How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

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.