Part 1: How Our Helicopter Brains Learn to Predict Everything We Feel and Do

Caroline J Davies

Why having brains like helicopter parents that predict everything can be both good and bad

Why are our brains like helicopter parents?

When I first heard the term, helicopter parent ¹, after my main parenting years were over, I remember thinking two things, how useful new words or concepts could be, and whether I had, in fact, been a helicopter parent myself. I am sure I was, to some degree, especially around safety issues; it’s an occupational hazard of being a physiotherapist, we have treated people who have had almost every type of injury you could imagine and some you can’t, so my brain has no problem imagining the pain and recovery involved with every potential risk out there.

However, if we want a quintessential example of a helicopter parent, we need to look no further than our own brains. If our brains’ job descriptions are, “be our very own helicopter parent”, then their mission statements would be “keep us alive against all the odds”. By the time we reach adulthood, our brains have done just that by noticing and noting every dangerous, difficult, or painful experience we have had, physically, mentally, or emotionally, as well as all the close calls.

Learning to be Predictable

Before our own brains mature to the point of understanding risks and consequences, we do need some real helicopter parenting. Gradually, with our parents’ or parenting figures’ help, and our repeated explorations and painful feedback, we learn to be more careful, to avoid drops, handle sharp objects carefully, wear helmets, go slower in places, and faster in others. This learning has stages that we need to understand, to make sense of how we get to what we are going to explain next— how our brains run our lives like a prerecorded show, including prerecorded pain!

Take a “simple” activity, like walking, which isn’t in fact simple at all, as we discover, if we have to relearn it later in life after an injury. As a child, we learn to walk in stages, layering each one on top of the next. First, getting up to stand, then balancing in standing. Then, something gets our attention, and we are propelled to move towards it, we find our foot moves forward to save us from falling and hey presto, we have done our first step. But there’s still the matter of keeping our balance, at the same time as moving our legs. If you watch a child, or an adult recovering from an injury, doing this, you will see someone who is, totally “in the moment.”

Figure 2: Microsoft 365 Stock Images (2025)

Once we have learned to walk, we enter the next stage, where we can both walk and do something else at the same time, like walking and talking, for example. Our brains do this by moving into the prerecorded or predicted stage, they have got this walking down- they run the walking programme (or walking show, if you prefer²), including all the moves, the timings, the balance and especially how it all should feel as we do it. Running the walking programme becomes a piece of cake, so much so that we don’t even notice that we are doing it, until something goes wrong. Perhaps we sprain our ankle or develop chronic or complex pain in our foot, and then nothing about walking feels predictable, easy, or right. Then, unfortunately, we can go onto develop a predicted painful-walking programme.

Why do our brains learn to predict everything?

I have asked my patients this question for the last couple of years and have had some very good answers. The top answer, quite correctly, is for protection. We have survived over millennia by having over-protective rather than under-protective brains, and, like top-level security teams, our brains are always anticipating or predicting every possible risk as we go through life.³

Although the picture below could have many different explanations and meanings, let’s use it to remind us why we need our brains to predict things, and also how these predictions can become problematic for us.

Figure 3: Copyright Caroline J Davies Reprocess Your Pain Generated with Chat GPT

So, one interpretation of the picture above is— if a state of mindful bliss were our everyday natural state— we probably wouldn’t survive very long. We need to be wired to always have the capacity and awareness to predict potential dangers and risks.

However, there is a different kind of danger that can come from only ever running the prerecorded “watch out for strange monsters” prediction, day in and day out: we are much more likely to be anxious or in pain, because the very possibility of threats is what can trigger our brains into predicting anxiety and pain.

The next key reason our brains predict things is to save energy. Have you noticed how tiring it is starting a new job or meeting new people? In new situations like this, we do not yet have the prerecorded predicted versions of our new tasks, or friends, set up yet, so our brains are working extra hard and using up extra energy as a result.

Figure 4: Copyright Caroline J Davies Reprocess Your Pain Generated with Chat GPT

As adults, on average, our brains use 25% of our overall available energy, probably more when we are learning. Incidentally, babies’ brains use 65%, because they spend so much of their time awake, learning. Running those prerecorded (predicted and predictable) shows saves us energy, which is probably one of the reasons why we also like to watch them, to relax, in real life.

Predictions allow us to multi-task as well, when we have an automated programme running, we can turn our attention (and energy) to other things that are either more interesting, or we just have to get done.

Being able to predict things is how we can also get better at our jobs, our hobbies, or sports, or being a good parent, friend, or partner. But just like the double edge sword of our “looking out for strange monsters” predictions, we shouldn’t become complacent just because we have learned a set of predictions. An excellent reminder I had from a recent class ⁴ was, to always be ready to learn from each new patient; no one’s life (or brain) has been lived (or wired) in the same way; everyone’s path to getting out of pain will be different.

