Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. I'm John B with Professor Andy Clark. His new book is The Experience Machine, how our minds

predict and shape reality. And he's a Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom.

First, autism. Overweight experiences. This is all fresh to me, Andy, that autism is not withdrawing from the world, it's

over-waiting information at the same time.

Are you projecting on that

the way I did, does it work in the same fashion? Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me on the show.

Yeah, so one of the applications of the predictive process in or sometimes called active inference theory for autism spectrum condition is that a good way to think about it and indeed a way that seems to stand up to some

clinical tests is as turning up the dial on sensory information over prediction.

So the core picture in the book is that experience always

takes shape at a sort of meeting point between what your brain expects and what

the signal from the world is giving you. If you turn the dial up too far on

expectation you get hallucination, but suppose you turn the dial up much further on sensory information, what you get then.

Then it looks like you might get a lot of the characteristics of autism spectrum condition.

That's to say it's harder to bring that very high-powered sensory signal

under the categories that you have so it will be

sometimes hard to detect faint patterns in the world and of course people's

facial sort of facial gestures that kind of show how they're thinking about

your mental state right now.

These are very faint patterns.

So if you're taking the sensory information

super seriously, which is a picture here,

then you'll find it harder to detect patterns like that.

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