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December 7, 2022 - January 31, 2023
Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts.
How can a concept like “Awe” have such diversity: awe of the vastness of the universe; awe of Erik Weihenmayer, who scaled Mount Everest while blind; and awe that a tiny worker ant can carry five thousand times its body weight? The classical view proposes that you are born with these concepts, or that your brain finds emotion fingerprints in people’s expressions and internalizes them as concepts.
Babies learn these regularities extremely quickly, even within a few minutes of exposure. This learning process is so powerful that it changes the wiring in a baby’s brain. Babies are born able to hear the differences between all sounds in all languages, but by the time they reach one year of age, statistical learning has reduced this ability to the sounds contained only in the languages they have heard spoken by live humans. Babies become wired for their native languages by statistical learning.
Experiments like this demonstrate that infants are not merely reactive to the world. Even from a very young age, they actively estimate probabilities based on patterns that they observe and learn, to maximize the outcomes they desire.
Even single-celled animals engage in statistical learning and then prediction: they not only respond to changes in their environment but anticipate them.
Human infants, however, do more than statistically learn simple concepts. They also quickly learn that some of the information they need about the world resides in the minds of the people around them.
In other words, the children were able to learn a subjective preference of the experimenter that was different from their own. This realization, that an object has positive value for someone else, is an example of mental inference.
Take the concept “Money,” for example. You can’t learn it simply by viewing a piece of colored paper, a gold nugget, a seashell, and a pile of barley or salt, each of which has been deemed currency by some society in history. 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.
From infancy, little human brains have an affinity for processing speech signals and quickly realize that speech is one way to access the information inside other people’s minds. They’re particularly attuned to adult “baby talk” with a higher and more variable pitch, shorter sentences, and strong eye contact.27 Even before infants understand what words mean in a conventional sense, the sounds of the words introduce statistical regularity that speeds concept learning. The developmental psychologists Sandra R. Waxman and Susan A. Gelman, leaders in this area of research, hypothesize that words
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Words encourage infants to form goal-based concepts by inspiring them to represent things as equivalent. In fact, studies show that infants can more easily learn a goal-based concept, given a word, than a concept defined by physical similarity without a word.
Any animal can view a bunch of similar-looking objects and form a concept of them. But you can show human infants a bunch of objects that look different, sound different, and feel different, and merely add a word—a WORD—and these little babies form a concept that overcomes the physical differences. They understand that the objects have some kind of psychological similarity that can’t be immediately perceived through the five senses.
This sort of social reality, in which two or more people agree that something purely mental is real, is a foundation of human culture and civilization. Infants thereby learn to categorize the world in ways that are consistent, meaningful, and predictable to us (the speakers), and eventually to themselves. Their mental model of the world becomes similar to ours, so we can communicate, share experiences, and perceive the same world.
When we, as adults, speak a word to a child, an act of great significance takes place without fanfare. In that moment, we offer the child a tool to expand reality—a similarity that is purely mental—and she incorporates it into the patterns that are being laid down inside her own brain for future use.
You see emotions in blinks, furrowed brows, and other muscle twitches; you hear emotions in the pitch and lilt of voices; you feel emotions in your own body, but the emotional information is not in the signal itself. 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.
Personally, I’d like to add the Greek word stenahoria to English, which refers to a feeling of doom, hopelessness, suffocation, and constriction.
Russian has two distinct concepts for what Americans call “Anger.” German has three distinct “Angers” and Mandarin has five. If you were to learn any of these languages, you’d need to acquire these new emotion concepts to construct perceptions and experiences with them.
Native speakers of English who learn Russian, for example, must learn to distinguish between anger at a person, called serdit’sia, and anger for more abstract reasons such as the political situation, known as zlit’sia. The latter concept is more similar to the English concept of “Anger,” but Russian speakers use the former more frequently; as a result, English speakers use serdit’sia more frequently as well and wind up misapplying it.
New emotion concepts from a second language can also modify those of your primary language.
Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.
