How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Even when your face seems completely still to the naked eye, your muscles are still contracting and relaxing.4

Variation, not uniformity, is the norm.

I began to see variation not as error but as normal and even desirable.

Neuroscientists call this principle degeneracy. Degeneracy means “many to one”:

many combinations of neurons can produce the same outcome.

In fact, every supposed emotional brain region has also been implicated in creating non-emotional events, such as thoughts and perceptions.

Emotions arise from firing neurons, but no neurons are exclusively dedicated to emotion.