123 | Lisa Feldman Barrett on Emotions, Actions, and the Brain

Emotions are at the same time utterly central to who we are — where would we be without them? — and also seemingly peripheral to the “real” work our brains do, understanding the world and acting within it. Why do we have emotions, anyway? Are they hardwired into the brain? Lisa Feldman Barrett is one of the world’s leading experts in the psychology of emotions, and she emphasizes that they are more constructed and less hard-wired than you might think. How we feel and express emotions can vary from culture to culture or even person to person. It’s better to think of emotions of a link between affective response and our behaviors.

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Lisa Feldman Barrett received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Waterloo. She is currently the University Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University. She also holds research appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/Harvard Medical School in the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Program and at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in the Department of Radiology. Among her many honors are the Award for Distinguished Service in Psychological Science from the American Psychological Association, the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, and her latest book is Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. So if any of you have been feeling depressed, sad, angry, it’s been a tough year 2020, right? Although maybe some of you have been doing well in your own personal ventures, so maybe you’re happy, maybe you’re joyful, maybe you’re cautiously optimistic. What we’re talking about here are emotions, we all have them, emotions are very important for who we are, how we live our lives, but in the study of Neuroscience or in how we think about psychology, it’s possible to argue that emotions get a little bit of short thrift we talk about consciousness, we talk about neurons, you talk about cognition and so forth, but emotions are clearly very important, but they have something of a wishy-washy connotation, I mean, they sort of float over what is important about the brain, which is how we think and reason and so forth.

0:00:50 SC: Today’s guest, Lisa Feldman Barrett wants to push back against that a little bit. She’s a psychologist at Northeastern University and the developer of something called The Theory of constructed emotion. If I can put into my own words, you’ll hear Lisa’s words during the podcast, but in previous episodes of Mindscape, we talk a lot about neuroscience and the brain, and two things have become clear to me anyway, one is the fact that the brain is part of the body, the fact that our sensory inputs and how we feel in our physical form is crucially important to what we think of as thinking, not just the neurons that are locked in our brain, and the other thing is that our brain construct models of the world and tries to predict what will happen next, so we know what to do, we know how to make choices, how to live in the world.

0:01:33 SC: So Lisa Feldman Barrett wants to make the case that emotions play a crucial role in both of these aspects of what it means to be thinking that emotions are not fundamental, actually, in fact, she doesn’t put it this way, but I would say emotions are emergent. There is no emotion circuit in the brain, and there’s certainly not specific anger circuits or happiness circuits or anything like that, there are effects in the brain, we feel strongly about something or weakly about something, positively about something or negatively about something, but emotions are kind of coarse graining their ways of conceptualizing these effective responses to turn them into action, to decide what we should do next, how we should actually respond to what is going on out there in the world, so emotions are not hard-wired, they are things that are constructed and they are things that we can sort of alter and change in various ways, but they’re absolutely crucial to the functioning of how we live in the world, you know David Hume, who’s been cited on the podcast many times, once famously pointed out that reason is and always should be the slave of the passions.

0:02:37 SC: Meaning that it’s our passions, our emotions, if you wanna put it that way, that give us motivation, that tell us what we want to do, and reason follows along and tells us how to get to what we want, but it’s the emotions, it’s the passions that actually decide what it is we want. So they’re a big deal. We should take them seriously, we should do the science necessary to understand where emotions come from, how they relate to the actions we take and what they do living in the brain, and we’re gonna do that. So let’s go.

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0:03:21 SC: Lisa Feldman Barrett. Welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:24 Lisa Feldman Barrett: Thanks so much for having me on your podcast.

0:03:26 SC: Sure. One of the things you have a new book out, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, and I was very interested to learn. One of the lessons is that I only have one brain, and I guess I thought I knew that, but apparently there’s an alternative, people think you have more than one brain.

