How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

despite the distinguished intellectual pedigree of the classical view of emotion, and despite its immense influence in our culture and society, there is abundant scientific evidence that this view cannot possibly be true. Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion.

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.5

Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.

When you’re anxious, you feel worked up, jittery, like you’re worried something bad will happen. In depression you feel miserable and sluggish;

The “fingerprint” of an emotion is likewise assumed to be similar enough from one instance to the next, and in one person to the next, regardless of age, sex, personality, or culture. In a laboratory, scientists should be able to tell whether someone is sad or happy or anxious just by looking at physical measurements of a person’s face, body, and brain.

If you’re uncertain whether a person directly in front of you could harm you, you might narrow your eyes to see the person’s face better. If danger is potentially lurking around the next corner, your eyes might widen to improve your peripheral vision. “Fear” takes no single physical form. Variation is the norm. Likewise, happiness, sadness, anger, and every other emotion you know is a diverse category, with widely varying facial movements.

the same emotion category involves different bodily responses. Variation, not uniformity, is the norm.

What we have been calling a fingerprint might just be a stereotype.

a mental event, such as fear, is not created by only one set of neurons. Instead, combinations of different neurons can create instances of fear. Neuroscientists call this principle degeneracy. Degeneracy means “many to one”: many combinations of neurons can produce the same outcome. In the quest to map emotion fingerprints in the brain, degeneracy is a humbling reality check.

no brain region contained the fingerprint for any single emotion.

Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.

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

You might think of food as existing in the physical world, but in fact the concept “Food” is heavily cultural. Obviously, there are some biological constraints; you can’t eat razor blades.

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.

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.

An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world. Philosophers have long proposed that your mind makes sense of your body in the world,

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.

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. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.

The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, tells a story that doesn’t match your daily life—your brain invisibly constructs everything you experience, including emotions. Its

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 brain is not a simple machine reacting to stimuli in the outside world. 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. These predictions are held in check by sensory inputs from the outside world, which your brain may prioritize or ignore.

To simplify our discussion drastically, I’ll describe this network as having two general parts with distinct roles. One part is a set of brain regions that send predictions to the body to control its internal environment: speed up the heart, slow down breathing, release more cortisol, metabolize more glucose, and so on. We’ll call them your body-budgeting regions.* The second part is a region that represents sensations inside your body, called your primary interoceptive cortex.

people spend at least half their waking hours simulating rather than paying attention to the world around them, and this pure simulation strongly drives their feelings.

Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. The pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favorite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal.

When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world.

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

You cannot be a rational actor if your brain runs on interoceptively infused predictions. An economic model at the foundation of the U.S. economy—some might say the global economy—is rooted in a neural fairy tale.

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. It is an elegantly orchestrated, self-fulfilling prophecy, embodied within the architecture of your brain.

Everything you perceive around you is represented by concepts in your brain.

All sensory information is a massive, constantly changing puzzle for your brain to solve.

Your perceptions are so vivid and immediate that they compel you to believe that you experience the world as it is, when you actually experience a world of your own construction. Much of what you experience as the outside world begins inside your head. When you categorize using concepts, you go beyond the information available,

When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation.

some instances of concepts are more effective in a particular context to achieve a particular goal. Their competition in your brain is like Darwin’s theory of natural selection but carried out in milliseconds; the most suitable instances outlive all rivals to fit your goal in the moment. That is categorization.

To build a purely mental concept, you need another secret ingredient: words.

Any animal can view a bunch of similar-looking objects and form a concept of them. But you can show human infants a bunch of objects that look different, sound different, and feel different, and merely add a word—a WORD—and these little babies form a concept that overcomes the physical differences. They understand that the objects have some kind of psychological similarity that can’t be immediately perceived through the five senses. This similarity is what we called the goal of the concept. The infant creates a new piece of reality,

Emotion words are not about emotional facts in the world that are stored like static files in your brain. They reflect the varied emotional meanings you construct from mere physical signals in the world using your emotion knowledge. You acquired that knowledge, in part, from the collective knowledge contained in the brains of those who cared for you, talked to you, and helped you to create your social world. Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.

How do you get a concept without a word? Well, your brain’s conceptual system has a special power called conceptual combination. It combines existing concepts to create your very first instance of a novel concept of emotion.

Conceptual combination plus words equals the power to create reality.

Categorization means selecting a winning instance that becomes your perception and guides your action.

First, your cascade of predictions explains why an experience like happiness feels triggered rather than constructed. You’re simulating an instance of “Happiness” even before categorization is complete.

Second, the cascade explains a statement I made in chapter 4, that every thought, memory, emotion, or perception that you construct in your life includes something about the state of your body.

Third, the cascade also highlights the neural advantages of high emotional granularity, the phenomenon (described in chapter 1) of constructing more precise emotional experiences.

Preciseness leads to efficiency; this is a biological payoff of higher emotional granularity.

Each time you categorize with concepts, your brain creates many competing predictions while being bombarded by sensory input.

These major hubs help to synchronize so much of your brain’s information flow that they might even be a prerequisite for consciousness. If any of these hubs become damaged, your brain is in big trouble: depression, panic disorder, schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia, chronic pain, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are all associated with hub damage.

Your brain has a mental model of the world as it will be in the next moment, developed from past experience. This is the phenomenon of making meaning from the world and the body using concepts. In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning.

To make meaning is to go beyond the information given.

Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. The brain systems that implement concepts, such as the interoceptive network and the control network, are the biology of meaning-making.