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What's more, the brain also predicts the sensory information it expects in your retinal blind spot—the portion of your visual field where the optic nerve exits and where there are zero light-sensitive cells. If our brains didn't do visual predicting as well as they do, we wouldn't be able to drive a car, find our keys, or read an article. In his book The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist and trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk writes, "The most important job of the brain is to ensure our survival . . . everything else is secondary." 1 Though he was writing about the brain and trauma, the concept applies to predictive coding as well. Predictions are our brain's way of preparing us for what might happen next, so we can be ready to keep ourselves safe. Chronic pain may be an example of this preparation going tragically wrong. In her book How Emotions Are Made, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett makes the case that chronic pain may result from our brain's (predicted) present-day sensory predictions based on past injury or stress. 2 When the brain fails to update its predictions, those attempts at preparatory protection based on our past can become self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling sources of real pain in our present-day lives. HOW YOU CAN USE IT As bodyworkers, we can use these ideas to introduce a sense of possibility and relief to our clients. For example, clients with shoulder pain will often feel better when a practitioner gently, skillfully, and patiently moves them through a pain-free range of motion—you can think of this as disrupting their brain's prediction habits. The clients' brain now has a new piece of information about their shoulder movement—that it is possible to move without pain. When this learning is integrated, this new possibility becomes part of the set of expectations that inform their ongoing shoulder experience. This may be one reason why clients report significant improvements in their pain, kinesiophobia, and guarding as a result of the "simple" interventions we typically perform as hands-on therapists. Interventions that actively involve the client can even more powerfully disrupt and rewire habitual sensory predictions. Inviting your client to slowly and actively explore the range of motion that doesn't cause them pain, within the safe context of your hands- on work, helps add new, nonthreatening options to their repertoire of movement predictions. A practice example: Clients often respond well to the invitation to gently "explore the corners" (the places they don't usually go) of their usual movement range. Each time a client goes into one of these new kinesthetic "corners" with curiosity and attention, the experience refines their proprioceptive awareness and provides more possibilities for safety and ease. Following are a few more ways to bring the power of predictive coding into your treatment room. Pre-Session: Your Assessment Can Also Be a Treatment When a client tells you about a movement limitation during your intake conversation, ask them to demonstrate the limited movement. Often, they will move quickly as they show it to you. If we invite them to slow down and describe the sense of limitation using sensory A B M P m e m b e r s ea r n F R E E C E h o u r s by rea d i n g t h i s i s s u e ! 31 When the brain fails to update its predictions, those attempts at preparatory protection based on our past can become self-perpetuating and self- fulfilling sources of real pain in our present-day lives.