How does your brain decide what you're seeing before you've even finished looking? Moshe Bar reveals how the orbital frontal cortex uses blurry, low-resolution snapshots of the world to generate rapid predictions that shape perception in real time.

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In this episode, Moshe Bar challenges the textbook separation between perception and cognition, arguing that these processes are deeply intertwined rather than sequential. He presents evidence that the orbital frontal cortex (OFC) receives coarse, low spatial frequency visual information and uses it to generate top-down predictions that actively guide how we perceive our environment. Bar estimates the balance between bottom-up sensory input and top-down prediction can range from zero to one hundred percent depending on c ...