How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Affective realism keeps you believing something even when the evidence puts it highly in doubt. It’s not because of ignorance or malevolence—it is simply a matter of how the brain is wired and operates. Everything you believe, and everything you see, is colored by your brain’s budget-balancing act.

The best defense against affective realism is curiosity. I tell my students to be particularly mindful when you love or hate something you read. These feelings probably mean that the ideas you’ve read are firmly in your affective niche, so keep an open mind about them. Your affect is not evidence that the science is good or bad.

Even something that seems obviously biological, such as blindness, is not objective in biology. Some sightless people do not think of themselves as blind, because they get around in the world just fine.

This sounds truthy. This is a very poor understanding of blind people. They do think of themselves as blind! Many just don't see blindness as a lack of something, and identify society rather than blindness as what causes problems for them! Deaf people also don't see being Deaf as inherently lacking!

Your experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, your brain is wired to model your world, driven by what is relevant for your body budget, and then you experience that model as reality. Your moment-to-moment experience may feel like one discrete mental state followed by another, like beads on a string, but as you have learned in this book, your brain activity is continuous throughout intrinsic, core networks. Your experiences might seem to be triggered by the world outside the skull, but they’re formed in a storm of prediction and correction. Ironically, each of us has a brain that creates a mind that misunderstands itself.

Steven Pinker writes in The Blank Slate, for example, that “people who believe that African Americans are more likely to be on welfare than whites . . . are not being irrational or bigoted. Those beliefs are correct” when compared to census figures. He and others argue that many scientists dismiss stereotypes as inaccurate because we are bullied into political correctness, are condescending toward ordinary people, or are biased by our own muddled assumptions about human nature.

Fuck off Steven Pinker

The history of science, however, has been a slow but steady march in the direction of construction. Physics, chemistry, and biology began with intuitive, essentialist theories, rooted in naive realism and certainty. We progressed beyond these ideas because we noticed that the old observations held true only under certain conditions. So, we had to replace our concepts. A scientific revolution swaps out one social reality for another, just like a political revolution does with its new government and social order. Again and again in science, our new sets of concepts have led us away from essentialism toward variation, and from naive realism to construction.