What do these predictions include?

Just to clarify this, before we go on and talk about predicted pain, it’s important to understand that our brains are not just predicting pain in our lives, they are predicting everything we feel and do. The predicted walking programme isn’t just the obvious taking of steps, it’s the feeling of our weight transferring from side to side, of our heels striking and the time we spend on each foot before we push off, the feeling of the fronts of our hips stretching just before the other foot lands, and the multiple variations of feelings for what footwear we are wearing or what surface we are walking on.

Our predictions also come with a 360-degree view and surround sound; they are fully scented and flavoured, with multi-layered sensory feelings of touch, pressure, and every type of comfortable and uncomfortable sensation your brain can recreate. Unfortunately, this includes all of the painful sensations as well, like stabbing, aching, burning, pins and needles and so on. Even emotional feelings are included in this grand simulation: it’s the ultimate virtual reality show.

And that is the catch. Our brains can be so good at minutely predicting our expected experiences, including the multi-dimensional sights, sounds and feelings that come with them, that we can be left wondering if it is all a giant con! Which is why we need to be a bit cunning to catch them out…

Catching our Predictions Out

Figure 5: Copyright Caroline J Davies Generated with Chat GPT

Try this test, take a second to look at this image from the top of my article on Pain Reprocessing Therapy. Check out the small print below that tells you some important details you might have missed. ⁵ It wasn’t until this was pointed out to me by my sharp-eyed best friend that I noticed it. If you missed it too, then your brain likely did the same as mine, it filled in the gaps and predicted what we expected to see. Perhaps you could also explain this by the fact you weren’t looking that well, or you were looking at something else in the picture. However, I looked at this picture many times; it was the first image I had created with AI, and I was, frankly, quite taken with it. A more famous example, if you haven’t seen it, is the basketball test, which shows what we can miss while doing a predictable thing like counting basketball passes. ⁶

Figure 6: Microsoft 365 Stock Images (2025)

How about this prediction gone wrong…have you noticed what happens when you come across an escalator that isn’t moving? Notice how disconcerting this is, you are about to step on it and suddenly everything is wrong, your legs don’t seem coordinated, and it takes you a second to sort yourself out and go up it. What is going on? Well, if you live in a city with an underground metro, like shopping in department stores or frequently visit airports you will have a predicted programme for how it feels to go up escalators, which will be in full swing as you approach them; when you suddenly notice the escalator isn’t moving, your brain has to adjust its’ predicted programmes at the last minute, and this glitch, of switching off a predicted programme and paying attention again, becomes noticeable.

Figure 7: Figure 6: Microsoft 365 Stock Images (2025)

A similar example happens if we have been on a boat for longer than a few hours, our brains have become used to predicting the ground will sway as we walk, and so they struggle when we are walking on land again, an unmoving surface. I will never forget working with a lifelong merchant sailor, in my training, who literally could not walk straight, he walked along the hospital corridor with both feet making wide accommodating circles for the sea swell his brain had predicted so long he couldn’t switch it off.

Figure 8: Figure 6: Microsoft 365 Stock Images (2025)

Another way to catch your brain’s predictions, is when you notice that you can make two different predictions about the same thing or line your predictions up with other peoples’ and find they are different. For example, your brain can make two different predicted images, out of the same picture, depending on what you focus on. See if you can make your brain see this as a vase as well as the faces and notice that subtle switch needed to do so, that is your brain changing its visual prediction in real time. You would think we might all see, hear, smell, or taste the same thing when we look at the same picture, hear the same sound or smell or eat the same foods, but as you already know, from many experiences, we do not. Our brains all make slightly different predictions in the moment. Recently, a word-sound example has become popular to illustrate this, whether your brain predicts the sound of two different words in the same single word recording. ⁷ Either you can hear Yanny or Laurel or with some manipulation of your brain or the sound frequencies, you can hear either but not both at the same time

Although some of these examples seem quite abstract and quirky, these moments where you can catch your predictions out, aren’t the norm, they are the exceptions; like catching a politician speaking their mind when they think the mike is turned off, or catching a surprised look on an actor’s face when something off-script happens. What is normal is that we run from dawn to dusk in waves of predictable patterns that we hardly notice. This includes the waves of pain that accompany these routines, which we suffer with, understandably, never want to notice “in the moment.”

This, “in the moment” noticing of pain makes up a key part of Pain Reprocessing Therapy, which we will discuss further in Part 2: Our Helicopter Brains and Their Unfortunate Habit of Predicting Pain

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