Comment by cubefox

> There's then evidence of what's called Predictive Coding. When that future happens, a higher level circuit decides how far off we were, and then releases appropriate neuromodulators to re-wire that circuit.

Yes, and ideally there would be whole backpropagation passes which update the entire model depending on how much the current observation diverges from past predictions. (Though brains use an updating mechanism which diverges from the backpropagation algorithm.)

Edit: Apparently the theory of this is broadly known (apart from "JEPA" and "predictive coding") also under the names "free energy principle" and "active inference": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle