The Predictive Life

Human beings live prospectively. Even memory, on close inspection, is in service of anticipation - the brain uses the past to estimate what's about to happen, prepares the body accordingly, and treats the resulting experience as evidence for the next prediction. The Predictive Life develops this single mechanism across a full clinical and conceptual arc: how old learning becomes prediction, how prediction organises attention and bodily preparation, how behaviour changes the evidence the system receives, and how memory and imagination share the machinery that constructs the futures we believe are available to us.

Structured in nine parts, the book moves from foundational neuroscience through the mechanics of feeling stuck in the present, to action as a source of new evidence, to the construction of foresight, before arriving at an integrated account of psychological resilience - reframed here not as bouncing back, but as the capacity to keep updating. Fifteen worked clinical formulations, spanning relationship anxiety, workplace shame, panic, chronic pain, burnout, grief, and ADHD, show the model applied to real presentations. A dedicated section - unusual for a book like this - turns the same scrutiny on the model itself: what it claims, what would count as evidence against it, where brain-based language risks explaining away real material conditions, and which competing frameworks already explain parts of the same territory better.