Ashley Finafrock’s Reviews > How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain > Status Update

In the most speculative chapter of the book, I'm finding myself curious to know more about how researchers are going finding supporting evidence for the constructed theory of emotion in their traditionally essentialism fields like anxiety, depression, chronic pain and how that information is practically applied.

Concepts are not stored, but are created on the fly, ad hoc, based off your past experiences

A lot of the build up to how emotions are made seems to be delving into the realm of how information is stored in the brain in general, not just specifically emotions

Wow I don't know why this is blowing my brain much. 🤯 I guess because it's paradigm shifting for me on how I understood the brain 🧠 to work (my layman's perspective)

You can think of emotion categories like cookies. There are crisp ones, chewy ones, sweet ones, large, small, flat, rounded, rolled, sandwiched, floored etc. Members of the category "Cookie" vary tremendously, but are deemed equivalent for some purpose. Cookies need not look the same nor be created w/same recipe; they're populations of diverse instances. Any category of emotion is filled w/variety (e.g. Sadness)

• There does not exist a single "fingerprint" for any single emotion, unlike what we have thought classically for 2000+ years
• An emotion can be expressed from firing off several different patterns of neurons that are different between individuals

I can see why these claims were shocking when she first presented them. I mean even emojis are made based off of what we even think of a s fingerprint of an emotion