How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Broca localized the “inner beast” in what he believed to be an ancient “lobe” deep within the human brain. He named it le grand lobe limbique, or “the limbic lobe.” Broca did not brand his supposed lobe as the seat of emotion (actually, he thought it housed the sense of smell and other primitive survival circuitry), but he did treat limbic tissue as a single, unified entity, laying the first stone on a path toward essentializing it as the home of emotion. Over the next century, Broca’s limbic lobe morphed into a unified “limbic system” for emotion, guided by other believers in the classical view. This so-called system was said to be evolutionarily old; to be virtually unchanged from its origin in non-human mammals; and to control the heart, lungs, and other internal organs of the body. It allegedly lay between ancient “reptilian” circuits in the brainstem for hunger, thirst, and so on, and the newer, uniquely human layers of cortex that regulate mankind’s animalistic emotions. This illusory hierarchy embodied Darwin’s ideas about human evolution—base appetites having evolved first, followed by wild emotional passions, with rationality as our crowning glory.27