0:03:42 LFB: Well, there is this pervasive belief in neuroscience that we can trace all the way back to ancient Greece and play those ideas about the human psyche, which suggests that the human brain evolved in layers, so that you have this inner lizard brain, which is responsible for your instincts, like feeding, and feeding and sleeping and reproducing and so on, and that layered on top of that is a new system called the limbic system, which is responsible for emotion that’s found in mammals, and then layered on top of that is the cerebral cortex, which is sometimes referred to as the neo-cortex like, it’s a new part that evolved in more advanced mammals in particularly large… In primates and in humans, and the idea was originally that your inner lizard and your limbic system together are kind of like this inner beast that’s responsible for all of your less desirable characteristics let’s say causing you to do things and say things that are somewhat ill considered and that you probably really regret later, and that your neocortex is constantly attempting to down-regulate, wrestle to the ground, this inner-beast, and so the metaphor is that your brain is basically a battlefield between your inner ancient beast and your more rational evolved self and the whole thing is basically a myth, but it’s a really, really potent, powerful method that even scientists sometimes have trouble stepping away from.

0:05:41 SC: And let’s just skip right to why it’s a myth, is it just a matter of, we’ve looked for these different parts of the brain and they’re not there the brain does have different parts in some sense.

0:05:53 LFB: Oh, sure, although, how you divide a brain up into parts is really a matter of, to some extent, a matter of where you decide to draw the lines, but that’s a different conversation to have. I think the conversation that’s most relevant here is to say, when you look at a lizard brain with your naked eye, it looks as if the brain has a very, very small cerebral cortex or no cortex at all, whereas when you look at… And when you look at a rat, it looks, a rat brain, with your naked eye, it looks as if there’s a very small cerebral-cortex, and when you look at a human, it looks massive. And so, this leads has led people to believe that the brain evolved kind of like sedimentary rock with different layers evolving at different times, but when you peer into the brain, into the cells, when you peer into the molecular makeup of the cells and look at the genes inside these cells, what you can see is that there are no new neurons essentially, that a lizard brain and a rat brain and a human brain and a bird brain and so on, in general, have the same types of neurons.

0:07:19 LFB: It’s just that through evolutionary time as brains have gotten larger and larger, as bodies have gotten larger and larger brains reorganize themselves, so on the outside, it looks like there are these different parts on the inside though, when you look into the interior of the cells, you can see that humans have the same complement of neurons as a blood-sucking lamprey.

0:07:49 SC: And one of the major issues here just to pre-figure the rest of the conversation is the role of emotions in all this part of this, I guess, primitive picture that some of us have, is that the emotions are roiling beneath us and our rational cognitive selves are either tamping them down or deploying them strategically, and you have a very different view of where emotions come from.

0:08:15 LFB: Well, let me just say that my view isn’t just an opinion… The National Academies of Sciences defines a theory as a set of hypotheses or ideas that are backed up by a heck of a lot of evidence, right? And so what I’m about to describe, it’s not just my personal opinion, it’s my considered opinion based on decades of research on the anatomy and the function and the metabolics of the brain, and to answer your question, it requires me to step back a little bit and make a couple of preliminary comments so that your listeners will understand the point that I’m trying to make here, and that is that emotions and feelings… Emotions certainly are feelings, but humans are also equipped to have feelings that are not emotions, and so… What do I mean by that? What I mean is that your brain’s most important job is to regulate your body, brains didn’t evolve to think rationally, they didn’t evolve to see or feel they evolved. You never can say why a brain… There’s not only one reason why your brain evolved, and you can never say for sure what that reason, what those reasons are.

0:09:54 LFB: But the brain’s most important job is regulating the body, and as the brain regulates the body, the body is constantly sending sense data about its state back to the brain, so when your heart beats, when your lungs expand as you are metabolising glucose in your cells and using oxygen and so on, you’re not aware of the fact that your brain is constantly receiving sense data from your body, you don’t feel those sensations happening, but that is what’s happening under the hood, so you don’t… The information from your body, you don’t experience it with the same degree of fidelity that you… Say, see or hear or smell or taste. You don’t really experience it very often at all in any very direct way, unless something’s wrong with your body, usually you experience what’s happening in your body as very simple feelings of pleasant-ness, unpleasantness, feeling calm, feeling worked up, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable, so evolution has fashioned us with this kind of simple barometer of how our bodies are doing basically, and that simple barometer is what you would call feeling or mood, or what a scientist like me would call affect.

0:11:26 SC: Affect right.

