This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchler. Here's John Batchler.

This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Batchler. The experience of white Christmas, think

about it. You've heard it a million times, maybe two million times. Big and cross-b,

white Christmas. And we look forward to it each year. It tells us the calendar is going

to change to a new year. However, that moment is revelatory of a new book's breakthrough

for me, understanding of our minds and how they work in our environment.

Book is the experience machine, how our minds predict and shape reality. I welcome Professor

Andy Clark, Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom,

several other distinguished universities. Andy's book is going to take us to white

Christmas and explain very carefully how it is that we can hear white Christmas when

it's not there or when it might be there or when it's unintelligible. Professor, a very

good evening to you. Thank you very much. The experience is white Christmas. The suggestion

is do you hear it or not hear it? What have you learned from the experiment that is conducted

with a variety of young people who do know the song? What have you learned of the predictive

brain? Good evening to you. Good evening, John. It's great to be here. Thanks for having

me. Yeah. So the white Christmas experiments are kind of very interesting sort of set

of experiments dating back actually to 1964, which kind of explains why they chose being

crossbears white Christmas as the sort of core song that we're going to use. But the

main ones were conducted around 2001, they were more controlled, they were better experiments,

and these involved undergraduates who are ushered into a room and they were told that they

were going to be played a sound file. And in that sound file, there might be a very faint

onset of being crossbeating white Christmas. And my job was to touch a button when they

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