Recent research on spontaneous brain rhythms and neural network coordination supports Immanuel Kant's concept of cognitive spontaneity—the mind's ability to organize sensory input in new ways. However, linking brain activity to cognition precisely remains difficult. Neurophenomenology, which incorporates subjective experience to explain variations in brain dynamics, provides a promising approach to this problem.
A prominent theory holds that cognition works by minimizing prediction errors through Bayesian inference, with attention understood as optimizing the precision of those error signals. While this account explains many attention-related phenomena, it fails to accommodate certain forms of voluntary attention. The authors argue that advocates of Bayesian prediction error minimization have overreached by claiming it is all the brain ever does, and that the theory's tools, though powerful, are insufficient for a complete explanation of attention.