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Predictive Myths: The Neural Economy of the Imaginary
Paperback
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 29 2025
Pages: 146
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.31 Width: 8.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
Predictive Myths: The Neural Economy of the Imaginary
What if imagination were not a luxury of the human mind, but the vital metabolism through which thought itself survives?
In Predictive Myths proposes a radical theory of the human imaginary: imagination is a predictive, metabolic system that transforms uncertainty into coherence, entropy into meaning. Bridging neuroscience, anthropology, and thermodynamics, it demonstrates that the same energetic principle governs neurons, emotions, and myths alike. The brain predicts, the body regulates, and culture ritualizes-all in service of a single biological necessity: the maintenance of informational equilibrium.
Through the innovative Neuro-Symbolic Digestive Model (NSDM), Predictive Myths unites predictive-processing theory with cultural anthropology. Drawing on EEG and heart-rate data, linguistic analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, Cioni reveals how imagination operates as a symbolic metabolism, recycling chaos into pattern through the rhythms of art, ritual, and narrative. Myth, in this light, is not an archaic illusion but the living circuitry of human adaptation.
Moving effortlessly between equations and poetry, theory and fieldwork, Predictive Myths redefines the boundaries between science and the humanities. It invites the reader to see cognition as a thermodynamic process and culture as the planetary homeostasis of meaning.
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