How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

In short, we find that your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment. Emotions are real, but not in the objective sense that molecules or neurons are real. They are real in the same sense that money is real — that is, hardly an illusion, but a product of human agreement.

They are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them.

Another surprising thing I learned while training to be a neuroscientist, along with degeneracy, is that many parts of the brain serve more than one purpose. The brain contains core systems that participate in creating a wide variety of mental states. A single core system can play a role in thinking, remembering, decision-making, seeing, hearing, and experiencing and perceiving diverse emotions. A core system is “one to many”: a single brain area or network contributes to many different mental states.

The classical view of emotion, in contrast, considers particular brain areas to have dedicated psychological functions, that is, they are “one to one.” Core systems are therefore the antithesis of neural fingerprints.38

hope you’ve caught the pattern emerging here: variation is the norm. Emotion fingerprints are a myth. If we want to truly understand emotions, we must start taking that variation seriously. We must consider that an emotion word, like “anger,” does not refer to a specific response with a unique physical fingerprint but to a group of highly variable instances that are tied to specific situations.

but the everyday “my brain is built to work like this” hallucination.

Your experience with figure 2-1 reveals a couple of insights. Your past experiences — from direct encounters, from photos, from movies and books — give meaning to your present sensations. Additionally, the entire process of construction is invisible to you. No matter how hard you try, you cannot observe yourself or experience yourself constructing the image. We needed a specially designed example to unmask the fact that construction is occurring. You consciously experienced the shift from unknown to known because you saw figure 2-1 both before and after you had the relevant knowledge to draw on. The process of construction is so habitual that you might never again see this figure as formless shapes, even if you try hard to un-see it and recapture experiential blindness. This little magic trick of the brain is so common and normal that psychologists discovered it time and time again before they understood how it worked.

Your past experiences — from direct encounters, from photos, from movies and books — give meaning...

Additionally, the entire process of construction is invisible to you. No matter how hard you try, you cannot observe yourself or experien...

You consciously experienced the shift from unknown to known because you saw figure 2-1 both before and after you had the relevant knowledge to draw on. The process of construction is so habitual that you might never again see this figure as formless shapes, ev...

We will call it simulation. It means that your brain changed the firing of its own sensory neurons in the absence of incoming sensory input. Simulation can be visual, as with our picture, or involve any of your other senses. Ever have a song playing in your head that you can’t get rid

Your brain simulated a nonexistent apple using sensory and motor neurons. Simulation happens as quickly and automatically as a heartbeat.2

Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.

Your bee-related simulations are rooted in your mental concept of what a “Bee” is. This concept not only includes information about the bee itself (what it looks and sounds like, how you act on it, what changes in your autonomic nervous system allow your action, etc.), but also information contained in other concepts related to bees (“Meadow,” “Flower,” “Honey,” “Sting,” “Pain,” etc.). All this information is integrated with your concept “Bee,” guiding how you simulate the bee in this particular context. So, a concept like “Bee” is actually a collection of neural patterns in your brain, representing your past experiences. Your brain combines these patterns in different ways to perceive and flexibly guide your action in new situations.5

Concepts also give meaning to the chemicals that create tastes and smells. If I served you pink ice cream, you might expect (simulate) the taste of strawberry, but if it tasted like fish, you would find it jarring, perhaps even disgusting. If I instead introduced it as “chilled salmon mousse” to give your brain fair warning, you might find the same taste delicious (assuming you enjoy salmon).

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. From an aching stomach, your brain constructs an instance of hunger, nausea, or mistrust.8

In these cases of disgust, longing, and anxiety, the concept active in your brain is an emotion concept. As before, your brain makes meaning from your aching stomach, together with the sensations from the world around you, by constructing an instance of that concept. An instance of emotion. And that just might be how emotions are made.

Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. 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.

But particular concepts like “Anger” and “Disgust” are not genetically predetermined. Your familiar emotion concepts are built-in only because you grew up in a particular social context where those emotion concepts are meaningful and useful, and your brain applies them outside your awareness to construct your experiences.

Each of us understands the world in a way that is useful but not necessarily true in some absolute, objective sense. Where emotion is concerned, social construction theories ask how feelings and perceptions are influenced by our social roles or beliefs. For

As a consequence, past experience helps determine your future experiences and perceptions.

The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of all three flavors of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And from neuroconstruction, it adopts the idea that experience wires the brain.

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.22