How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

In short, your experience right now was predicted by your brain a moment ago.

Once your predictions are correct enough, they not only create your perception and action but also explain the meaning of your sensations. This is your brain’s default mode. And marvelously, your brain does not just predict the future: it can imagine the future at will. As far as we know, no other animal brain can do that.

In short, you feel what your brain believes. Affect primarily comes from prediction.

You’ve already learned that you see what your brain believes—that’s affective realism. Now you know the same is true for most feelings you’ve experienced in your life.

Everything you feel is based on prediction from your knowledge and past experience. You are truly an architect of your experience. Believing is feeling.

The bottom line is this: the human brain is anatomically structured so that no decision or action can be free of interoception and affect, no matter what fiction people tell themselves about how rational they are. Your bodily feeling right now will project forward to influence what you will feel and do in the future.

Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.

she told me that we were sharing the emotion gezellig. Curled up in her living room, sharing wine and chocolates, she explained that this emotion means the comfort, coziness, and togetherness of being at home, with friends and loved ones.

your good work, but he has just informed you that the promotion went to someone else. How

Gigil (Filipino): The urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable.26 Voorpret (Dutch): Pleasure felt about an event before the event takes place.27 Age-otori (Japanese): The feeling of looking worse after a haircut.

Diving into a compelling novel is also healthful for your body budget. This is more than mere escapism; 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). If you are not a reader, see a compelling film. If the story is sad, have a good cry, which is also beneficial to the budget.8

Recategorization is a tool of the emotion expert. The more concepts that you know and the more instances that you can construct, the more effectively you can recategorize in this manner to master your emotions and regulate your behavior.

The virus is necessary but not sufficient.

Every human being is the sum of his or her concepts, which become the predictions that drive behavior. The concepts in your head are not purely a matter of personal choice. Your predictions come from the cultural influences you were pickled in.

So as a human being, you have the ability to shape your environment to modify your conceptual system, which means that you are ultimately responsible for the concepts that you accept and reject.