The Science of Expectation: How We Shape Our World

Key points

The brain constantly predicts what will happen and updates those predictions with experience.

Dopamine, serotonin, and stress hormones determine how we learn from surprises.

Trauma and adversity can lock the brain into fearful, rigid expectations.

Awareness, narrative, and deliberate retraining help rewrite those predictions.

We like to think we are objective observers of reality—that we see things exactly as they are. But the truth is, we mostly see what we expect to see.

The brain is not a passive recorder of experience, but an active prediction machine. It guesses what will happen next and updates future guesses based on experience. Every perception, emotion , and decision depends on the accuracy of these forecasts.

Over time, our predictions harden into expectations