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my original thumping heart, flushed face, knotted stomach, and tears could become meaningful as a different emotion, such as anger or fear, instead of sadness. Or in a very different situation, like a wedding celebration, those same sensations could become joy or gratitude.
Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions.
people vary tremendously in how they differentiate their emotional experiences. A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.
Hundreds of experiments have shown that people worldwide can match emotion words to so-called expressions of emotion, posed by actors who aren’t actually feeling those emotions. However, those expressions can’t be consistently and specifically detected by objective measures of facial muscle movements when people are actually feeling emotion.
An emotion like “Fear” does not have a single expression but a diverse population of facial movements that vary from one situation to the next.
“Now, wait just a minute,” you might be thinking. “Is she saying that our culture has created these expressions, and we all have learned them?” Well . . . yes. And the classical view perpetuates these stereotypes as if they are authentic fingerprints of emotion.
the body’s orchestra of internal organs can play many different symphonies during happiness, fear, and the rest.
an emotion is not a thing but a category of instances, and any emotion category has tremendous variety.
If I asked how you felt in each of these situations, would you give a detailed answer like “aggravated,” “irritated,” “outraged,” or “vengeful” automatically with little effort? Or would you answer “angry” in each case, or simply, “I feel bad”? How do you even know the answer?
most neurons are multipurpose, playing more than one part, much as flour and eggs in your kitchen can participate in many recipes.
Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.
Each time your brain simulates sensory input, it prepares automatic changes in your body that have the potential to change your feeling.
Construction treats the world like a sheet of pastry, and your concepts are cookie cutters that carve boundaries, not because the boundaries are natural, but because they’re useful or desirable.
concepts give meaning to changes in sound pressure so you hear them as words or music instead of random noise.
Every moment that you are alive, your brain uses concepts to simulate the outside world. Without concepts, you are experientially blind, as you were with the blobby bee. With concepts, your brain simulates so invisibly and automatically that vision, hearing, and your other senses seem like reflexes rather than constructions.
In a given moment, in a given context, your brain uses concepts to give meaning to internal sensations as well as to external sensations from the world, all simultaneously.
An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.
In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.
If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them.
What’s inevitable is that you’ll have some kinds of concepts for making sense of sensory input from your body in the world because, as we learn in chapter 5, your brain has wiring for this purpose. Even single-celled animals can make sense of changes in their environment.
Other cultures can and do make other kinds of meaning from the same sensory input.
Your genes turn on and off in different contexts, including the genes that shape your brain’s wiring. (Scientists call this phenomenon plasticity.) That means some of your synapses literally come into existence because other people talked to you or treated you in a certain way.
In other words, construction extends all the way down to the cellular level. The macro structure of your brain is largely predetermined, but the microwiring is not.
The one-to-many principle — any single neuron can contribute to more than one outcome — is metabolically efficient and increases the computational power of the brain. This kind of brain creates a flexible mind without fingerprints.
I also do not speak of perceiving someone’s emotion “accurately.” Instances of emotion have no objective fingerprints in the face, body, and brain, so “accuracy” has no scientific meaning. It has a social meaning — we certainly can ask whether two people agree in their perceptions of emotion, or whether a perception is consistent with some norm. But perceptions exist within the perceiver.
you actively participate in determining what you see, and most of the time you have no awareness you are doing so.
Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.
There is one emotion category that people seem able to perceive without the influence of emotion concepts: happiness. Regardless of the experimental method used, people in numerous cultures agree that smiling faces and laughing voices express happiness.
the historical record implies that ancient Romans did not smile spontaneously when they were happy. The word “smile” doesn’t even exist in Latin. Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages,
Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation.
movement feels like a two-step process — decide, then move — when in fact your brain issues motor predictions to move your body well before you become aware of your intent to move.
If your brain were merely reactive, it would be too inefficient to keep you alive.
Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It’s a huge, ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act.
Like a scientist, your brain uses knowledge (past experience) to estimate how confident you can be that each prediction is true.
Your brain must explain bodily sensations to make them meaningful, and its major tool for doing so is prediction.
people spend at least half their waking hours simulating rather than paying attention to the world around them, and this pure simulation strongly drives their feelings.
Philosophers from the West and the East describe valence and arousal as basic features of human experience. Scientists largely agree that affect is present from birth and that babies can feel and perceive pleasure and displeasure,
affect is a fundamental aspect of consciousness, like brightness and loudness.
Your affective feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and calmness and agitation, are simple summaries of your budgetary state. Are you flush? Are you overdrawn? Do you need a deposit, and if so, how desperately?
Younger American adults tend to prefer the upper right quadrant: pleasant, high arousal. Middle-aged and older Americans tend to prefer the lower right quadrant (pleasant, low arousal), as do people from Eastern cultures like China and Japan.
The phrase “an unpleasant image” is really shorthand for “an image that impacts my body budget, producing sensations that I experience as unpleasant.”
People employ affect as information, creating affective realism, throughout daily life. Food is “delicious” or “bland.” Paintings are “beautiful” or “ugly.” People are “nice” or “mean.”
Whenever you make a big deposit or withdrawal from your body budget — eating, exercising, injuring yourself — you might have to wait for your brain to catch up.
you feel what your brain believes. Affect primarily comes from prediction.
Everything you feel is based on prediction from your knowledge and past experience. You are truly an architect of your experience. Believing is feeling.
Mayberg’s patients report immediate relief from their agony. As the electrical current is turned off and on, the patients’ crippling wave of dread approaches and recedes in synchrony with the stimulation.
You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: that what you feel alters your sight and hearing. Interoception in the moment is more influential to perception, and how you act, than the outside world is.
Affect is in the driver’s seat and rationality is a passenger. It doesn’t matter whether you’re choosing between two snacks, two job offers, two investments, or two heart surgeons — your everyday decisions are driven by a loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses.
You cannot be a rational actor if your brain runs on interoceptively infused predictions.
You cannot overcome emotion through rational thinking, because the state of your body budget is the basis for every thought and perception you have, so interoception and affect are built into every moment.
