How Sensory Breadth of Stored Experience Shapes the Flexibility of Predictive Processing
Abstract
This paper investigates the relationship between the sensory breadth of stored experience and the flexibility of the brain’s predictive processing system.
Drawing on Karl Friston’s free energy principle, Bessel van der Kolk’s work on somatic memory, Wilder Penfield’s neurostimulation findings, and contemporary research on distributed memory encoding, the paper proposes that the quality and modality range of stored sensory experience directly determines the combined richness available to the brain’s generative model.
A nervous system whose archive consists of broad, multi-modal, embodied experience produces flexible, context-sensitive predictions. A nervous system whose archive is sensorially narrow produces rigid, repetitive predictions that resist updating.
This mechanism may explain the persistence of maladaptive patterns across
the lifespan, the effectiveness of body-based therapeutic approaches, and the neuroprotective value of early multi-sensory experience proposed in the calibration framework (Wijn, 2026a,
2026b).
The paper bridges predictive processing theory, memory neuroscience, and clinical psychoanalytic insight to argue that the archive is not a passive record but the active substrate from which all prediction, and therefore all perception, action, and identity, is generated.
Link to complete paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22790696
