How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

In the quest to map emotion fingerprints in the brain, degeneracy is a humbling reality check.36

(That view is called equipotentiality, and it’s been long disproved.) I am saying that most neurons are multipurpose, playing more than one part, much as flour and eggs in your kitchen can participate in many recipes.

When Westerners hear Indonesian gamelan music for the first time, which is based on seven pitches per octave with varied tunings, it’s more likely to sound like noise. A brain that’s been wired by listening to twelve-tone scales doesn’t have a concept for that music. Personally, I am experientially blind to dubstep, although my teenage daughter clearly has that concept. Concepts also give meaning to the chemicals that create tastes and smells.

You might think of food as existing in the physical world, but in fact the concept “Food” is heavily cultural. Obviously, there are some biological constraints; you can’t eat razor blades.

Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.

The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of all three flavors of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And from neuroconstruction, it adopts the idea that experience wires the brain.

The balance between prediction and prediction error, shown in figure 4-3, determines how much of your experience is rooted in the outside world versus inside your head. As you can see, in many cases, the outside world is irrelevant to your experience. In a sense, your brain is wired for delusion: through continual prediction, you experience a world of your own creation that is held in check by the sensory world. Once your predictions are correct enough, they not only create your perception and action but also explain the meaning of your sensations. This is your brain’s default mode. And marvelously, your brain does not just predict the future: it can imagine the future at will. As far as we know, no other animal brain can do that.

Any graduate student of mine who never feels distress is clearly doing something wrong.

Marathon runners learn this; they feel fatigue early in the race when their body budget is still solvent, so they keep running until the unpleasant feeling goes away. They ignore the affective realism that insists they’re out of energy.

Scientists with the right equipment can change people’s affect by directly manipulating body-budgeting regions that issue predictions. Helen S. Mayberg, a pioneering neurologist, has developed a deep brain stimulation therapy for people suffering from treatment-resistant depression.

Let me show you what this means. You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: that what you feel alters your sight and hearing. Interoception in the moment is more influential to perception, and how you act, than the outside world is.

Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver’s seat and rationality is a passenger. 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.57

Antonio Damasio, in his bestseller Descartes’ Error, observes that a mind requires passion (what we would call affect) for wisdom.

The science of economics used to employ a concept called the rational economic person (homo economicus), who controls his or her emotions to make reasoned economic judgments. This concept was a foundation of Western economic theory, and though it has fallen out of favor among academic economists, it has continued to guide economic practice.

However, if body-budgeting regions drive predictions to every other brain network, then the model of the rational economic person is based on a biological fallacy. You cannot be a rational actor if your brain runs on interoceptively infused predictions. An economic model at the foundation of the U.S. economy—some might

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.

This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain,” remains one of the most successful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his bestseller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don’t have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows.

“Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly,” says neuroscientist Barbara L. Finlay, editor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences. “All brain divisions are present in all vertebrates.” So how do brains evolve? They reorganize as they expand, like companies do, to keep themselves efficient and nimble.61 Figure 4-7: The “triune brain” idea, with so-called cognitive circuitry layered on top of so-called emotion circuitry.

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.

Celebrate your achievements but don’t let them become golden handcuffs. A little composure goes a long way.

point is that bias is not advertised by a glowing sign worn around jurors’ necks; we are all guilty of it, because the brain is wired for us to see what we believe, and it usually happens outside of everyone’s awareness.