The Brain and the Cost of Certainty

At every moment, we believe we are making decisions based on clear choices; yes or no, right or wrong, success or failure. But neurologically, we are not living in a world of true absolutes. We are living in a world based on neural predictions.

What often feels like “binary thinking” is the brain’s attempt to reduce uncertainty. The human brain favors coherence and consistency not because it loves rigidity, but because prediction is metabolically efficient, meaning certainty costs less energy than ambiguity.

Predictive Certainty From Early Adolescence

This shows up early.

In first grade, children are asked a deceptively simple question: What do you want to be when you grow up? When a child responds with “doctor,” “lawyer,” “nurse,” or “firefighter,” the answer is met with affirmation. When the response is “I don’t know,” or something less socially legible such as “famous athlete,” “artist,” or “rapper,” it’s often met with polite concern.

What we rarely acknowledge is that a seven-year-old does not yet possess the neural architecture to answer that question meaningfully. The prefrontal and default-mode networks in the brain responsible for identity formation, future simulation, and self-modeling are still developing. The odds that a child understands the depth of what they are being asked are incredibly low, bordering on improbable.

And yet, we reward certainty anyway.

Adults do this not out of malice, but because many of us have settled into our own form of predictive rigidity [more on this in future blogs]. In predictive neuroscience, this is sometimes described as hyper-precise priors; models of the world that have become so stable they resist updating. Rigid certainty feels safe to the brain because it minimizes surprise.

Predictive Certainty Shaped By Our Environment

The environment matters here, too.

The brain regulates the body in context, not in isolation. A child raised in a resource-rich, stable environment develops very different predictions about safety and possibility than a child raised in volatility or scarcity. Neither brain is “wrong.” Both are making biologically rational predictions based on their histories.

A child who has less and is labeled ‘unlikely to succeed’ develops predictive models about safety, survival, and the future that differ from both a child who has more resources as well as a child who has similar material conditions but receives positive labels such as “likely to succeed.”

When Certainty Becomes Identity: "What Is My Purpose?"

As children move through adolescence, they begin forming predictive models about identity, safety, and the future based on both their environments and the signals they receive from others. When certainty is rewarded or required, those predictions can harden into a sense of who we “should” be.

Over time, that sense of certainty can start to feel like identity, shaping how we answer questions like “What is my purpose?” and leaving us dysregulated, empty, or confused when our lived experience no longer matches the models we built. Allow me to use my story to illustrate how this happens in the brain.

A little about my brain and how I found myself in a state of neural dysfunction:

I am 34 years old.

By 32, I had spoken on global stages, become a human resources executive at a major tech company, hired my own branding agency, and was in the running for a chief human resources officer apprenticeship at a major oil and gas company. I had scaled global teams, sat on operating committees in my twenties, and helped grow a 50,000-person organization by my thirties.

I was good at what I did. Really good. And I knew it.

I worked hard. I prayed harder. I refused to sacrifice my beliefs or my morals. I believed deeply that I was showing the world you could lead with both conviction and compassion. I had answered the childhood question. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up and I could map the next five years with ease.

Then something disrupted everything.

In the same year I reached a new peak of my professional trajectory, I experienced a profound spiritual reckoning. Christ told me I was distracted. (Yep—He just showed up in a neuroscience blog.)

By May 2025, I gave notice.

By July 2025, I walked away from what I thought was a long-term calling on my life.

Instead of boardrooms, I found myself baptizing women in the Pacific Ocean. Instead of corporate strategy decks, I was teaching women about their brains, how predictions form, how patterns update, and what healing looks like.

I started a small garden with a few trees and leafy greens. That garden multiplied into dozens of herbs, vegetables, fruit trees, even tea and sugar plants, and became Sweet Humanity Kitchen; a business rooted in storytelling through food, culture, and legacy.

By December 2025, still 34 years old, I had hosted a Freedom Conference, taught my first formal Bible + Neuroscience course through my nonprofit Eight48 Ministries, and submitted applications for Neuroscience and Neurobiology PhD programs.

The same hands that once couldn’t keep an orchid alive were suddenly growing abundance.

And my brain… completely lost its footing.

Freedom felt like a threat:

From the outside, everything looked aligned. Purposeful. Peaceful. But internally, my nervous system was overwhelmed. I struggled to regulate. I struggled to receive. I struggled to freely enjoy God's provision.

It felt like accidentally plugging the red wire into the blue slot, except none of the slots were labeled.

I had entered a world where absolutes no longer existed. No five-year plan. No constant evaluation. No less than urgent urgencies disguised as importance (ya'll know what I am talking about).

There were days of sunlight, soil under my fingernails, learning for the sake of learning, and helping people without shipping MVPs on a deadline.

And oddly… I struggled.

Here’s why.

Neuroscience 101: Time To Nerd Out For A Moment

Your brain’s primary job is not thinking or managing your IQ. It is regulation.

Through a process called allostasis, the brain predicts the body’s future energy needs and allocates resources accordingly. Think of it as body budgeting. It anticipates demands before they arise using past experience, context, and internal bodily signals.

For example, let's look at how the body responds to a threat/stress response:

When a threat is detected, physical or psychological, your body responds automatically: heart rate rises, breathing changes, focus narrows, cortisol releases. Energy is redistributed to keep you safe. Memory encoding sharpens. Immune cells mobilize. And all of this happens without conscious permission.

When the threat resolves, the system attempts to return to balance. But here’s the critical part: what counts as “safe” or “normal” depends entirely on the nervous system’s history.

If you have spent years in high-pressure, tightly structured environments, your brain may learn that tension is predictable.  MIND BLOWING, RIGHT? (Totally understand if it's just me—reminds me of the time a good friend left me hanging on “Hamilton” as an opening song for one of my talks....[squirrel moment]). 

High pressure, tightly structured environments now 'equal' efficient. Familiar.
So when I entered an immediate season of freedom consisting of more time to personally distribute, emotional safety, and unstructured creativity, all at once— my brain couldn't take it. My brain did not register freedom and rest. It registered it as uncertainty!

Uncertainty carries metabolic cost. That’s why calm can feel agitating, rest can feel wrong, and freedom can feel unsafe.

Neurologically, I wasn’t broken (although I felt totally broken). I was updating.

Closing: From "Absolute Certainty" to "Both-And" Thinking

What I experienced was prediction error—the signal that the world no longer matches the brain’s model.

Updating those models takes energy (in my case, lots of energy). It takes time. Until new patterns become familiar, the nervous system may oscillate between dysregulation and growth.

This is where “both-and” thinking lives, not as a fun new personality trait or measure of EQ, but as a measure of neural capacity. Cognitive flexibility emerges when the brain reduces the precision of rigid priors and allows competing predictions to coexist long enough to learn.

It’s biological.

It’s spiritual.

And it’s deeply human.

The brain is a prediction machine; it is also a learning machine. And learning, by definition, requires uncertainty.

Next month, I’ll talk more about “both-and thinking” and the neural architecture that supports it. Thanks for nerding out with me today.

The brain, truly, is fascinating.