0:11:26 LFB: Now, affect feeling pleasant, unpleasant, feeling worked out, calm. Affect is with you all the time. Your brain is always regulating your body from the moment that you’re born until the moment that you draw your last breath, and so your body is always sending information to your brain even when you’re sleeping, and so you are always in some state of affect. Your affective feelings are properties of consciousness in a sense, they’re always with you, but they’re not emotions, in order to make affective feelings transform them into emotions, other things have to happen, and so in a sense, emotions are these complex constructions that your brain produces out of the sense data from your body that you experience is affect, so affect can sometimes be transformed into emotion, but often it isn’t, and you just have these feelings kind of as a running sort of soundscape or feeling scape that just is occurring as the background in your everyday life. And so what this means is that you may have moments where affect is really at the front of your consciousness, front of your attention and you may have it… Moments where you’re not really paying attention to it at all.

0:12:47 LFB: So it’s sort of in the background, but it’s never… You never have an affectless moment in your life, so you can never be without feeling unless you have a non-neurotypical brain or something is terribly wrong, and so rational moments, moments of rational decision are not moments without feeling, that’s just not possible based on the anatomy of how our brains are structured.

0:13:14 SC: And good, so that’s a great overview of the story, and I think that we had the time to dig into it a little bit more deeply. So why don’t we start with this idea that in some sense, the brain evolved to regulate and predict behaviour, to understand what we should be doing in the world, you have this wonderful little example in the book in Seven And a Half Lessons, I forget what the little organism is called, but it’s basically the little stomach that has some nerve endings.

0:13:45 LFB: Right, yeah. So there’s a little creature, the modern creature is called Amphioxus.

0:13:52 SC: Amphioxus.

0:13:54 LFB: Or its common name is a lancelet, and this creature has been around for… I don’t know, 500 million years, give or take. It really, it hasn’t really… Its niche, the environment that it lives in hasn’t really changed very much, and so it hasn’t changed very much either, and it is considered to be very, very similar to the common ancestor that we and other vertebrates animals with backbones share with invertebrates like flies and octopuses and so on, and this little… It looks like basically a little fish in a sense, although it has gill slits, and this creature is so interesting ’cause it’s probably not any longer than your finger wiggles around, it has a very, very simple motor system and very, very simple sense of touch on its body, but it can’t see, it can’t hear, it has no ears, no eyes, it has no brain, it has some of the cells that eventually will become a vertebrate brain, but or… Animals with brains will eventually be… Some of these cells will eventually become a brain, but amphioxi don’t really have brains, they basically plant themselves in the sand, sort of like a blade of grass, filter food, and then when the food concentration decreases, the animal will uproot itself wriggle itself to some random spot where probabilistically, there’ll be more food plant itself and feed some more, and so basically, this is an animal that doesn’t really…

0:15:50 LFB: It has no sense organs, so it’s not really aware that it has an environment at all, and it doesn’t really have a brain, and to some extent doesn’t really need one because it’s not really moving around that much, it’s not really moving around that much other than… To feed and occasionally escape a predator, if there’s a looming darkness, the animal doesn’t have an eye, but it has the ability, it has some cells that can sense light versus dark, probably to control a circadian rhythm, so it can sense darkness and when there’s a looming darkness, it darts away, and that’s basically what the animal is capable of, and remarkably, you and I and every animal on this planet derived from an ancestor that was somewhat like this creature.

0:16:48 SC: Well, that’s the lesson that I got. And maybe this is too much, but you say you have this very simple minded, literally simple-minded, if minded at all kind of organism, and yet our brains as marvelous and wonderful as they are, it can be just thought of as elaborations on this theme that you move when you’re running out of food and you run away from the looming darkness, and we indeed have plenty of looming darkness around us. So maybe that makes sense.

0:17:17 LFB: Yeah, for sure. I start… When I started writing this book, the first set of lines, I wrote in the first half lesson were the earth was once ruled by creatures without brains, that’s a biological statement, not a political statement, ’cause it does feel right now, is the world being run with creatures does that have brains. The fact is that brains are really expensive organs to have, metabolically speaking, your brain is the most expensive organ in your whole body, and as over evolutionary time as bodies got bigger, brains got bigger, and so your brain’s most important job is to regulate your body and what you think and what you see and what you feel are in the service of regulating that body, your body… So, of course, thinking is helpful, but it’s really in the service of regulating your body, and there’s a great… There’s this great little meme that I don’t know when it started, but Sea squirts, which are called tunicates which are also very ancient animals in this evolutionary story these animals actually in their adult form attached to a rock and they never move again and then proceed to eat their own brains, basically, they digest their own brains.

