How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Another surprising thing I learned while training to be a neuroscientist, along with degeneracy, is that many parts of the brain serve more than one purpose. The brain contains core systems that participate in creating a wide variety of mental states. A single core system can play a role in thinking, remembering, decision-making, seeing, hearing, and experiencing and perceiving diverse emotions. A core system is “one to many”: a single brain area or network contributes to many different mental states. The classical view of emotion, in contrast, considers particular brain areas to have dedicated psychological functions, that is, they are “one to one.”

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. Likewise, your brain has core “ingredients,” which we called core systems in chapter 1. They combine in complex ways, roughly analogous to recipes, to produce diverse instances of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and so on. The ingredients themselves are multipurpose, not dedicated to emotions but participating in their construction.

Emotions do not shine forth from the face nor from the maelstrom of your body’s inner core. They don’t issue from a specific part of the brain. No scientific innovation will miraculously reveal a biological fingerprint of any emotion. That’s because our emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed. They are made. By us. We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions, on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems. 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.

When you interact with your friends, parents, children, lovers, teammates, therapist, or other close companions, you and they synchronize breathing, heart beats, and other physical signals, leading to tangible benefits. Holding hands with loved ones, or even keeping their photo on your desk at work, reduces activation in your body-budgeting regions and makes you less bothered by pain. If you’re standing at the bottom of a hill with friends, it will appear less steep and easier to climb than if you are alone. If you grow up in poverty, a situation that leads to chronic body-budget imbalance and an overactive immune system, these body-budgeting problems are reduced if you have a supportive person in your life. In contrast, when you lose a close, loving relationship and feel physically ill about it, part of the reason is that your loved one is no longer helping to regulate your budget.

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.

Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.

Emotions are social reality. We construct instances of emotion in exactly the same manner as colors, falling trees, and money: using a conceptual system that is realized within the brain’s wiring. We transform sensory inputs from the body and the world, which are perceiver-independent, into an instance of (say) happiness in the context of a concept, “Happiness,” found in many human minds. The concept imposes new functions on these sensations, creating reality where there was none before: an experience or perception of emotion. Instead of asking, “Are emotions real?” the better question is, “How do emotions become real?”

Gigil (Filipino): The urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable.26 Voorpret (Dutch): Pleasure felt about an event before the event takes place.27 Age-otori (Japanese): The feeling of looking worse after a haircut.