Watch an expert rock climber study a wall they have never seen before, and you are watching the motor system think. Giovanni Pezzulo explains how the predictive brain reuses sensorimotor knowledge for problem solving, imagery, and understanding other minds.

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Pezzulo distinguishes two kinds of prediction that are often conflated in the literature. Implicit prediction, as in classical conditioning, attaches value labels to stimuli without maintaining an internal model of the predictive relationship. Explicit prediction builds structured forward models of environmental regularities that can be run offline for planning, decision-making, and mental simulation. The predictive brain hypothesis proposes that the brain systematically incorporates environmental structure into ...