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

This chapter elaborates on how concepts are formed in our brain from the moment we are born and how new concepts continues to be formed through our brain's ability to adapt and learn-from past and present experiences. It explains the mental processes such as statistical learning, coneptual combination etc that we use to form concepts from an early age. Emotional granularity can point out your emotional intelligence.

The fourth chapter of How Emotions Are Made builds on key ideas like concepts, simulations, and predictions. It explains how the brain makes sense of the world through a loop of prediction, comparison, and error correction. Introducing "interoception," the brain's ability to sense internal bodily states, the author shows how it creates affect, influencing every choice we make. No decision is fully rational.

The third chapter of this book focuses on laying out case studies that has disproven method of recognising emotions called basic emotion. What we(Western culture) identify as anger(an emotion) through loud yelling, pouding fist etc may be taken simply as actions by people in different cultures. Emotions or emotional experiences are created by us- our culture, context,not our brains ,there is no biological fingerprint

Book debunks most of the classical views around how how emotions are formed in our brain ,why they are formed and how its been expressed by us through our actions and how we give meaning to our actions based on emotions that are generated by our brain, more often than not it turns out actions are not a direct result of our emotions but an indirect result- its primarily based on perceptions- or concepts.

Somewhat intriguing start to this book- some ideas presented in the first few pages got me thinking, I'm expecting this consistency throughout.