Making Sense

The generative model of experience and empathy

Making Sense

The phrase “making sense” often refers to framing something in a way that’s intelligible or understandable to someone else. “Make it make sense” is a meme-worthy phrase often attached to things that are pathological or humorously devoid of logical consistency.

However, in cognitive theory, the words 'making sense' carry a profoundly different meaning.

The phrase isn’t about logic. It’s quite literally about the creation of our sensations.

Sight, smell, taste, sound, touch, these aren’t raw snapshots of the outside world.

They’re fabrications, the final product of a process. Not singular representations of a mind-independent reality, but constructions generated by your brain.

It’s a common assumption that smells, tastes, and sights exist “out there” and our minds act like a reality-catcher, streaming them into consciousness. That passive framework, the idea that perception is just the imprint of the external world, was laid down most famously by René Descartes in the 17th century. His Treatise of Man and Meditations helped cement both mind-body dualism and the notion that our senses function as passive receptors.

But neither of these philosophical/scientific tenets aged well.

Over the course of the last couple of hundred years, the echoes of Cartesian philosophy have been increasingly incapable of bearing meaningful fruit, and more often than not have left us self-aggrandizing, getting the right answers to the wrong questions.

So let’s zoom in on a counter-theory, predictive processing, and then zoom out to see how it doesn’t just change neuroscience, it can change the qualitative experience of our reality.

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The Sound of Empathy

In 2016, researchers Ediz Sohoglu and Matthew Davis published a study looking at how we learn to understand unclear speech. Predictive processing was at the heart of their thesis. By playing deliberately unclear speech, then clear versions then reintroducing the deliberately unclear speech, the subject was able to gain clarity over the distortion based on their prior experience.

The authors showed that this improvement happens because the brain updates its internal model of how speech should sound, essentially learning by minimizing prediction error.

It went something like this.

Distorted Speech File 1

Complete nonsense… (PUN!)

But let's listen to the non-distorted speech.

Now the Distorted Speech file again..

You can’t “unhear” it now. Your model has been transiently updated, and therefore, you’re quite literally generating a new prediction of what the sensory data from the sound file offers.

And you want to know the kicker?

If you were to expose yourself to enough of these deliberately distorted speech files, you'd actually gain clarity on all distorted speech. So not only does exposure change your reality in the short term, but it also has the ability to create a long-term narrowing in your prediction error.

Showing the potency in how our prior experiences can influence the interpretation of what we think to be our raw sensory data.

Not only should this fact make you think, but it should also make you feel..

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Beyond Neuroscience

Here’s where it gets interesting. Predictive processing isn’t just a model of perception; it’s a philosophy of reality.

Your experience of the world is always filtered through prior experience. What you see, hear, and feel is less about the raw data coming in and more about the predictions your brain is making. In other words: your history shapes your reality.

And that realization should make us more empathetic.

When someone fails to “make sense” of a situation, they aren’t broken. They’re just running a different model, built from different priors. Just as hearing garbled speech doesn’t make you a bad listener, failing to understand someone else’s worldview doesn’t make you a bad person. It simply means your generative model hasn’t been tuned to their experience yet.

Predictive processing shows us how potent prior experience is in shaping perception. That insight can soften our judgments. It can remind us that our realities aren’t absolute; they’re negotiated, constructed, and updated through error and feedback.

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Making Sense of Each Other

To “make sense” is to literally create sense. And that creation is always collaborative: between past and present, between perception and prediction, between me and you.

Useful philosophies, as John Vervaeke puts it, are transjective, not just subjective or objective, but co-created. Predictive processing is one of those philosophies. It tells us not only how the brain makes sense of noise, but also how people make sense of each other.

Because at the end of the day, empathy is just another kind of predictive processing.

It’s the willingness to let someone else’s priors reshape your model of the world.

Be well,

Jordan