How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

How do you get a concept without a word? Well, your brain’s conceptual system has a special power called conceptual combination. It combines existing concepts to create your very first instance of a novel concept of emotion.44

For example, 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! This happens even if all six toys are physically identical, strongly suggesting that infants gain the same efficiency benefits from conceptual knowledge that adults do. Conceptual combination plus words equals the power to create reality.47

People with alexithymia also have a restricted emotion vocabulary and have difficulty remembering emotion words. These clues provide further evidence that concepts are critical for experiencing and perceiving emotion.48

Simply put: I did not see a snake and categorize it. I did not feel the urge to run and categorize it. I did not feel my heart pounding and categorize it. I categorized sensations in order to see the snake, to feel my heart pounding, and to run. I correctly predicted these sensations, and in doing so, explained them with an instance of the concept “Fear.” This is how emotions are made.

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.

So the infant brain must transfer information efficiently by passing it to as few neurons as possible.

The solution to this engineering challenge is a cortex that represents concepts so that similarities are separated from differences. This separation, as you will now see, leads to a tremendous optimization.

There is great redundancy from one frame to the next, however, so when YouTube’s server sends the stream of video information over the Internet to your computer or phone, it needn’t send every single pixel from every frame. It’s more efficient to communicate only what has changed from one frame to the next, because any static areas of the previous frame have already been transmitted.

The human brain does much the same thing when it processes prediction error. The sensory information from sight is highly redundant like a video, and the same is true for sound, smell, and the other senses. The brain represents this information as patterns of firing neurons, and it’s advantageous (and efficient) to represent it with as few neurons as possible.

As we go from very specific to increasingly general concepts (in this example, from line to angle to eye), the brain creates similarities that are progressively more efficient summaries of the information. For example, “Angle” is an efficient summary with respect to lines but is a sensory detail with respect to eyes. The same logic works for the concepts “Nose” and “Ear” and so on. Together, these concepts are part of the concept “Face,” whose instances are yet more efficient summaries of the sensory regularities in facial features. Eventually, the infant’s brain forms summary representations for enough visual concepts that she can see one stable object, despite incredible variation in low-level sensory details. Think about it: each of your eyes transmits millions of tiny pieces of information to your brain in a moment, and you simply see “a book.”

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. This efficiency makes it practical for the brain to form rudimentary concepts such as “Mother” and “Self” that result from learning.

Two of the phenomena I’ve been discussing are actually one and the same. I’m speaking of concepts and predictions.

Early in life, you build up concepts from detailed sensory input (as prediction error) from your body and the world. Your brain efficiently compresses the sensory input it receives, just like YouTube compresses video, extracting similarities out of differences, eventually creating an efficient, multisensory summary. Once your brain has learned a concept in this manner, it can run this process in reverse, expanding the similarities into differences to construct an instance of the concept, much as your computer or phone expands the incoming YouTube video for display. This is a prediction. Think of prediction as “applying” a concept, modifying the activity in your primary sensory and motor regions, and correcting or refining as needed.

Let’s give our focus to one of those instances, your prediction that you see your beloved Uncle Kevin unexpectedly in a shopping mall. Your brain issues this prediction because, at some time in the past, you saw Uncle Kevin in a similar situation and experienced sensations that you categorized as happiness. How well will this prediction match your incoming sensory inputs right now? If it matches better than all the other predictions, then you will experience this instance of “Happiness.” If not, then your brain will adjust the prediction, and you might experience an instance of “Disappointment.” Or if need be, your brain will make the prediction match the sensory input, and you will mistakenly perceive someone else to be your Uncle Kevin, as Sophia did in the shopping mall that day.

So there you are, standing in the mall, and your brain must determine whether its prediction of Uncle Kevin ultimately becomes your perception and directs your action, or whether a course correction is required. To determine the details, the brain unpacks the summary of all the sensory input into a gigantic cascade of more detailed predictions, like uncompressing a YouTube video for viewing, or adding water to dehydrated food to make it edible. This process, shown in figure 6-1, is the same one that builds up a concept from details, but in reverse.

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.

