How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Your body-budgeting regions are like a mostly deaf scientist: they make predictions but have a hard time listening to the incoming evidence.

I wish you'd used a different metaphor here

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

These regions are loud and bossy, like a mostly deaf scientist with a big megaphone.

You might believe that you are a rational creature, weighing the pros and cons before deciding how to act, but the structure of your cortex makes this an implausible fiction. Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver’s seat and rationality is a passenger. It doesn’t matter whether you’re choosing between two snacks, two job offers, two investments, or two heart surgeons—your everyday decisions are driven by a loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses.

Mathematical models indicate that under certain conditions, unregulated free-market economies do work well. But one of those “certain conditions” is that people are rational decision makers. I have lost count of the number of experiments published over the past fifty years showing that people are not rational actors. You cannot overcome emotion through rational thinking, because the state of your body budget is the basis for every thought and perception you have, so interoception and affect are built into every moment.

Interoception is also one of the most important ingredients in what you experience as reality. If you didn’t have interoception, the physical world would be meaningless noise to you.

When Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy’s voice wavered during his speech after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, he didn’t cry, he didn’t pout, and at one point he actually smiled. And yet, somehow, viewers inferred that he was experiencing intense sadness. Sensation and simple feeling are not sufficient to explain how an audience of thousands perceived the depth of Malloy’s anguish.

Once again, you use concepts to categorize the continuous input. Beginning in infancy, you learn regularities in the stream of speech that reveal the boundaries between phonemes, the smallest bits of sound that you can distinguish in a language (for example, the sound of “D” or “P” in English). These regularities become concepts that your brain later uses to categorize the stream of sound into syllables and words.

Without concepts, you’d experience a world of ever-fluctuating noise. Everything you ever encountered would be unlike everything else. You’d be experientially blind, like when you first saw the blobby picture in chapter 2, but permanently so. You’d be incapable of learning.

Kantian as fuck

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.

Synthetic unity of apperception

Philosophers and scientists define a category as a collection of objects, events, or actions that are grouped together as equivalent for some purpose. They define a concept as a mental representation of a category. Traditionally, categories are supposed to exist in the world, while concepts exist in your head.

Thus, concepts aren’t fixed definitions in your brain, and they’re not prototypes of the most typical or frequent instances. Instead, your brain has many instances—of cars, of dot patterns, of sadness, or anything else—and it imposes similarities between them, in the moment, according to your goal in a given situation. For example, your usual goal for a vehicle is to use it for transportation, so if an object meets that goal for you, then it’s a vehicle, whether it’s a car, a helicopter, or a sheet of plywood with four wheels nailed on.

A single object can also be part of different concepts. For example, a car does not always serve the goal of transportation. Sometimes a car is an instance of the concept “Status Symbol.” In the right circumstances, a car can be a “Bed” for a homeless person, or even a “Murder Weapon.” Drive a car into the ocean and it becomes an “Artificial Reef.”

Successful communication requires that you and your friend are using synchronized concepts.

Erik Weihenmayer, who scaled Mount Everest while blind;

Likewise, instances of an emotion category such as “Fear” don’t have enough statistical regularity—as demonstrated in chapter 1—to allow a human brain to build a concept based on perceptual similarities. To build a purely mental concept, you need another secret ingredient: words.

I agree if words includes signs

Spoken words give the infant brain access to information that can’t be found by observing the world and resides only in the minds of other people, namely, mental similarities: goals, intentions, preferences. Words allow infants to begin growing goal-based concepts, including emotion concepts.

Okay but signs do this too. Deaf kids have no deficits compared with hearinv kids when they can sign

A defining moment of humanity occurs when one child becomes an all-powerful being by draping a washcloth over her head and brandishing a toothbrush, and the second child kneels before her in supplication.

This means that an instance of an emotion concept helps to make sense of longer continuous streams of sensory input, dividing them into distinct events.

Your brain was not programmed by nature to recognize facial expressions and other so-called emotional displays and then to reflexively act on them. The emotional information is in your perception. Nature provided your brain with the raw materials to wire itself with a conceptual system, with input from a chorus of helpful adults who spoke emotion words to you in a deliberate and intentional way.

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.

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.

Alexithymia research please

In a situation where a person with a working conceptual system might experience anger, people with alexithymia are more likely to experience a stomachache. They complain of physical symptoms and report feelings of affect but fail to experience them as emotional.

motherly aroma,

You aren’t detecting or recognizing emotion in someone’s face. You aren’t recognizing a physiological pattern in your own body. You are predicting and explaining the meaning of those sensations based on probability and experience. This happens each time you hear an emotion word or are faced with an array of sensations.

Some of these mental regularities are emotion concepts, and they function as mental explanations for why your heart thumps in your chest, why your face flushes, and why you feel and act the way you do in certain circumstances. When we share those abstractions with each other, by synchronizing our concepts during categorization, we can perceive each other’s emotions and communicate.

Your genes gave you a brain that can wire itself to its physical and social environment. The people around you, in your culture, maintain that environment with their concepts and help you live in that environment by transmitting those concepts from their brains to yours. And later, you transmit your concepts to the brains of the next generation. It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.

the German emotion word Backpfeifengesicht, meaning “a face in need of a fist.”

