Why the Brain Hates Uncertainty #

“Apophenia? Apophe-nah bro…”

The human brain is a pattern-detecting machine. It evolved to notice shapes in shadows, voices in noise, and meaning in chaos — because missing a signal could be fatal. But in altered states, where perception becomes more fluid and ambiguous, this same drive kicks into overdrive.

If you read all of the guides on this site, you should hopefully notice that a lot of the techniques involve either:

1. Adding random noise
2. Removing all noise
3. A combo of both

When information becomes noisy — like in dreams, sensory deprivation, or psychedelic states — the brain doesn’t simply shrug and give up. Instead, it fills in the gaps using stories, symbols, memories, and emotions. This process, known as apophenia, is often labeled as “seeing patterns where none exist” — but in practice, it’s exactly how meaning is made.

Predictive Processing and the Bayesian Brain #

From a neuroscience perspective, the brain is increasingly understood as a Bayesian inference engine — constantly generating predictions about incoming sensory input and updating those predictions based on error signals¹. This model, known as predictive processing, suggests that perception is an active process of hypothesis testing.

Uncertainty disrupts this system. When the brain encounters ambiguous or noisy input, its predictions become less certain, and the brain responds by leaning more heavily on prior beliefs and expectations². This is why, in altered states of consciousness, people often perceive hidden meanings, synchronicities, or symbolic connections — their brain is working overtime to explain the unpredictable.

This impulse can be hacked in order to find new meanings in the chaos. There’s a paradox at the heart of this that’s quite funny:

Are the new insights therefore meaningful, meaningless, or both?

Think of it like a Zen koan.

Why This Happens #

• Survival: Uncertainty is stressful. Evolutionarily, it was safer to assume that rustle in the bushes was a predator than to ignore it.
• Cognitive economy: The brain takes shortcuts. Once it sees a pattern, it tends to stick with it, even if the data is incomplete.
• Need for coherence: We prefer a coherent story. Even random input gets woven into narrative.

This is why altered states so often feel profound, even when they arise from random noise. The experience of “it all connects” — common in dreams and psychedelics — is your brain doing what it does best: protecting you from uncertainty by weaving order from ambiguity.

Understanding this mechanism doesn’t strip away the mystery — if anything, it gives you a clearer view of how deep your brain’s drive for meaning truly goes.

There are a couple of practical applications once you understand this:

Firstly, you can rationalise ALL results as something like “I’m just uncovering new information and new ways of seeing things. That doesn’t mean they are ‘correct’ or ‘real’, but I might find this perspective useful.”

At this point, the fringe, mystical topics lose a bit of their edge. The psychomanteum isn’t quite so scary, tattwa meditation doesn’t seem so esoteric, Tarot divination starts to make sense.

Secondly, you can use this principle to create new ways of entering altered states. Under-explored techniques like echo delays and deprivation-flood cycles, as well as some hypnotic induction methods, and even interrogation techniques, operate on this same chaos/meaning principle. What can you come up with? Drop me a line if you think of something good.