0:18:56 LFB: So the meme, right? Is that this is like a model for tenure, like what happens to a professor when they’re tenure.

0:19:00 SC: There are so many metaphors lurking there underneath the ocean floor yeah.

0:19:04 LFB: I know, right? But the general lesson there is that brains are really expensive, and their most important job is controlling your body to keep you alive and well, to figure out when to spend resources and when to save them. So essentially, you can think of your brain as running a budget for your body, it’s not budgeting money, it’s budgeting resources like salt and glucose and oxygen and water and so on, and every movement that you take, every new thing that you learn requires energy. And the assumption is that there’ll be some return on that investment, and so your brain is always doing this very complicated sort of calculus to figure out which movements are worth it, when is it worth it to learn something new versus go with what you know.

0:20:00 SC: Right, and it does kind of make sense, that rationality as glorious as it is is kind of an outgrowth of that. It’s some sort of optimization. Puzzle-solving kind of thing. In fact, you deploy a vocabulary word, which I’d come across before, but I felt maybe I could get away without learning and now I should learn it, which is allostasis. We talked to Antonio Damasio, whose favourite word is homeostasis and allostasis seems closely related to that, but different.

0:20:29 LFB: Yeah, so allostasis, so let me say homeostasis is a very old concept that certainly Antonio Damasio has used to great effect. But the idea of homeostasis goes all the way back to the physiologist Walter Cannon at the turn of the 20th century, and the idea is that homeostasis is that a system has a set point, a point where it’s running most efficiently, and like a thermostat, in a sense, and so whenever there’s a deviation from that set point, the system will attempt to return itself to that setpoint ’cause it’s most efficient at that setpoint, and it’s a very reactive model of how things work.

0:21:25 LFB: So there’s a change and then the brain responds to that change by attempting to return to the set point, what we know though is first of all, that brains and in fact, many biological systems run by prediction, not by reaction, so your brain is not sitting around dormant, waiting for stuff to happen and then reacting to it that is incredibly metabolically inefficient and metabolic efficiency is actually a major constraint on brain evolution and on the health of individual creatures like you and me, so instead what’s happening is that your brain is attempting to predict the needs of the body and meet those needs before they arise, so for example, your brain doesn’t stand you up and then change your blood pressure to get oxygen to your brain, that would be metabolically costly to put it mildly, ’cause you’d probably faint and break a limb, but instead what happens is as your brain is preparing to stand you up, it also changes your blood pressure so that as you stand…

0:22:40 LFB: Right, and so allostasis is the predictive regulation of the body, allostasis is literally defined as attempting to anticipate the needs of the body and meet those needs before they arise, that’s literally the definition of allostasis and also the assumption is that it’s not that you’re trying to reduce spending, it’s that you’re trying… Well you are trying to reduce spending, but you’re trying to be efficient in your spending, meaning you can be allosterically balanced when you’re running on a treadmill, you can be allosterically balanced when you’re sitting quietly at your desk. The point is that your brain is attempting to get your body into the most efficient window or the most efficient range of functioning, because efficiency is what’s important. So, for example, when you exercise, I don’t know if you work out at the gym or if you work out with trainers or whatever, but if you start learning a new exercise your… It takes a lot of effort. And you might not be very good at it, but as you practise, you start to get better and better and you develop muscle memory, and you start to become much more efficient at doing that exercise, and that’s really great when you’re playing tennis, but it really sucks if you’re trying to keep yourself in cardiovascular health, because what you wanna do is maximally exercise your heart, and so interval training is really great for this because you’re constantly changing what you do all the time.

0:24:24 LFB: This is a great illustration of allostasis. If you keep doing the same exercise over and over and over again, you’re gonna get better and better and better at it, more efficient, more efficient, more efficient at it, because your brain is allosterically adjusting to it, and the reason why interval training works so great is that the minute the brain is starting to allosterically adjust your trainer changes your exercise program.

