When we do this, we are imitating life. In life, we guess and predict all the time. When we’re reading a book, we’re predicting the ending: we don’t need a teacher to tell us to do that. Agatha Christie made a good living out of this impulse. In fact, when we read a paragraph or even a sentence, we are predicting the ending. Our eye isn’t travelling linearly, it’s darting around. When we go shopping, we predict how busy the town is likely to be and where we’ll be able to park. Prediction is how we make sense of the world.