Chapter 3 · Canonical English edition

3. Why Information Alone Is Not Enough

Functional Systems Facilitation · Dmitry Shamenkov

Section 5 of 53version 1.1 · July 2026Source: Book_OD
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3. Why Information Alone Is Not Enough

The Paradox of Those Who Know but Do Not Act

Here a fair question arises. If all of this is so obvious, and so well supported by science, why do people go on living in loneliness, hiding their feelings, hoarding grievances, lying, and wrecking their relationships and their own health? Why does knowledge not turn into action?

The answer lies in how our brain is built.

We are used to thinking of the brain as an instrument that perceives reality “as it is” and then makes decisions on that basis. Modern neuroscience suggests the opposite: the brain is, first and foremost, an organ of prediction. It does not simply “receive” signals from the world; it actively generates predictions from entrenched past experience and checks those predictions against the incoming data.

This view is known as predictive processing (predictive coding), and it is associated with the names of Karl Friston, Anil Seth, Lisa Barrett, and many other neuroscientists¹³. A recent paper by Barrett and Miller (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2026) reports that a large proportion — on the order of 90% of the synapses in the sensory cortex — are feedback (top-down) connections; that is, connections carrying signals not “bottom-up” from the sense organs but “top-down,” from our expectations, models, and purposes¹⁴. The implication: the great majority of cortical connections carry top-down signals, which suggests that expectation contributes heavily to what we perceive.

Strikingly, this can be compared with one of the central tenets of Anokhin’s theory of functional systems, formulated back in the 1970s: purpose shapes perception. Every action of a living system is organized around an anticipatory image of the result — the acceptor of the result of action. We see what corresponds to our purpose; what does not fit it tends to recede from awareness. (Saltykov and Grachev have proposed refining this formulation: the system-forming factor of a functional system is not the result itself but precisely the anticipatory reflection of the result — the prediction, the expectation, the model of the future. The modern, anatomical finding does not, by itself, establish Anokhin’s claim, but it can be read alongside it.)

And here lies the root of the paradox.

Defense Against New Experience

If the brain works on the basis of entrenched models, then every time we land in a stressful, uncertain, or conflict-laden situation, it turns automatically to old experience. Not to what we read in some smart book, not to scientifically grounded recommendations, but to the neural patterns that were laid down earlier.

In ordinary communication this means: we know we ought to speak honestly — yet the moment fear sets in, we say what we have always said. We know we should not manipulate — yet the old defensive pattern fires anyway. We know that advice does not help — yet in a moment of anxiety we start handing out advice.

In evolutionary terms this is entirely logical. Under stress, the ancient “fight / flight / freeze” mechanism kicks in — the reaction that saved our ancestors from predators. But in modern social life this mechanism more often hinders than helps: it narrows the range of responses to “attack, hide, or freeze,” whereas healthy communication calls for the exact opposite — openness, contact, precise expression of oneself.

In my book Open Dialogue: The Key to the Conscious Management of Health (2018), I described this mechanism in detail: such a reaction does not bring us to a constructive outcome in communication, and it serves neither our own health nor the health of the groups we belong to¹⁵.

Why “Trying It at Home” Is Not Enough

From this follows a crucial conclusion: new patterns of communication cannot form where the old ones are still running. If a person tries to start “being more sincere” in their ordinary relationships, they will almost certainly run up against old reactions — their own and other people’s; those reactions will trigger old defenses, and the attempt will quickly collapse. This is not “weakness of will” or “lack of motivation”; it follows from how the nervous system works.

That is exactly why reprogramming calls for a special environment. An environment that offers:

  • a clear shared purpose — everyone has agreed on what they have gathered here to do;

  • clear rules — they protect the space from automatic destructive patterns;

  • sufficient regularity — because without repetition a new pattern does not take hold;

  • support in the form of other people and a facilitator — because rewriting ancient reactions on your own is nearly impossible;

  • the freedom to make mistakes without catastrophic consequences — because only in a space where mistakes are safe can new experience take root.

