Last Week I Learned: Processes of Believing

While looking into studies on the intersection of experiences, exposure, and beliefs I stumbled upon this interesting article that looks at the neurology of beliefs. Here is a wordy quote that, when broken down, gives an interesting perspective on this intersection:

"Perceived information is what motivates the generating of actions (Figure 1). Note that believing is inherent in this transforma- tion such that knowledge acquired in the past and represented in probabilistic representations is linked to the future by proba- bilistic predictions. Generating actions involves intentions to act, action selection, inhibition of unwanted acts, and predicting reward and costs of acts (Nachev et al., 2008; Passingham et al., 2010). In general terms, this refers to deciding what to do next. The neuroscientific basis for decision making has been shown to be related to reward valuation (Grabenhorst & Rolls, 2011) and unconscious or intuitive selection that evolves within far less than 400 ms (Chen et al., 2010; Kahnt et al., 2010; Schultze-Kraft et al., 2016). The processes that regulate the performance of actions are replete with probabilistic reward and cost predictions determined by the personal meanings attributed to the mental representations of the signals from the outside world (Friston et al., 2014). The action-perception-valuation triad has been postulated to account, in context of a hierarchical dimension, for computations of physical, social, and cultural matters (Sugiura et al., 2015)."