How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

why is essentialism so powerful that it can twist the words of great scientists and misdirect the path of scientific discovery? The simplest reason is that essentialism is intuitive.

It’s easy to come up with reasons why an experiment did not detect an essence: “we haven’t looked everywhere yet,” or “it’s inside this complicated biological structure we can’t see into yet,” or “our tools today aren’t sufficiently powerful to find the essence, but one day they will be.” These hopeful thoughts are heartfelt but logically impossible to prove false. Essentialism inoculates itself against counterevidence.

If scientists believe in a world of essences that are waiting to be discovered, then they devote themselves to finding those essences, a potentially endless quest.

“Whenever we have made a word . . . to denote a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose a substantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of which the word shall be the name.”

Modern neuroscience, however, has shown that the so-called limbic system is a fiction, and experts in brain evolution no longer take it seriously, let alone consider it a system.

it’s no overstatement to say that if you change your current experiences today, you can change who you become tomorrow.

your body and your mind are deeply interconnected. Interoception drives your actions. Your culture wires your brain.

when you get involved in someone else’s story, you aren’t as involved in your own. Such mental excursions engage part of your interoceptive network, known as the default mode network, and keep you from ruminating (which would be bad for the budget).

Words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget, and your body budget determines how you feel.

Don’t be satisfied with “happy”: seek out and use more specific words like “ecstatic,” “blissful,” and “inspired.

Every experience you construct is an investment, so invest wisely. Cultivate the experiences you want to construct again in the future.

Get up and move around, even if you don’t feel like it.

Another approach to mastering your emotions in the moment is to change your location or situation,

Anytime you feel miserable, it’s because you are experiencing unpleasant affect due to interoceptive sensations.

This is the distinction between discomfort and suffering. Discomfort is purely physical. Suffering is personal.

With practice, you can learn to deconstruct an affective feeling into its mere physical sensations, rather than letting those sensations be a filter through which you view the world. You can dissolve anxiety into a fast-beating heart. Once you can deconstruct into physical sensations, then you can recategorize them in some other way, using your rich set of concepts. Perhaps that pounding in your chest is not anxiety but anticipation, or even excitement.

You can’t be a self by yourself.

Sometimes deconstructing the self is too challenging. You can achieve some of the same benefits more simply by cultivating and experiencing awe, the feeling of being in the presence of something vastly greater than yourself. It helps you get some distance from your self.

Whether you cultivate awe, meditate, or find other ways to deconstruct your experience into physical sensations, recategorization is a critical tool for mastering your emotions in the moment.

All members of a social species regulate each other’s body budgets — even bees, ants, and cockroaches. But we are the only species who can do so by teaching each other purely mental concepts, and then using them in synchrony.

when scientists place a cold virus into the noses of one hundred people, only 25–40 percent get sick. So a cold virus cannot be the essence of a cold — something more complex must be going on. The virus is necessary but not sufficient.

For many years, scientists and clinicians held a classical view of mental illnesses like chronic stress, chronic pain, anxiety, and depression. Each ailment was believed to have a biological fingerprint that distinguished it from all others.

My view is that some major illnesses considered distinct and “mental” are all rooted in a chronically unbalanced body budget and unbridled inflammation.

stress doesn’t come from the outside world. You construct it.

The way I see it, pain is constructed in the same way that emotions are made.

If you believe you’ll feel less pain, your beliefs influence your predictions and tune down your nociceptive input so you do feel less pain.

Overall, the body sensations that are categorized as pain, stress, and emotions are fundamentally the same, even at the level of neurons in the brain and spinal cord.* Distinguishing between pain, stress, and emotion is a form of emotional granularity.

a plausible model of chronic pain: errant predictions without correction.

The World Health Organization projects that by 2030, depression will cause more premature deaths and years of disability than cancer, stroke, heart disease, war, or accidents.

If depression is a disorder of affect, and affect is an integrated summary of how your body budget is doing (answer: pretty poorly), then depression may actually be a disorder of misbudgeting and prediction.

that’s what I think is happening in depression. Your brain is continually mispredicting your metabolic needs. Your body and brain therefore act as if you were fighting off an infection or healing from a wound when none exists, as in chronic stress or pain. As a result, your affect is out of whack: you experience debilitating misery, fatigue, or other symptoms of depression. Simultaneously, your body is quickly metabolizing unnecessary glucose to meet those high yet nonexistent energy needs, leading to weight problems and leaving you at risk for other metabolic-related illnesses that co-occur with depression, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

A depressed brain is effectively locked into misery. It’s like a brain in chronic pain, ignoring prediction error, but on a much larger scale that shuts you down.

Your genes could leave you sensitive to your environment and every little problem.

The theory of constructed emotion suggests that we can treat depression by breaking the cycle of misbudgeting, that is, by changing interoceptive predictions to be more in line with what’s going on around you.

I speculate that an anxious brain, in a sense, is the opposite of a depressed brain. In depression, prediction is dialed way up and prediction error way down, so you’re locked into the past. In anxiety, the metaphorical dial is stuck on allowing too much prediction error from the world, and too many predictions are unsuccessful. With insufficient prediction, you don’t know what’s coming around the next corner, and life contains a lot of corners. That’s classic anxiety.

uncertainty is more unpleasant and arousing than assured harm, because if the future is a mystery, you can’t prepare for it. For example, when people are seriously ill but have an excellent chance of recovery, they are less satisfied with life than people who know their disease is permanent.

Words on questionnaires can influence people’s categorizations, just like the basic emotion method influences perceptions with its list of emotion words.

If he had simply diagnosed me with depression, he could have actually cultivated a feeling of depression in me in that instant.

A population of citizens with imbalanced body budgets doesn’t just cost billions of dollars in health care. It costs people their well-being, their relationships, and even their lives.

Every society has rules for which emotions are acceptable, when they are acceptable, and how to express them.

If you violate your culture’s rules of social reality, punishment may follow.

It might seem like your brain has a quick, intuitive process and a slower, deliberative one, and that the former is more emotional and the latter more rational, but this idea is not defensible on neuroscience or behavioral grounds. Sometimes your control network plays a large role in the construction process, and other times its role is less, but it is always involved, and the latter times are not necessarily emotional.

When people perceive emotion in a man, they usually attribute it to his situation, but when they perceive emotion in a woman, they connect it to her personality. She’s a bitch, but he’s just having a bad day.

As for mammals in general, it’s harder to say for sure. They undoubtedly feel pleasure and pain, as well as alertness and fatigue.

how about birds, fish, or reptiles? We don’t know for sure.

I think it’s best to assume all animals can experience affect.

The natural chemicals that relieve suffering within our own nervous systems, opioids, are found in fish, nematodes, snails, shrimps, crabs, and some insects. Even tiny flies might feel pain; we know that they can learn to avoid odors that are paired with electric shock.

Macaques, however, don’t care about as many things as you and I do. Their affective niche is much smaller than ours;

We must offer the macaque a reward of some kind, like a tasty drink or treat, to bring the toys into the macaque’s affective niche

Animals can definitely learn concepts. Monkeys, sheep, goats, cows, raccoons, hamsters, pandas, harbor seals, bottlenose dolphins, and plenty of other animals learn concepts by smell.