So babies must learn about the world from sensory input before their brains can model the world.

Kant

In contrast, your adult brain has a network to shut out information that might sidetrack your predictions, allowing you to do things like read this book without distraction. You have a built-in “spotlight” of attention that illuminates some things, such as these words, while leaving other things in the dark.

My ADHD brain says "sounds fake but okay"

Eventually, the infant’s brain forms summary representations for enough visual concepts that she can see one stable object, despite incredible variation in low-level sensory details. Think about it: each of your eyes transmits millions of tiny pieces of information to your brain in a moment, and you simply see “a book.”

every thought, memory, emotion, or perception that you construct in your life includes something about the state of your body.

Some scientists refer to the control network as an “emotion regulation” network. They assume that emotion regulation is a cognitive process that exists separately from emotion itself, say, when you’re pissed off at your boss but refrain from punching him. From the brain’s perspective, however, regulation is just categorization. When you have an experience that feels like your so-called rational side is tempering your emotional side—a mythical arrangement that you’ve learned is not respected by brain wiring—you are constructing an instance of the concept “Emotion Regulation.”

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.

The pathology paradigm here is very tiring. Oooo my brain's in trouble and the trouble is AUTISM

Several years ago, my family was eating dinner in our kitchen in Boston when suddenly, simultaneously, all of us had a sensation that was entirely new. Our chairs tipped backward for a moment, then righted themselves, but in a curvy sort of way like cresting an ocean wave. This completely novel experience left us in a state of experiential blindness, so we started forming hypotheses.

My experience of the big east coast earthquake with the epicenter in Virginia was similar to this, except I was lying down at the time and it was at least ten seconds. The sinusoidal nature of the shaking was apparent. I think I immediately recognized it as an earthquake despite no prior experience, because I didn't have any alternative hypotheses.

I’ve been calling this process “categorization,” but it’s known by many other names in science. Experience. Perception. Conceptualization. Pattern completion. Perceptual inference. Memory. Simulation. Attention. Morality. Mental Inference. In the folk psychology of daily life, these words mean different things, and scientists often study them as different phenomena, assuming each is produced by a distinct process in the brain. But really, they arise via the same neural processes.

Morality??? Do you mean decision making, perhaps?

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.

The scientific answer to the riddle, however, is no. A falling tree itself makes no sound. Its descent merely creates vibrations in the air and the ground. These vibrations become sound only if something special is present to receive and translate them: say, an ear connected to a brain.

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.

“Red” is not a color contained in an object. It is an experience involving reflected light, a human eye, and a human brain. We experience red only when light of a certain wavelength (say, 600 nanometers) reflects from an object (in the midst of other reflections at other wavelengths), and only while a receiver translates this contrasting array of light into visual sensations.

And in the absence of a brain, there is no experience of color at all, only reflected light in the world.

For instance, to the Berinmo people of Papua New Guinea, apples reflecting light at 600 nanometers are experienced as brownish, because Berinmo concepts for color divide up the continuous spectrum differently.

This sounds like claiming ancient Greeks didn't see blue

We do not passively detect physical changes in the world. We actively participate in constructing our experiences even though we are mostly unaware of that fact. An object might seem to transmit information about its color into your brain, but the information required for you to experience color comes mainly from your predictions, corrected by the light that your brain takes in from the world.

Kant

Changes in air pressure and wavelengths of light exist in the world, but to us, they are sounds and colors. We perceive them by going beyond the information given to us, making meaning from them using knowledge from past experience, that is, concepts. Every perception is constructed by a perceiver, usually with sensory inputs from the world as one ingredient.

Kant

To a physicist, “real” is a quark, a Higgs boson, or maybe a collection of little strings vibrating in eleven dimensions.

Honest physicists will admit that these are models

But evolution has provided the human mind with the ability to create another kind of real, one that is completely dependent on human observers. From changes in air pressure, we construct sounds. From wavelengths of light, we construct colors. From baked goods, we construct cupcakes and muffins that are indistinguishable except by name (chapter 2). Just get a couple of people to agree that something is real and give it a name, and they create reality. All humans with a normally functioning brain have the potential for this little bit of magic, and we use it all the time.

in rare cases they are pink (i.e., they reflect light at a wavelength that people in my culture experience as pink).

Wavelengths plural. Pink doesn't correspond to a wavelength; neither do brown or gray.

Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. They are perceiver-dependent categories. Albert Einstein illustrated this point nicely when he wrote, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”

"Plant" is also a category though

Emotions are real, but real in the same manner of the sound of a tree falling, the experience of red, and the distinctions between flowers and weeds. They are all constructed in the brain of a perceiver.

The distinction between “real in nature” versus “illusory” is a false dichotomy. Fear and anger are real to a group of people who agree that certain changes in the body, on the face, and so on, are meaningful as emotions. In other words, emotion concepts have social reality. They exist in your human mind that is conjured in your human brain, which is part of nature. The biological processes of categorization, which are rooted in physical reality and are observable in the brain and body, create socially real categories.