0:24:49 SC: That’s great. It’s actually quite rare that we get actionable advice here on The Mindscape Podcast, more about a big picture, theories of the world that this is actually news you can use, which is something a little bit different. And this theme, I guess it brings me back, I did have a conversation also with Carl Friston who has his free energy principle again and again, in slightly different angles, we get this theme that life is hard. And there’s an infinite number of things that could happen to us. And so the brain figures out schemes that are basically shortcuts that are sort of ways to do a pretty good job, maybe not the best possible job, make us more efficient than we would be just by blind flailing around.

0:25:39 LFB: Yeah, I think that’s putting… I think that’s the right vibe, I think that’s putting it really mildly though, I guess what I would say is… And I think that the philosophers and neuroscientists and some electrical engineers might care about the difference between allostasis and free energy, but for what I’m about to say, Carl is trying to take things right down to the level of physics, which I’m sure you appreciate. I’m happy to stay at the level of biology and probably ’cause I got a C in high school physics and I couldn’t even get through my college courses, just confessing there, but I think generally, yeah.

0:26:32 LFB: The point really is that, the world is filled with ambiguous sense data. If you think about it, your brain is trapped in a dark silent box for your whole life, called your skull, and it’s receiving sense data from the world through your sense organs, your eyes or ears, you know, and so on, and it’s receiving sense data from your body, and these are the effects of some set of causes, but your brain doesn’t know the causes, it only knows the effects, so that’s a classic problem that philosophers call a reverse inference problem or an inverse inference problem, you know the facts, but you have to guess the cause so you’re constantly faced with input that you actually don’t know what caused it, so you don’t know what to do about it to keep you alive and well, and so your brain has one other source of information that’s available, and that is what’s happened in the past, under similar circumstances.

0:27:46 LFB: And in science, this is how you know, I don’t know if this is how it works in physics, but in psychology and in neuroscience, the way that you know that something is important is that every time someone discovers it they gave it a new name. So some people call this memory, some people call it perceptual inference, some people call it simulation, there are lots and lots and lots of names for what I’m about to describe, but basically, if we were to freeze time right now and look at what your brain is doing, it’s got some representation of what is going on in your body and what’s going on in the world, and maybe the trajectory of change that brought you there, and it’s asking itself, metaphorically. The last time I was confronted with this array of sense data, what caused it? What did I do? What did I smell, what did I see, what did I hear, what did I feel? So it’s basically conjuring in its own wiring, re-implementing past experiences that are somewhat similar to the present conditions in order to predict what’s going to happen next, and the remarkable thing about this from my perspective, ’cause I’m just like…

0:29:12 LFB: I am a very, very, very skeptical person, so it took me 25 years to even believe my own data, let alone, so I just don’t… I’m not easily swayed, but the thing that really I found remarkable about this is that I was reading in, work on neuroanatomy, and then I was reading work on signal processing, and then I was reading other work in electrophysiology and other work in functional brain function and nervous system function, and they all point to the same idea, even though those literatures don’t talk to each other at all. And that is that your brain is basically using the past to predict the future as a way of controlling your body and creating your experience in the present.

0:30:04 SC: It’s very… Something I can be very sympathetic to as a physicist who is interested in the arrow of time, not to keep name dropping past podcast, but we also had one with Jenann Ismael, who is a philosopher of science who thinks about exactly this, why we think that we have choices and free will and so forth, and it has a lot to do with projecting what’s going to happen into the media past and recalling the immediate future, but I think that’s a whole another podcast because we need to get to emotions somehow, and we’re very close, so… Great, we had this brain, it’s doing its best to get along in the world without wasting too many resources, and as you said, both external sense data, but also is interoception the right word for this model for this idea that the brain has about what its internal body state is doing.