Such an environment is not a “training,” not a “course,” not a “seminar” in the ordinary sense. It is a special educational architecture, designed for a single task: to create the conditions in which a living system can restore its capacity for genuine contact.

And it is precisely this architecture that FSF is.

Transition

We have examined three things. First: we are all parts of living systems of larger scale, and our health is inseparable from the quality of those systems. Second: within these systems, the main healing factor turns out to be the quality of connections — relationships, honesty, contact. Third: simply knowing this is not enough; what is needed is a special environment in which the old automatic patterns can be rewritten into new ones.

Now that it is clear why FSF is needed, we can move on to what it actually is — what its principles are, what its inner architecture is, and how exactly that architecture is built to do its work.

Notes and Sources for Part I

  1. Sudakov, K. V. Functional Systems (Moscow, 2011); see also the classic exposition in Anokhin, P. K. Essays on the Physiology of Functional Systems (1975). A modern revision of the principle: Saltykov, A. B., Grachev, S. V. on the reconsideration of the definition of the system-forming factor as the anticipatory reflection of the result.

  2. Levin, M. (2023). Bioelectric Networks: The Cognitive Glue Enabling Evolutionary Scaling from Physiology to Mind. Animal Cognition, 26, 1865. Levin, M. (2025). The Multiscale Wisdom of the Body: Collective Intelligence as a Tractable Interface for Next-Generation Biomedicine. BioEssays. Lagasse, E. & Levin, M. (2023). Future Medicine: From Molecular Pathways to the Collective Intelligence of the Body. Trends in Molecular Medicine, 29(9), 687–710. The concept of nested selves: Friston, K. & Levin, M. (joint work on active inference and multiscale cognition).

  3. Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion. Science, 302, 290–292; and a series of subsequent works by Eisenberger on the neural overlap of physical and social pain.

  4. Nowak, M. A. (2006). Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation. Science, 314, 1560–1563. Nowak, M. A. & Highfield, R. (2011). SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed.

  5. Hawkley, L. C. & Cacioppo, J. T. (2010). Loneliness Matters: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Consequences and Mechanisms. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 40, 218–227.

  6. Kikusui, T., Winslow, J. T., & Mori, Y. (2006). Social buffering: relief from stress and anxiety. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 361, 2215–2228.

  7. Alexander, B. K. (2012). Addiction: The Urgent Need for a Paradigm Shift. Substance Use & Misuse, 47, 1475–1482; see also the classic works of Alexander, Hadaway, and Coambs (1981) on Rat Park.

  8. Aizer, A. A. et al. (2013). Marital Status and Survival in Patients With Cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 31(31), 3869–3876. N = 1,260,898.

  9. Kroenke, C. H. et al. (2006). Social Networks, Social Support, and Survival After Breast Cancer Diagnosis. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 24(7), 1105–1111.

  10. Vaillant, G. E. & Mukamal, K. (2001). Successful Aging. American Journal of Psychiatry, 158(6), 839–847. On the study as a whole — the TEDx talk by Robert Waldinger, “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness” (2015).

  11. Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7). N = 308,849.

  12. Kelly, A. E. & Wang, L. (2012). A Life Without Lies: How Living Honestly Can Affect Health. Paper presented at the 120th convention of the American Psychological Association; the “Science of Honesty” program, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

  13. Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Seth, A. (2021). Being You. Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made.

  14. Barrett, L. F. & Miller, S. (2026). Anatomy of a sensory cortex: ~90% of synapses in mammalian sensory cortex are feedback. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. A paper providing neuroanatomical findings consistent with the principle “purpose determines perception.”

  15. Shamenkov, D. A. Open Dialogue: The Key to the Conscious Management of Health. Methodological handbook. University 2035, NTI Platform, Moscow, 2018, 56 pp. (my book, which I reference throughout the text).