How do you get a concept without a word? Well, your brain’s conceptual system has a special power called conceptual combination.
the first time I traveled to visit her in Belgium, she told me that we were sharing the emotion gezellig. Curled up in her living room, sharing wine and chocolates, she explained that this emotion means the comfort, coziness, and togetherness of being at home, with friends and loved ones.
prelinguistic infants generally can hold about three objects in mind at a time. If you hide toys in a box while an infant watches, she can remember up to three hiding places. However, if you label several toys with a nonsense word like “dax” and several more with “blicket” before hiding them—assigning the toys to categories—the infant can hold up to six objects in mind!
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.
If people lack a well-developed conceptual system for emotion, what is their emotional life like? Will they feel only affect? These questions are difficult to test scientifically.
When you categorize with your multisensory concepts, you’re also regulating your body budget.
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.”
Along the way, you’ll also learn the neural basis for several important topics you’ve seen previously: emotional granularity, population thinking, why emotions feel triggered rather than constructed, and why your body-budgeting regions can affect every decision and action you make.* When taken as a whole, these explanations hint at a unifying framework for how the brain makes meaning: one of the most extraordinary mysteries of the human mind.
Infants absorb the sensory input around them and learn, learn, learn. The developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik describes babies as having a “lantern” of attention that is exquisitely bright but diffuse.
You have a built-in “spotlight” of attention that illuminates some things, such as these words, while leaving other things in the dark. The infant brain’s “lantern” cannot focus in this manner.
The solution to this engineering challenge is a cortex that represents concepts so that similarities are separated from differences.
This process reduces redundancy and represents the information in a minimal, efficient form for future use. It’s like dehydrated food that takes up less space but needs to be reconstituted before eating.
Any given concept is not represented in the information flow among one single set of neurons; each concept is itself a population of instances, and these instances are represented in different patterns of neurons on each occasion. (This is degeneracy.) The concept is constructed in the moment, ad hoc.
The concept cascade. When you develop a concept (right to left), sensory input is compressed into efficient, multisensory summaries. When you construct an instance of a concept by prediction (left to right), those efficient summaries unpack into ever more detailed predictions, which are checked against actual sensory input at each stage.
a more specific word than “happiness” for feeling attachment to a close friend, such as the Korean word jeong
Gerald M. Edelman called your experiences “the remembered present.”
your brain never categorizes 100 percent with one concept and 0 percent with others. Predictions are more probabilistic than that.
Which predictions should be the winners? Which sensory input is important, and which is just noise? Your brain has a network to help resolve these uncertainties, known as your control network. This is the same network that transforms an infant’s “lantern” of attention into the adult “spotlight” you have now.
Suppose you’ve recently argued with your significant other, and now you’re having chest pain. Is it a heart attack, indigestion, an experience of anxiety, or a perception that your partner’s being unreasonable? Your interoceptive network will launch hundreds of competing instances of different concepts, each a brain-wide cascade, to resolve this quandary.
The name “control network” is unfortunate because it implies a central position of authority, as if the network were making decisions and conducting the process. This is not the case. Your control network is more of an optimizer.
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.
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.
Your brain has a mental model of the world as it will be in the next moment, developed from past experience. This is the phenomenon of making meaning from the world and the body using concepts. In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning.
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.
To make meaning is to go beyond the information given. A fast-beating heart has a physical function, such as getting enough oxygen to your limbs so you can run, but categorization allows it to become an emotional experience such as happiness or fear, giving it additional meaning and functions understood within your culture.
Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation.
The brain systems that implement concepts, such as the interoceptive network and the control network, are the biology of meaning-making.
For this, the brain needs the concept of “Tree” and what trees can do, such as fall in a forest. This concept can come from prior experience with trees, or from learning about trees in a book, or from another person’s description. Without the concept, there is no crashing timber, only the meaningless noise of experiential blindness. 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.1 Without a perceiver there is no sound,
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we humans are architects of our own experiences.
We actively participate in constructing our experiences even though we are mostly unaware of that fact.