The concept cascade reveals the neural reasons for several of the claims I’ve made earlier in the book. First, your cascade of predictions explains why an experience like happiness feels triggered rather than constructed. You’re simulating an instance of “Happiness” even before categorization is complete. Your brain is preparing to execute movements in your face and body before you feel any sense of agency for moving, and is predicting your sensory input before it arrives. So emotions seem to be “happening to” you, when in fact your brain is actively constructing the experience, held in check by the state of the world and your body.10

Third, the cascade also highlights the neural advantages of high emotional granularity, the phenomenon (described in chapter 1) of constructing more precise emotional experiences. When your brain constructs multiple instances of “Happiness” at seeing Uncle Kevin, it must sort out which one best resembles your current sensory input, to become the winning instance. This is a big job for your brain with some metabolic cost. But imagine if the English language had a more specific word than “happiness” for feeling attachment to a close friend, such as the Korean word jeong (정). Your brain would require less effort to construct with this more precise concept. Even better, if you had a special word for “happiness at feeling close to my Uncle Kevin,” your brain could be even more efficient at determining the winning instance. On the other hand, if you were constructing with the very broad concept “Pleasant Feeling” rather than “Happiness,” your brain’s job would be harder. Preciseness leads to efficiency; this is a biological payoff of higher emotional granularity.11

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. It constantly tinkers with the information flow among neurons, ramping up the firing rate of some neurons and slowing down others, which moves sensory input in and out of your attentional spotlight, making some predictions fit while others become irrelevant.

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. When you have an experience that feels like your so-called rational side is tempering your emotional side—a mythical arrangement that you’ve learned is not respected by brain wiring—you are constructing an instance of the concept “Emotion Regulation.”19

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.

We regulate our body budgets, as any animal does, but wrap this regulation in purely mental concepts like “Happiness” and “Fear,” that we construct in the moment. We share these purely mental concepts with other adults, and we teach them to our children. We make a new kind of reality and live in it every day, mostly unaware that we are doing so.

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

Albert Einstein illustrated this point nicely when he wrote, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”5

You move your facial muscles all the time. Your eyebrows scrunch. Your lips curl. Your nose wrinkles. These actions are perceiver-independent and they help you sample the sensory world. Widening your eyes enhances your peripheral vision, so you can more easily detect objects surrounding you. Narrowing your eyes improves your visual acuity for objects right in front of you. Wrinkling your nose helps to block noxious chemicals. But these movements are not intrinsically emotional.6

Make something up, give it a name, and you’ve created a concept. Teach your concept to others, and as long as they agree, you’ve created something real. How do we work this magic of creation? We categorize. We take things that exist in nature and impose new functions on them that go beyond their physical properties. Then we transmit these concepts to each other, wiring each other’s brains for the social world. This is the core of social reality.9

By virtue of the fact that we share a concept, my movement initiates a prediction in your brain . . . a uniquely human brand of magic. It is categorization as a cooperative act.11

But only human animals have both language and collective intentionality. The two abilities build on one another in complex ways, allowing a human infant to bootstrap a conceptual system into her brain, changing its wiring in the process. The combination also allows people to categorize cooperatively, which is the basis of communication and social influence.12

Words also have power. They let us place ideas directly into another person’s head. If I seat you in a chair, perfectly motionless, and say the word “pizza” to you, neurons in your brain will change their firing pattern automatically, making predictions. You might even salivate as you simulate the taste of mushrooms and pepperoni. Words give us our own special form of telepathy.

We’ve characterized some of these functions in previous chapters. The first stems from the fact that emotion concepts, like all concepts, make meaning.

The second function of emotions stems from the fact that concepts prescribe action:

The third function is related to a concept’s ability to regulate your body budget.

But emotion concepts have two other functions that draw other individuals into your circle of social reality. One function is emotion communication, in which two people categorize with concepts in synchrony.

The other function is social influence.

Concepts like “Excitement,” “Fear,” and “Exhaustion” are tools for you to regulate other people’s body budgets, not just your own. If you can get someone else to perceive your panting, sweaty state as fear, you influence their actions in a way that mere quick breaths and damp brows cannot achieve on their own. You can be an architect of other people’s experiences.15

This brings us to one of the most challenging ideas in this book: you need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. It’s a requirement. Without a concept for “Fear,” you cannot experience fear. Without a concept for “Sadness,” you cannot perceive sadness in another person. You could learn the necessary concept, or you could construct it in the moment through conceptual combination, but your brain must be able to make that concept and predict with it. Otherwise, you will be experientially blind to that emotion.

