Predict

‘Predicting the future’—the stuff of dreams one might imagine; the province of astrologers and soothsayers, surely. Perhaps not, the scientific mind might retort: after all, is it not the job of science to discover laws of nature, and thereby make precise, verifiable predictions about the future? But what if we were to claim that prediction is neither fanciful nor difficult, and not even rare. Rather, it is commonplace; something that we all accomplish each and every moment of our lives. Some readers may recall the popular video game, pong, where the goal is to ‘keep the puck in play’ using an electronic paddle. Figure 2 shows images of two different pong games in progress. In addition to the paddle and puck, the players’ eye gaze is also being tracked. The image on the left shows the player’s eyes tracking the puck itself. On the other hand, in the right-hand image, the player is already looking at a point where she expects the puck to travel to. The player on the left is reactive; she simply tracks the puck, and as the game gets faster, she eventually misses. The right player, in contrast, is able to predict where the puck will be, and most of the time she gets it right. Further, we often see her eyes dart faster than the puck to multiple regions of the field as she appears to recalculate her prediction continuously. What kind of player do you think you are? As it happens, almost all of us are predictive players. Even if we have never played pong before, we rapidly begin predicting the puck’s trajectory after even a few minutes of playing. The ‘reactive player’ in this experiment was in fact autistic, which apparently affected the person’s ability to make predictions about the puck’s trajectory. (The neurological causes of autism are still not well known or agreed upon; the recent research from which the images in Figure 2 are taken represent new results that might shed some more lightonthisdebilitatingcondition.) So it appears that prediction, as exhibited by most pong players, is far from being a rare and unusual ability. It is in fact a part and parcel of our everyday lives, and is present, to varying degrees, in all conscious life.