How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

You can experience anger with or without a spike in blood pressure. You can experience fear with or without an amygdala, the brain region historically tagged as the home of fear.

Now imagine that you’re in a doctor’s office, complaining of chest pressure and shortness of breath, which may be heart attack symptoms. If you’re a woman, you’re more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and sent home, whereas if you’re a man, you’re more likely to be diagnosed with heart disease and receive lifesaving preventive treatment. As a result, women over age sixty-five die more frequently of heart attacks than men do.

A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.2

the inability to distinguish between emotions of the same phylim

If facial expressions are universal, then babies should be even more likely than adults to express anger with a scowl and sadness with a pout, because they’re too young to learn rules of social appropriateness. And yet when scientists observe infants in situations that should evoke emotion, the infants do not make the expected expressions. For example, the developmental psychologists Linda A. Camras and Harriet Oster and their colleagues videotaped babies from various cultures, employing a growling gorilla toy to startle them (to induce fear) or restraining their arm (to induce anger). Camras and Oster found, using FACS, that the range of babies’ facial movements in the two situations was indistinguishable.

interesting that facial recongnition patterns exist corss culturally but are not evident with infants. this is important because they do not have the retraint from social standards to not make the face that comes naturally.

Where emotions and the autonomic nervous system are concerned, four significant meta-analyses have been conducted in the last two decades, the largest of which covered more than 220 physiology studies and nearly 22,000 test subjects. None of these four meta-analyses found consistent and specific emotion fingerprints in the body. Instead, the body’s orchestra of internal organs can play many different symphonies during happiness, fear, and the rest.26

there does not seem to be a consistant biological response to emotional valances. It varies from person to person Meta analysis 220

“SM,” afflicted with a genetic disease that gradually obliterates the amygdala during childhood and adolescence, called Urbach-Wiethe disease.

the name of the desiise of SM

Your concepts are a primary tool for your brain to guess the meaning of incoming sensory inputs. For example, concepts give meaning to changes in sound pressure so you hear them as words or music instead of random noise. In Western culture, most music is based on an octave divided into twelve equally spaced pitches, an arrangment known as the twelve-tone equal-tempered scale. All people of Western culture with normal hearing have a concept for this ubiquitous scale, even if they can’t explicitly describe it. Not all music uses this scale, however. 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.

muscial variation based on structure leads individuals not in tune with new structure to be unable to decipher the difference between it and sound.

Social reality is not just about words—it gets under your skin. If you perceive the same baked good as a decadent “cupcake” or a healthful “muffin,” research suggests that your body metabolizes it differently. Likewise, the words and concepts of your culture help to shape your brain wiring and your physical changes during emotion.24

Interesting for the calories in calories out model and possible overlap with a thermic effect.

We had them repeat an emotion word like “anger” over and over. Eventually, the word becomes just a sound to the subject (“ang-gurr”) that’s mentally disconnected from its meaning. This technique has the same effect as creating a temporary brain lesion, but it’s completely safe and lasts less than one second. Then we immediately showed subjects two wordless faces side by side as before. Their performance dropped to a dismal 36 percent: nearly two-thirds of their yes/no decisions were incorrect!9

This is a really interesting thing that I did not know could happen.

If your brain were merely reactive, it would be too inefficient to keep you alive. You are always being bombarded by sensory input. One human retina transmits as much visual data as a fully loaded computer network connection in every waking moment; now multiply that by every sensory pathway you have. A reactive brain would bog down like your Internet connection does when too many of your neighbors are streaming movies from Netflix. A reactive brain would also be too expensive, metabolically speaking, because it would require more interconnections than it could maintain.12 Evolution literally wired your brain for efficient prediction. As an example of this wiring in your visual system, have a look at figure 4-1, which shows how your brain predicts far more visual input than it receives.

Brian primarily a prediction tool. This would be interesting for concepts related to dreams and deja vu

Suppose you are playing baseball. Someone throws the ball in your direction, and you reach out and catch it. Most likely, you’d experience this as two events: seeing a ball and then catching it. If your brain actually reacted like this, however, baseball couldn’t exist as a sport. Your brain has about half a second to prepare to catch a baseball in a typical game. This isn’t enough time to process the visual input, calculate where the ball will land, make the decision to move, coordinate all the muscle movements, and send the motor commands to move you into position for the catch.15

This is tau and largely works for regular shaped and understood items if it is fast enough.

Babies are born able to hear the differences between all sounds in all languages, but by the time they reach one year of age, statistical learning has reduced this ability to the sounds contained only in the languages they have heard spoken by live humans. Babies become wired for their native languages by statistical learning.

Even with the right equipment in place (the eye and the brain), the experience of a red apple is not a done deal. For the brain to convert a visual sensation into the experience of red, it must possess the concept “Red.” This concept can come from prior experience with apples, roses, and other objects you perceive as red, or from learning about red from other people. (Even people who are blind since birth have a concept of “Red” that they learn from conversations and books.) Without this concept, the apple would be experienced differently. For instance, to the Berinmo people of Papua New Guinea, apples reflecting light at 600 nanometers are experienced as brownish, because Berinmo concepts for color divide up the continuous spectrum differently.3

other cultures do peceive colors as different shades or colors altogether. This is from the granularity of the color spectrum.

moment later I touch yours. Our nonverbal behaviors coordinate. There’s also biological synchrony; a mother’s and child’s heart rates will synchronize if they are securely bonded, and the same can happen to anyone during an engaging conversation. The mechanism is still a mystery. I suspect it’s because their breathing synchronizes as they unconsciously observe each other’s chests rising and falling. When I was a training therapist, I learned to intentionally synchronize my breathing with my clients’ to prepare them for hypnosis.47

Kekk

similar bout of affective realism gave birth to Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law. This law permits the use of deadly force in self-defense if you reasonably believe you’re in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm. A real-life incident was the catalyst for the law, but not in the way that you might think. Here’s how the story is usually told: In 2004, an elderly couple was asleep in their trailer home in Florida. An intruder tried to break in, so the husband, James Workman, grabbed a gun and shot him. Now here’s the true, tragic backstory: Workman’s trailer was in a hurricane-damaged area, and the man he shot, Rodney Cox, was an employee of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Workman, mostly likely under the influence of affective realism, perceived that Cox meant him harm and opened fire on an innocent man. Nevertheless, the inaccurate first story became a primary justification for Florida’s law.47

In one study of convictions that were later overturned by DNA evidence, 70 percent of the accused were convicted based on eyewitness testimony.

The ingredients are three aspects of the mind that we’ve encountered in this book: affective realism, concepts, and social reality.

Poorer nutrition equals a thinner PFC, which is linked to poorer performance in school, and less education, like not completing high school, leads back to poverty. In this cyclic manner, society’s stereotypes about race, which are social reality, can become the physical reality of brain wiring, thereby making it seem as if the cause of poverty were simply genes all along.18