Parking & Access Update – Please Read Before Your Next Class
September 30, 2025
One reason yoga sharpens perception may lie in how the brain anticipates the causes of the sensory signals that shape our experience. In neuroscience, this is called predictive coding, the idea that the brain constantly generates expectations about what sensations will arise next, based on past experience. Say, in Chair Pose, the brain predicts that a burning sensation will arise in the quadriceps, caused by the sustained bend in the knees. It anticipates the trajectory these sensations will take, shaped by past experience. As long as what we feel aligns roughly with those expectations, depending on how much precision we place on the sensations themselves, the mind is reassured. Whether we’re on or off our mat, most of the time we move through life guided by these assumptions and refinements.
Yoga, as a mindfulness practice, begins to interrupt that autopilot. By turning attention to real-time sensation and increasing the precision weight we assign to the differences between assumptions and real sensation, we begin to notice where experience diverges from expectation and at a finer level of detail. It would be uninteresting to let our predictions dominate; there wouldn’t be much to feel or to do on our mat. But through repeated cycles of sensing and correcting, perception becomes more precise, like tuning an instrument to finer frequencies.
There is a lot of talk these days about dopamine, and it may be interesting to some to know that dopamine is a key neuromodulator involved in assigning precision to prediction errors and motivating us to adapt and learn from what we experience. Whether this practice requires or enhances dopaminergic activity, dopamine plays a vital role in refining perception and guiding the ongoing process of learning through yoga.
An attitude of curiosity matters. With this support, you can use your power of attention to recognize that what you feel is not the same as what you have known in the past. In that recognition lies the opportunity to learn more deeply about what is happening in your body and mind, here and now.
References
Friston, K. J., Shiner, T., FitzGerald, T., Galea, J. M., Adams, R., Brown, H., Dolan, R. J., Moran, R., Stephan, K. E., & Bestmann, S. (2012). Dopamine, affordance and active inference. PLoS Computational Biology, 8(1), e1002327. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002327
