How to Change a Brain that Resists Changing
Exploring Bottom-Up and Top-Down Brain Signaling
By Garnet Dupuis
The human brain is remarkably efficient at recognizing patterns. Throughout life it continuously builds internal models based on experience, allowing us to predict what is likely to happen next. These patterns save time and energy, but they can also become deeply established and increasingly resistant to change.
Fortunately, the adult brain retains the ability to adapt through neuroplasticity. With appropriate stimulation, new neural pathways can develop while older patterns become more flexible, supporting continued learning, creativity, and personal growth.
One of the central ideas explored in this article is that lasting change often depends on the interaction between two complementary systems of brain processing: Bottom-Up and Top-Down signaling.
"You can't think your way out of the problem, but you can feel your way into the solution."
Introduction
The adult human brain has the remarkable ability to change both functionally and structurally throughout life. At the same time, it naturally develops organized patterns that improve efficiency by helping predict future perceptions and actions. Every repetition strengthens these patterns, making them progressively more automatic and more resistant to modification.
This raises an important question:
How can we change a brain that has become resistant to change?
The answer explored here involves understanding how sensory experience can influence established mental patterns through the interaction of Bottom-Up and Top-Down processing.
Starting with the Basics
The brain consists of multiple systems that evolved over millions of years and now work together as an integrated whole. Understanding two complementary processing styles provides a useful framework for explaining how the brain learns and adapts.
Bottom-Up processing begins with information arriving through the senses and the body. It is primarily concerned with what is happening right now.
Top-Down processing interprets that information using previous knowledge, memories, beliefs, expectations, and predictions. It allows the brain to anticipate events before they occur.
Neither system is more important than the other.
- Bottom-Up provides information.
- Top-Down provides meaning.
Healthy cognition depends on both systems working together.
Bottom-Up Processing
Bottom-Up processing is driven by immediate sensory experience. Information flows upward from the body and the senses toward higher brain regions responsible for interpretation.
This includes vision, hearing, touch, movement, balance, pain, pleasure, body position (proprioception), and internal bodily sensations.
Because Bottom-Up processing is grounded in present-moment experience, it continually provides fresh information about what is actually occurring.
Top-Down Processing
Top-Down processing works in the opposite direction. Instead of beginning with incoming sensory information, it begins with previously learned knowledge.
Past experience allows the brain to recognize patterns quickly and predict what is likely to happen next. This makes decision-making extremely efficient and reduces the amount of energy required for everyday functioning.
However, the same efficiency that makes Top-Down processing valuable can also become a limitation. The brain sometimes responds to what it expects to perceive rather than to what is actually happening.
Is Either System Always Correct?
Neither Bottom-Up nor Top-Down processing is perfectly reliable.
Sensory information can be incomplete or misleading, while expectations may be influenced by previous experiences, emotions, beliefs, or cultural assumptions.
The brain therefore operates through a continuous cycle of prediction, observation, comparison, and adjustment.
This relationship can be viewed through two fundamental questions:
- Ontology: What is actually real?
- Epistemology: How do we know?
Bottom-Up processing helps us encounter reality, while Top-Down processing attempts to interpret what that reality means.
Jumping to Conclusions
Imagine noticing what appears to be a snake lying across a garden path. Your body instantly reacts—you jump backwards before consciously analyzing the situation.
A moment later you discover that the "snake" is simply a garden hose.
Your brain reacted using previously stored survival patterns. Although the conclusion was incorrect, the rapid response helped maximize safety while minimizing reaction time.
This illustrates one of the brain's greatest strengths—and one of its greatest weaknesses.
Sometimes the brain responds more strongly to its expectations than to reality itself.
Predictive Coding
Modern neuroscience increasingly describes the brain as a prediction engine. Rather than passively waiting for information to arrive, the brain continuously predicts future sensory experiences using previously established internal models.
Incoming sensory information is constantly compared against these predictions.
- If reality matches expectation, the prediction is reinforced.
- If reality differs, a prediction error occurs.
Prediction errors can also be understood as moments of surprise. These unexpected outcomes provide valuable opportunities for learning because they signal that the brain's existing model may require updating.
However, prediction errors are not always welcomed. The brain often attempts to minimize them by preserving familiar patterns, even when those patterns are no longer accurate or beneficial.
This helps explain why deeply established habits and beliefs can be surprisingly difficult to change.
When the Brain Gets It Right—or Wrong
The brain stores previous experiences as internal models known as priors. These priors help predict what is likely to happen next, allowing us to respond quickly and efficiently.
When incoming sensory information matches a prior, the brain strengthens that existing pattern. However, when new information conflicts with a strongly held prior, the brain may reject the new evidence instead of updating its model.
This tendency is beneficial when sensory information is genuinely unreliable, but it can also prevent us from changing outdated habits or beliefs.
