Perceiving by way of triggering differences between visual raw data and mental expectations?

"For every axon coming from the retina into our thalamus before entering our 'consciousness' in the primary visual cortex, the primary visual cortex sends at least twice as many axons back onto the thalamus to modulate the raw signal," explained UC San Diego neuroscientist Bradley Voytek.3

Why is that significant? "Our cortex is already changing the raw visual information before that information gets into our consciousness," Voytek concluded.

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According to University of Edinburgh philosopher Andy Clark's masterful 2013 summary of the state of cognitive science, this emerging idea about the brain is called the "bidirectional hierarchical network model." It holds that every level of the brain is engaged in making predictions, so the expectation of seeing a house feeds down through the cortex to the eyes, which are then more likely to perceive a sloping roof instead of something else. But if something is amiss with the prediction, that information gets transmitted and the brain tries to find a better organizational paradigm for the visual input. Knowledge feeds perception and back again. There are loops everywhere strengthening and weakening according to how well they seem to reflect exterior reality.