How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

The traditional view of depression is that negative thoughts cause negative feelings. I’m suggesting it’s the other way around. Your feelings right now drive your next thought, as well as your perceptions, as predictions. So a depressed brain relentlessly keeps making withdrawals from the budget, basing its predictions on similar withdrawals from the past. This means constantly reliving difficult, unpleasant events. You wind up in a cycle of budgeting imbalances, unbroken by prediction error because it is ignored, gets tuned down, or doesn’t make it to the brain. In effect, you’re locked into a cycle of uncorrected predictions, trapped in an adverse past when your metabolic needs were high.