How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.

past experience helps determine your future experiences and perceptions.

Without prediction error, life would be a yawning bore. Nothing would be surprising or novel, and therefore your brain would never learn anything new.

It’s structured as billions of prediction loops creating intrinsic brain activity. Visual predictions, auditory predictions, gustatory (taste) predictions, somatosensory (touch) predictions, olfactory (smell) predictions, and motor predictions travel throughout the brain, influencing and constraining each other.