Podcast with Giovanni Pezzulo on predictive brain and embodied cognition

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 such models and uses them to drive perception, attention, and action selection proactively rather than reactively.

The interview centers on embodied problem solving, illustrated by competitive rock climbers who study an unfamiliar wall before ascending. Expert climbers visibly rehearse motor sequences, moving their arms to simulate grasps and reaches, using their bodies as external scaffolds for cognition. This is not mere motor programming: the climber must assemble partial skills in novel combinations, evaluate reachability constraints, and explore a vast space of possible routes, all guided by proprioceptive knowledge that only expertise provides. Memory experiments confirm that expert climbers remember difficult routes significantly better than novices, but only when the routes are actually climbable, demonstrating that motor expertise structures perception and memory rather than providing a generic cognitive advantage.

Pezzulo builds from individual action to social cognition through a series of escalating steps. If your motor system generates predictions about your own actions, it can also predict the actions of others by running the same forward models with different parameters. This simulation-based understanding of others bootstraps joint action planning, coordination, and eventually the ability to influence another person's beliefs and intentions. Clinical evidence supports this continuum: patients with bilateral parietal lesions cannot inhibit imagined actions from becoming overt movements, and utilization behavior patients automatically grasp objects they see, revealing the tight coupling between internal simulation and motor execution that normally remains covert.