Westerners surely do experience pleasant aggression. Athletes feel it in the heat of competition. Videogame players cultivate it during first-person shooter games. But these people are not experiencing liget with all its meaning, prescribed actions, body-budget changes, communication, and social influence unless they can construct “Liget” using conceptual combination. Liget is the whole conceptual package, and if your brain cannot make this concept, then you cannot experience liget, although you can experience parts of it: the pleasant, high arousal affect; the aggression; the thrill of pursuing a risky challenge; or the feeling of brother- or sisterhood that comes from being part of a group.

we live in social groups. This arrangement has allowed us to expand across the globe, creating livable habitats by feeding, clothing, and learning from each other in otherwise inhospitable physical conditions. We can therefore amass information across generations—stories, recipes, traditions, anything that we can describe—that helps each generation to shape the brain wiring of the next. This trove of intergenerational knowledge lets us actively shape the physical environment, rather than just adapt to it, and to create civilizations.19

Just because fear appears generation after generation in your culture does not prove that fear is coded into the human genome, nor that it was sculpted by natural selection in our hominin ancestors millions of years ago on the African savanna. These single-cause explanations discount the enormous power of collective intentionality (not to mention copious evidence from modern neuroscience). Evolution surely allowed humans to create culture, and part of that culture is a system of goal-based concepts to manage ourselves and each other. Our biology allows us to create goal-based concepts, but exactly which concepts may be a matter of cultural evolution.20

This process is called emotion acculturation. From a new culture, you acquire new concepts, which translate into new predictions. Using those predictions, you become able to experience and perceive the emotions of your newly adopted home.

You can’t predict efficiently when you don’t know the local concepts. You must get by with conceptual combination, which can be effortful and yields only an approximate meaning. Or you will be awash in prediction error much of the time. The process of acculturation therefore taxes your body budget. In fact, people who are less emotionally acculturated report more physical illness. Once again, categorization gets under your skin.36

The theory of constructed emotion explains how you experience and perceive emotion in the absence of any consistent, biological fingerprints in the face, body, or brain. Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them. These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept. The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the winner that becomes your experience, and if it’s an instance of an emotion concept, then you experience emotion. This whole process occurs, with the help of your control network, in the service of regulating your body budget to keep you alive and healthy. In the process, you impact the body budgets of those around you, to help you survive to propagate your genes into the next generation. This is how brains and bodies create social reality. This is also how emotions become real.

You are not a reactive animal, wired to respond to events in the world. When it comes to your experiences and perceptions, you are much more in the driver’s seat than you might think. You predict, construct, and act. You are an architect of your experience.

The theory of constructed emotion also leads to a whole new way of thinking about personal responsibility. Suppose you’re angry with your boss and lash out impulsively, slamming your fist on his desk and calling him an idiot. Where the classical view might attribute some blame to a hypothetical anger circuit, partially absolving you of responsibility, construction extends the notion of responsibility beyond the moment of harm. Your brain is predictive, not reactive. Its core systems are constantly trying to guess what’s coming next so you can survive. Therefore your actions, and the predictions that launched those actions, are shaped by all your past experiences (as concepts) that led up to that moment. You slam that desk because your brain predicted an instance of anger, using your concept of “Anger,” and your past experience (whether direct, or from movies or books, etc.) includes an action of slamming the desk in a similar situation.

So the question of responsibility becomes, Are you responsible for your concepts? Not all of them, certainly. When you’re a baby, you can’t choose the concepts that other people put into your head. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts that ultimately drive your actions, whether they feel willful or not. So “responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change your concepts.2

If you grow up in a society full of anger or hate, you can’t be blamed for having the associated concepts, but as an adult, you can choose to educate yourself and learn additional concepts. It’s certainly not an easy task, but it is doable. This is another basis for my frequent claim, “You are an architect of your experience.”

Due to their trauma, their brains continue to model a hostile world, even after they’ve escaped to a better one. It was not their fault that their brains are wired for a specific, toxic environment. But each woman is the only one who can transform her conceptual system to make things better. That’s the form of responsibility that I mean. Sometimes, responsibility means that you’re the only one who can change things.

The belief in essences is called essentialism. It presupposes that certain categories—sadness and fear, dogs and cats, African and European Americans, men and women, good and evil—each have a true reality or nature. Within each category, the members are thought to share a deep, underlying property (an essence) that causes them to be similar, even if they have some superficial differences. There are many varieties of dog with differences in size, shape, color, gait, temperament, and so on, but these differences are considered superficial with regard to some essence that all dogs share. A dog is never a cat.

Essentialism is the culprit that has made the classical view supremely difficult to set aside. It encourages people to believe that their senses reveal objective boundaries in nature. Happiness and sadness look and feel different, the argument goes, so they must have different essences in the brain. People are almost always unaware that they essentialize; they fail to see their own hands in motion as they carve dividing lines in the natural world.