How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

This happens even if all six toys are physically identical, strongly suggesting that infants gain the same efficiency benefits from conceptual knowledge that adults do. Conceptual combination plus words equals the power to create reality.47

When a mind has an impoverished conceptual system for emotion, can it perceive emotion? From scientific experiments in our own lab, we know that the answer is generally no. As you learned in chapter 3, we can easily interfere with people’s ability to perceive anger in a scowl, sadness in a pout, and happiness in a smile by impairing their access to their emotion concepts.

The stimulus-response brain is a myth, brain activity is prediction and correction, and we construct emotional experiences outside of awareness. This explanation fits the architecture and operation of the brain.52

Simply put: I did not see a snake and categorize it. I did not feel the urge to run and categorize it. I did not feel my heart pounding and categorize it. I categorized sensations in order to see the snake, to feel my heart pounding, and to run. I correctly predicted these sensations, and in doing so, explained them with an instance of the concept “Fear.” This is how emotions are made.

It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.

budgeting regions can affect every decision and action you make.* When taken as a whole, these explanations hint at a unifying framework for how the brain makes meaning: one of the most extraordinary mysteries of the human mind.

Two of the phenomena I’ve been discussing are actually one and the same. I’m speaking of concepts and predictions. When your brain “constructs an instance of a concept,” such as an instance of “Happiness,” that is equivalent to saying your brain “issues a prediction” of happiness.

The result is akin to natural selection, in which the instances most suitable to the current environment survive to shape your perception and action.

Through their massive connections, they broadcast predictions that alter what you see, hear, and otherwise perceive and do. That’s why, at the level of brain circuitry, no decision can be free of affect.

A sound, therefore, is not an event that is detected in the world. It is an experience constructed when the world interacts with a body that detects changes in air pressure, and a brain that can make those changes meaningful.1 Without a perceiver there is no sound, only physical reality.

Ultimately, if I and other like-minded scientists are successful in substituting the new concepts for the old, well, that’s a scientific revolution.

The fiction of the self, paralleling the Buddhist idea, is that you have some enduring essence that makes you who you are. You do not. I speculate that your self is constructed anew in every moment by the same predictive, core systems that construct emotions, including our familiar pair of networks (interoceptive and control), among others, as they categorize the continuous stream of sensation from your body and the world.

Your brain ignored sensory input, maintaining that its predictions are reality. Apply this example to pain and the result is a plausible model of chronic pain: errant predictions without correction.

The World Health Organization projects that by 2030, depression will cause more premature deaths and years of disability than cancer, stroke, heart disease, war, or accidents. Those are pretty dreadful outcomes for a “mental” illness.

Instead, my doctor and I

uncovered a body-budgeting issue and looked for ways to repair it. My doctor didn’t realize it, but he was co-constructing my experience. He wanted to construct one social reality, and I had another.

The ultimate rules for emotion in any society are set by its legal system.*

Judges, for example, attempt to set emotion aside to render a decision by pure reason, a belief that assumes emotion and reason are distinct entities.

In other words, rational killing is considered worse than emotional killing, all other circumstances being equal.4

Scientists are still trying to figure out how the brain creates the experience of having control. But one thing is certain: there is no scientific justification for labeling a “moment without awareness of control” as emotion.15 What does all this mean for the law?

The law considers emotional damage to be less serious than physical damage and less deserving of punishment. Think about how ironic this is. The law protects the integrity of your anatomical body but not the integrity of your mind, even though your body is just a container for the organ that makes you who you are—your brain. Emotional harm is not considered real unless accompanied by physical harm. Mind and body are separate. (Let’s all raise a glass to René Descartes here.)

The First Amendment was founded on the notion that free speech produces a war of ideas, allowing truth to prevail. However, its authors did not know that culture wires the brain. Ideas get under your skin, simply by sticking around for long enough. Once an idea is hardwired, you might not be in a position to easily reject it. …

Macaques do have an important difference from humans where affect is concerned. Many, many objects and events in your world, from the tiniest insect to the largest mountain, cause fluctuations in your body budget and change your affective feelings. That is, you have a large affective niche. Macaques, however, don’t care about as many things as you and I do. Their affective niche is much smaller than ours; the sight of a majestic mountain rising in the distance doesn’t impact their body budget in the least. Simply put, more things matter to us.8

At present, however, we have no firm evidence that chimps can form goal-based concepts. They cannot imagine something completely novel, like a flying leopard, even though they and macaques have a network that’s analogous to the human default mode network (part of the interoceptive network). They cannot consider the same situation from different points of view. They can’t imagine a future that is different from the present. They also do not realize that goal-based information resides inside the heads of other creatures.

Any concept can be goal-based—recall that “Fish” can be a pet or a dinner—but emotion concepts are only goal-based,

If chimps cannot form goal-based concepts, then necessarily, chimps are not naturally equipped to teach concepts to one another; that is, they don’t have social reality. Even if they could learn a concept like “Anger” from a human trainer, one generation doesn’t create the context for the next generation to bootstrap concepts into their brains.

Only we have concepts for mental states, such as emotion concepts, for predicting and making sense of sensations. Social reality is a human superpower.26

The video contains no sound and no explanation for the movements. Even so, viewers readily assigned emotions and other mental states to the shapes. The large triangle, some said, was bullying the small, innocent triangle until the brave circle came to the rescue.

It’s unclear why she omits mention of the composer of the video, or even that there must have been a composer

Casting away those essences remains a challenge today because the brain is wired to categorize, and categories breed essentialism.

Rather, your mind is a computational moment within your constantly predicting brain.

At the same time, Balinese and Ilongot cultures, and to a certain extent cultures guided by Buddhist philosophy, do not make hard distinctions between thinking and feeling.

We all think a food “is delicious” as if the flavor were embedded in the food, when flavor is a construction and the deliciousness is our own affect.

You in turn might have predicted my nod, along with a host of other possibilities, which causes a change in your sensory input, which interacts with your predictions. In other words, your neurons influence one another not only through direct connections but indirectly through the outside environment, in an interaction with me. We are performing a synchronized dance of prediction and action, regulating each other’s body budgets.

Social reality is the human superpower; we’re the only animal that can communicate purely mental concepts among ourselves.

We constantly mistake perceiver-dependent concepts—flowers, weeds, colors, money, race, facial expressions, and so on—for perceiver-independent reality.

When we misconstrue the social as the physical, we misunderstand our world and ourselves. In this regard, social reality is a superpower only if we know that we have it.

Essentialism lays out not just a view of human nature but a worldview. It implies that your place in society is shaped by your genes. Therefore, if you are smarter, faster, or more powerful than others, you can justifiably succeed where others cannot. People get what they deserve and they deserve what they get. This view is a belief in a genetically just world, backed by a scientific-sounding ideology.

But as you’ve just seen, there is another possibility: the official welfare statistics are true because we, as a society, made them so.19

Again and again in science, our new sets of concepts have led us away from essentialism toward variation, and from naive realism to construction.21