Abstract
I will describe several recent cognitive and neuroscience experiments which quantify the information flow between organisms (including humans) and their environment. All the experiments support the assertion that the sensing-acting information is close to the optimal trade-off between minimum sensing information and future value. These are specific biological realizations of two general principles: (i) minimization of predictive information under a future value constraint; (ii) optimal information bottleneck between past and future information. These different settings, from the fly visual neural code, mice in the Morris Water Maze, the neural responses to auditory surprise in rats and humans, apparently follow the same information optimization principles.