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A visual prediction, for example, doesn’t just answer the question, “What did I see last time I was in this situation?” It answers, “What did I see last time I was in this situation when my body was in this state?”
Affect is your brain’s best guess about the state of your body budget.
Your interceptive predictions, which produce your feelings of affect, determine what you care about in the moment — your affective niche.
You construct your environment — your reality — by virtue of what sensory input from the physical environment your brain selects; it admits some as information and ignores some as noise. And this selection is intimately linked to interoception.
You must make the affect meaningful so your brain can execute a more specific action.
When you walk into an entirely new situation, you don’t experience it based solely on how things look, sound, or smell. Your experience it based on your goal.
When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation.
Perhaps your goal is to feel accepted, to feel pleasure, to achieve an ambition, or to find meaning in life. Your concept of “Happiness” in the moment is centered on such a goal, binding together the diverse instances from your past.
Your brain weighs its predictions based on probabilities; they compete to explain what caused your sensations, and they determine what you perceive, how you act, and what you feel in this situation. Ultimately, the most probable predictions become your perception:
Successful communication requires that you and your friend are using synchronized concepts.
Humans are not the only animals that learn statistically: non-human primates, dogs, and rats can do it, among others. Even single-celled animals engage in statistical learning and then prediction: they not only respond to changes in their environment but anticipate them.
To build a purely mental concept, you need another secret ingredient: words.
Spoken words give the infant brain access to information that can’t be found by observing the world and resides only in the minds of other people, namely, mental similarities: goals, intentions, preferences.
studies show that infants can more easily learn a goal-based concept, given a word, than a concept defined by physical similarity without a word.
It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.
When your brain “constructs an instance of a concept,” such as an instance of “Happiness,” that is equivalent to saying your brain “issues a prediction” of happiness.
I separated the ideas of predictions and concepts earlier to simplify some explanations. I could have used the word “prediction” throughout the book and never mentioned the word “concept,” or vice versa, but information transmission is easier to understand in terms of predictions flying across the brain, whereas knowledge is more readily understood in terms of concepts. Now that we’re discussing how concepts work in the brain, we must acknowledge that concepts are predictions.
Every prediction you make, and every categorization your brain completes, is always in relation to the activity of your heart and lungs, your metabolism, your immune function, and the other systems that contribute to your body budget.
Gerald M. Edelman called your experiences “the remembered present.” Today, thanks to advances in neuroscience, we can see that Edelman was correct. An instance of a concept, as an entire brain state, is an anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and what your sensations mean.
information can pass efficiently between different networks in your brain via the major hubs in the interoceptive and control networks.20 These major hubs help to synchronize so much of your brain’s information flow that they might even be a prerequisite for consciousness. If any of these hubs become damaged, your brain is in big trouble: depression, panic disorder, schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia, chronic pain, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are all associated with hub damage.
Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action.
We do not passively detect physical changes in the world. We actively participate in constructing our experiences even though we are mostly unaware of that fact.
Changes in air pressure and wavelengths of light exist in the world, but to us, they are sounds and colors. We perceive them by going beyond the information given to us, making meaning from them using knowledge from past experience, that is, concepts.
Just get a couple of people to agree that something is real and give it a name, and they create reality.
Albert Einstein illustrated this point nicely when he wrote, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”
The distinction between “real in nature” versus “illusory” is a false dichotomy. Fear and anger are real to a group of people who agree that certain changes in the body, on the face, and so on, are meaningful as emotions. In other words, emotion concepts have social reality.
When Benazir Bhutto, the late prime minister of Pakistan, said that “You can kill a man, but not an idea,” she was proclaiming the power of social reality to reshape the world.
Make something up, give it a name, and you’ve created a concept. Teach your concept to others, and as long as they agree, you’ve created something real.
Humans are unique, however, because our collective intentionality involves mental concepts. We can look at a hammer, a chainsaw, and an ice pick and categorize them all as “Tools,” then change our minds and categorize them all as “Murder Weapons.” We can impose functions that would not otherwise exist, thereby inventing reality. We can work this magic because we have the second prerequisite for social reality: language.
An instance of emotion, constructed from a prediction, tailors your action to meet a particular goal in a particular situation, using past experience as a guide.
Concepts like “Excitement,” “Fear,” and “Exhaustion” are tools for you to regulate other people’s body budgets, not just your own.
With social reality, however, there is no such thing as accuracy.
Emotions have no fingerprints, so there can be no accuracy. The best you can do is find consensus.
They are real because people agree that they’re real. But they, and emotions, exist only in the presence of human perceivers.
you need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. It’s a requirement.
Some scientists argue that without an emotion concept, the emotion still exists but the affected person doesn’t realize it, implying a state of emotion outside of consciousness. I suppose this is a possibility, but I doubt it.
Our biology allows us to create goal-based concepts, but exactly which concepts may be a matter of cultural evolution.
The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don’t load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it.
Utka Eskimos have no concept of “Anger.” The Tahitians have no concept of “Sadness.”
When Tahitians are in a situation that a Westerner would describe as sad, they feel ill, troubled, fatigued, or unenthusiastic, all of which are covered by their broader term pe’ape’a.
English has been a conceptual prison for the science of emotion.
In general, Americans prefer high arousal, pleasant states.
Ultimately, if I and other like-minded scientists are successful in substituting the new concepts for the old, well, that’s a scientific revolution.
Without interoception, you wouldn’t notice or care about your physical surroundings or anything else, and you’d be unlikely to survive for long. Interoception enables your brain to construct the environment in which you live.
It takes more than one brain to create a mind.
“responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change your concepts.
If you grow up in a society full of anger or hate, you can’t be blamed for having the associated concepts, but as an adult, you can choose to educate yourself and learn additional concepts.
your actions shape other people’s concepts and behaviors, creating the environment that turns genes on and off to wire their brains, including the brains of the next generation.
Social reality implies that we are all partly responsible for one another’s behavior, not in a fluffy, let’s-all-blame-society sort of way, but a very real brain-wiring way.
Natural selection did not aim itself toward us. We are just another species with particular adaptations that help pass our genes to the next generation. Other animals have evolved plenty of powers that we don’t have,