0:31:00 LFB: Yes, so you can think about, if you use this idea of the brain in the box, right. Then from the brain’s perspective, the periphery is its body in the world, your body is a part of the environment that the brain is trying to guess at, and so the sense data that come, that we experience as vision and touch and so on, we call exteroceptive and the sense data that come from the body is called interoceptive, sometimes people mistake interoception for the awareness of those sense data, but really interoception is the brain’s modeling of the sensory environment of the body, meaning your brain needs to make guesses about what your heart is doing, what your lungs are doing, where the glucose needs to be, where more oxygen versus carbon dioxide is, and so on and so forth. So your brain is using sense data, interoceptive data from the body to help model the body in order to figure out how to control it and what to do next, and your brain is always doing this your whole life, every waking moment of your life, and every moment that you’re asleep, this is going on all the time. And then sometimes your brain will make sense of those data, so when you don’t see separately from hearing, separately from smelling to us, it feels like our senses are very distinct, but actually at the level of the brain, the senses are to some extent, speaking to one another, and scientists call this, neuroscientists call this multi-modality that you’re…

0:32:58 LFB: And So interoception is all tied up with vision and audition, and touch and so on, it’s like this intimate dance between the senses that’s always happening all the time. So for example, literally what you see is influenced by the state of your body, you may not realise that, but it is actually right, and there are many, many studies which certainly the anatomy clearly points to this, but also there are very many functional studies that show it and so.

0:33:32 LFB: The way to explain how emotions are made is the following, so your brain at every moment is asking itself what is similar to the present sensory array, what is similar to the present, not what is this… Not what are these sense data, but what’s similar to this in my past in psychology, things that are similar to one another are called a category, and the representation of a category is called a concept. So you could say to what your brain is doing when it’s predicting what it’s doing is category construction or concept construction, your brain is conjuring a concept as a set of predictions about the possible meaning of sense data that is about to arrive at your brain to your brain, so it’s making guesses, hypotheses about what’s about to happen and what caused it.

0:34:39 LFB: If I hear a rustle, so if I hear a rustling, I don’t mean to go on and on, but it’s really more complicated than the idea that you have a fear circuit in your lizard brain that gets triggered and then poof, you’re fearful, it… Unfortunately, it takes more words to describe this, but the idea would be, you’re walking in the woods, say, and you hear a rustle of leaves and you’re the rest of leaves, and so if you stop, stop time and you look at what’s happening in the brain. The brain’s gonna be asking itself what is similar in my past to the sensory array right now, and your past isn’t just the stuff that you’ve experienced, it’s also stuff that you’ve read about or experiences you’ve had watching movies or somebody telling you something, or things that you’ve observed.

0:35:37 LFB: And so your brain might predict that it’s the wind, or it might predict that it’s a snake, or it might predict that something fell from a tree, or it might predict that it’s a person with a gun, or it might predict, your brain could be predicting lots of things, and it’s predicting more than one thing. And these predictions are concepts, they’re knowledge that you have based on past experience about what’s likely to happen next, and so your brain actually starts to prepare your body to, it prepares your heart and your lungs and the internal systems of your body to support whatever action your brain is believing that it should take, so it’s sort of weighing probabilities, trying to figure out which one is the right one, and then it begins to prepare your action, and it begins to also prepare the anticipated sense data that will come next.

0:36:43 LFB: So what did I hear the last time I prepared this action? What is the last, did I see the last time? What did I smell the last time? How did I feel the last time… And so your brain’s actually preparing these… Changing the firing of its own neurons to prepare this response, and then the sense data come in, and if the sense data match the prediction, then the response just executes and to you, it feels like you’re just reacting to stuff in the world, but actually there’s been a lot of preparation under the hood, so when your brain conjures past experience to make sense of sense data, it’s constructing a concept, if it constructs an emotion concept then you, it makes an emotion, if it constructs some other kind of concept then it is constructing some other kind of experience.

0:37:35 SC: Yeah, I think this is fascinating because I understand the sort of intellectual version of this or the conceptual version, where we say, I look at a picture on my computer screen and rather than just seeing it as 1000 x 1000 array of pixels with different color values, I say, “Oh look, there’s a puppy” or something like that, I core screen it in that way to give myself a concept that goes along with all sorts of other concepts but, and that I think most of us can sort of easily grasp, but you’re bringing in this extra element, which is that emotions are an example of that, and in particular, an example that we use to help the body decide what actions to take, is that a fair way of saying it?

