How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

When you apply for a job or college or medical school, make sure you interview on a sunny day, because interviewers tend to rate applicants more negatively when it is rainy.

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.

An economic model at the foundation of the U.S. economy—some might say the global economy—is rooted in a neural fairy tale.

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.

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. Even when you experience yourself as rational, your body budget and its links to affect are there, lurking beneath the surface.

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.

A visual prediction, for example, doesn’t just answer the question, “What did I see last time I was in this situation?” It answers, “What did I see last time I was in this situation when my body was in this state?”

One way to make meaning is to construct an instance of emotion.

The very history of stand your ground laws is, ironically, potent evidence against their value. It’s impossible to determine reasonable fear for one’s life in a society where racist stereotypes abound and affective realism literally transforms how people see each other. The whole line of reasoning for stand your ground is gutted by affective realism. If stand your ground doesn’t scare the crap out of you, think about the impact of affective realism on people who legally carry concealed weapons. Affective realism indisputably influences people’s perceptions of threat; therefore it virtually assures that innocent people will be shot by accident. It’s simple: you predict a threat, sensory information from the world says otherwise, but then your control network downplays the prediction error to maintain the prediction of threat. Bam, you’ve shot a harmless fellow citizen. Human brains are built for this sort of delusion, through the same process that produces daydreams and imagination.

Right now, over 60 percent of people in the United States believe that crime is on the rise (though it’s historically low), and they also believe that owning a gun will make them safer. These beliefs are ripe to lead people, through affective realism, to genuinely see a deadly threat where there is none and to act accordingly. Now that we know definitively that our senses don’t reveal objective reality, shouldn’t this critical knowledge influence our laws?48

We already know that our senses do not reveal reality, and judges and jurors necessarily suffer from affective realism. These factors, along with the rest of our knowledge of mind and brain, lead to a fairly radical idea (I’m almost afraid to say it): perhaps it is time to reevaluate trial by jury as the basis for determining guilt and innocence. Yes, it’s enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but the writers of that landmark document had no inkling of how the human brain works, nor that one day we could detect a defendant’s DNA under a victim’s fingernails.

When DNA evidence is unavailable or irrelevant, perhaps trials might dispense with a jury and instead feature the collective wisdom of multiple judges working together, randomly drawn from a larger pool of judges. As I’ve said already, I’m not a legal scholar, just a scientist, so perhaps wiser legal minds can construct a balanced judicial panel system in better ways. A panel of skilled judges who are trained to be self-aware and emotionally granular might avoid affective realism more effectively than a jury would. It’s not a perfect solution by any means: in the United States at least, judges tend to be on the older side, predominantly European American, and may overrepresent a particular set of beliefs while maintaining the illusion that they are free of them. Judges are also more likely to hand out maximum sentences. But one thing is certain: every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view. To believe otherwise is a fiction that is not supported by the architecture of the brain.72

A healthy dose of skepticism yields a worldview that is different from the genetically just world of the classical view. Your place in society is not random but neither is it inevitable.

By virtue of our values and practices, we restrict options and narrow possibilities for some people while widening them for others, and then we say that stereotypes are accurate. They are accurate only in relation to a shared social reality that our collective concepts created in the first place.

Construction agrees that you’re indeed the agent of your own destiny, but you are bounded by your surroundings. Your wiring, determined in part by your culture, influences your later options.

It’s refreshing to question the concepts that have been given to us, and to be curious about which are physical and which are social. There is a kind of freedom in realizing that we categorize to create meaning, and therefore it is possible to change meaning by recategorizing. Uncertainty means that things can be other than they appear.

The enteric nervous system, which controls your stomach and intestines, is looking more and more important for understanding the mind, but it’s extremely difficult to measure and therefore largely unexplored. We’re even finding that microbes in your stomach have a huge effect on mental states, and nobody knows how or why.