A prior can therefore be understood in many different ways:
- Patterns
- Habits
- Beliefs
- Behaviors
- Perspectives
- Interpretations
- Confirmation bias
- "My reality"
- "Who I am"
When these internal models remain flexible, prediction errors become opportunities for learning rather than threats to identity.
Active Inference and Confirmation Bias
The brain does not passively receive information. Instead, it actively searches incoming sensory signals for meaning—a process known as Active Inference.
While this helps us understand our environment efficiently, it also creates the possibility of confirmation bias. Rather than remaining open to new information, the brain may selectively interpret experiences in ways that reinforce existing beliefs.
Information that supports our current perspective is readily accepted, while information that contradicts it may be ignored or dismissed.
"Seeing is believing" can gradually become "Believing is seeing."
Why Being Wrong Can Be Good
If every prediction error feels like failure, the brain naturally tries to avoid situations that challenge its beliefs. Unfortunately, this also limits learning.
A more adaptive approach is to experience prediction errors as surprises rather than threats. Surprise represents new information—an invitation to update the brain's internal model.
Magic tricks and comedy demonstrate this beautifully. Both create expectations and then gently violate them. The unexpected outcome is enjoyable precisely because it surprises us without threatening our safety.
Perhaps meaningful brain change works in much the same way: learning becomes easier when discovering something new feels rewarding instead of uncomfortable.
Changing Old Patterns
Every habit, belief, or behavior stored within the brain competes with new experiences. Simply deciding to change rarely eliminates an established pattern because that pattern has already been strengthened through repetition.
Neuroplasticity is therefore a competitive process. New patterns must become stronger than the old ones before lasting change can occur.
The challenge is not creating new patterns—it is allowing existing ones to become flexible enough for new learning to take place.
Softening Rigid Brain Patterns
Modern culture strongly emphasizes analytical thinking. While reasoning is essential, humans are more than thinking machines.
We are also sensory, emotional, and embodied organisms. Feelings, movement, vision, hearing, and bodily awareness all provide powerful Bottom-Up information that can influence the brain in ways that thinking alone sometimes cannot.
You can't think your way out of the problem,
but you can feel your way into the solution.
Allowing more sensory information into the learning process may temporarily soften rigid Top-Down organization, creating opportunities for healthier patterns to emerge.
Brain Engagement
One Bottom-Up approach described in the paper is Brain Engagement.
Unlike traditional Brain Entrainment, which relies on repetitive rhythms to synchronize brain activity, Brain Engagement uses continuously changing Light and Sound patterns to maintain curiosity, attention, and exploration.
Rather than reinforcing a single fixed pattern, dynamic sensory stimulation continually introduces new information that encourages the brain to remain flexible while supporting healthy neuroplasticity.
Relaxing Existing Beliefs
Research into psychedelic therapies has inspired the REBUS model—Relaxing Existing Beliefs Under Psychedelics. The central idea is that temporarily loosening rigid Top-Down organization may allow new learning to occur.
The paper suggests that this principle extends beyond psychedelic substances. Deep relaxation, meditation, hypnagogic states, and dynamic sensory stimulation may also encourage greater openness to new information by reducing the dominance of established patterns.
The Role of Hypnagogia
The brain naturally becomes more flexible during transitions between waking and sleeping. These hypnagogic states often include vivid imagery, novel associations, and reduced cognitive rigidity.
Rather than viewing these experiences as unusual, the paper suggests they represent a normal part of the brain's natural rhythm and may provide valuable opportunities for creativity, problem solving, and adaptive change.
State Change vs. Trait Change
Neuroplastic change occurs over time.
- State Changes are temporary shifts in brain activity that occur while a stimulus is present.
- Trait Changes develop through repetition and become lasting patterns that remain even after the original stimulus has ended.
Every lasting habit begins as a temporary state. With repeated practice and reinforcement, those temporary experiences gradually become stable characteristics of the brain.
Key Takeaways
- The brain continuously balances Bottom-Up sensory information with Top-Down predictions.
- Prediction errors—or surprises—drive learning and neuroplasticity.
- Strong priors can become rigid habits and beliefs that resist change.
- Confirmation bias occurs when existing beliefs dominate new information.
- Brain Engagement uses changing Light and Sound to encourage cognitive flexibility.
- Hypnagogic states naturally soften rigid patterns and support creativity.
- Repeated State Changes can gradually become lasting Trait Changes.
Conclusion
The adult brain possesses an extraordinary capacity for change while simultaneously striving to preserve familiar patterns. Lasting neuroplasticity depends on finding the balance between stability and flexibility. Bottom-Up sensory experiences provide fresh information that can gently loosen rigid Top-Down beliefs, allowing the brain to update its internal models and develop healthier, more adaptive ways of thinking and behaving.
Rather than relying on thought alone, meaningful brain change often begins with experience. When the body, the senses, and the mind work together, new possibilities emerge—and the brain becomes more capable of learning, adapting, and growing throughout life.