How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Heart rate changes are inevitable; their emotional meaning is not.

Each of us understands the world in a way that is useful but not necessarily true in some absolute, objective sense.

There is no single difference between anger and fear, because there’s no single “Anger” and no single “Fear.”

If instances of emotion are like cookies, then the brain is like a kitchen, stocked with common ingredients such as flour, water, sugar, and salt. Beginning with these ingredients, we can create diverse foods such as cookies, bread, cake, muffins, biscuits, and scones.

Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.

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you’re not at the mercy of emotions that arise unbidden to control your behavior. You are an architect of these experiences. Your river of feelings might feel like it’s flowing over you, but actually you’re the river’s source.

Deep.

Your brain’s 86 billion neurons, which are connected into massive networks, never lie dormant awaiting a jump-start. Your neurons are always stimulating each other, sometimes millions at a time. Given enough oxygen and nutrients, these huge cascades of stimulation, known as intrinsic brain activity, continue from birth until death. This activity is nothing like a reaction triggered by the outside world. It’s more like breathing, a process that requires no external catalyst.

Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation.

It takes more than one brain to create a mind.

Millions of people around the world can instantly, effortlessly recognize Kermit the Frog, but that doesn’t mean the human brain is wired for Muppet recognition.

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You can dissolve anxiety into a fast-beating heart. Once you can deconstruct into physical sensations, then you can recategorize them in some other way, using your rich set of concepts. Perhaps that pounding in your chest is not anxiety but anticipation, or even excitement.

Depression is an imbalance of many entwined parts of the nervous system that we can understand only by treating the whole person, not by treating one system in isolation like the parts of a machine.

Emotions are not temporary deviations from rationality. They are not alien forces that invade you without your consent. They are not tsunamis that leave destruction in their wake. They are not even your reactions to the world. They are your constructions of the world. Instances of emotion are no more out of control than thoughts or perceptions or beliefs or memories. The fact is, you construct many perceptions and experiences and you perform many actions, some that you control a lot and some that you don’t.

Memories are not like a photograph—they are simulations, created by the same core networks that construct experiences and perceptions of emotion. A memory is represented in your brain in bits and pieces as patterns of firing neurons, and “recall” is a cascade of predictions that reconstruct the event.

Emotions are not expressed, displayed, or otherwise revealed in the face, body, and voice in any objective way, and anyone who determines innocence, guilt, or punishment needs to know this. You cannot recognize or detect anger, sadness, remorse, or any other emotion in another person—you can only guess, and some guesses are more informed than others.