain is a metabolically expensive organ! Despite accounting for only about 2% of the body’s mass, it uses roughly 20% of the body’s total energy. To conserve that energy, it constantly makes predictions about what’s coming next — giving more attention to what’s unusual or unexpected, and less to what’s familiar or ordinary.
Drawing on prior experience, the brain builds models to explain the causes of the sensory signals it receives — including an inferred “self,” a separate external world, and the patterns that link them. It then looks for evidence to confirm and refine these internal models, reinforcing its expectations in order to operate as efficiently as possible.
And this, as you might expect, carries a cost. The predictive model tends to reinforce itself, creating a kind of impedance in the sensory system — a subtle resistance to the immediacy of experience. This generates tension between the brain’s story of solid separateness and the ever-changing, ephemeral nature of what’s actually happening. That unresolved friction is, in a very real sense, what we feel as suffering.
The good news (and your brain might have already predicted where this is heading) is that when we meditate and rest our attention on something — even something utterly familiar and ordinary — we reduce the dominance of those priors. We break the spell of the brain’s predictions and refresh the newness of the present moment.
This is what we’ll explore in tonight’s practice. As T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
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