0:38:19 LFB: That’s absolutely the right way of saying it, so there’s so much embedded in what I’m saying, there’re so many implications for people’s everyday lives, which I wrote about actually in my book called How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Where I explain this in great detail. It’s a popular science book, so if you wanna know it in the really nitty-gritty detail, you have to go to the scientific papers, but it’s a popular science book, and so it has some amount of detail and it also has a set of implications, and I’ve given demonstrations in many of the talks to the public that I’ve given about how this works, which listeners can find on my public website, lisafeldmanbarrett.com, where you can demonstrate how concepts work, concepts are not this like laundry list of features to describe something, right? So if I asked you like, what’s a cat? Or what’s a bird? You might give me a set of features that you think a bird has like wings and feathers, and of course, but the thing is that not all birds have wings and not all birds have feathers, and in fact, research shows that when you ask someone to tell you the concept of a bird, what they’re doing really is they’re imagining an instance of a bird, so if I ask you, Sean, tell me the features of a bird, what kind of bird does your mind conjure in that moment?

0:39:58 SC: Right, there’s some sort of standard bird, which is probably for something like a crow.

0:40:03 LFB: Okay, a crow. That’s interesting, a lot of people say like a robin or… But a crow, we can go with a crow and then…

0:40:08 SC: We can blame Game of Thrones for this.

0:40:10 LFB: I’m sorry?

0:40:11 SC: We can blame Game of Thrones for this, I presume.

0:40:14 LFB: Right? No, that’s right… That’s great, actually. But if you’re in a pet store and your goal is to buy a pet bird, what kind of bird would your brain conjure?

0:40:31 SC: Right now I’m thinking of a, like a little… Oh, I forget what they’re called, the little budgies… The little parakeets.

0:40:37 LFB: Yeah, yeah. A little budgie, right, exactly. And if you were sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table and you were hungry and the bird was serving as a function, its function was food, what kind of bird would you conjure?

0:40:52 SC: Oh, you’ve chosen a terrible example because my wife, Jennifer and I always have peking duck on Thanksgiving, but duck still counts as a bird.

0:40:58 LFB: Woah, there you go, for you it’s peking duck, actually that’s a great example because for me it would be… It would be Turkey. And the really interesting thing is that the experiences that you have over and over and over again, like both of us watching Game of Thrones, actually changes, which concepts that your brain makes, the experiences that you have today become the predictions of tomorrow, basically, you are cultivating continually your past as a means of controlling your future, you are… The experiences you have today, become the past that your brain uses to make predictions for tomorrow. So the point here though, is that when your brain makes a concept, it’s not making a laundry list of features that’s static, that’s used again and again and again in all situations, your brain is making a situated concept, it’s like whatever the function of a bird is in a given situation, that’s the prediction that your brain is making, and it’s true also for emotions, so for example, if I ask you, what this… If I ask you What is anger… What are the features of anger… You’re from a Western culture, and you probably know the Western stereotype of anger, which is… Well, tell me, what do you think anger is… What’s anger?

0:42:28 SC: It’s an emotion where you’re very upset and you’re directing that upsetedness at a person or an event that has done something wrong.

0:42:37 LFB: Okay, so somebody has harmed you and it’s unpleasant, and you’re really worked up, and you’re likely to do what…

0:42:52 SC: React badly against them.

0:42:54 LFB: Okay, do something to hurt them, to harm them, and how does your face look?

0:43:01 SC: Scrunched up and maybe turning red for me.

0:43:03 LFB: Yeah, so you’re scowling and your blood pressure is rising and you’re turning red… Okay, so that’s the stereotype of… Just like a crow for you is a stereotype of a bird, or for me, it might be a robin, that’s the Western stereotype of anger. So the data show that about 30% of the time people do scowl in the West, people do scowl in anger, which means that’s statistically more than chance, so that gets you a publication in a good journal. But what it means is that 70% of the time your face is doing something else other than scowling…

0:43:51 SC: Yeah. Nowhere near a 100%…

0:43:54 LFB: Yeah, that’s meaningful too. Sometimes we cry in anger, sometimes we laugh in anger or smile in anger, sometimes we frown in anger, sometimes our faces are completely still in anger, your brain using concepts is preparing your actions that are situated, that are the action that will best work in a situation that you’re in, so similarly, your blood pressure does go up in anger sometimes, but it also goes down sometimes, and sometimes it stays the same, and sometimes anger really… The function of anger is really to cause harm to someone else who’s harmed you, but sometimes anger brings people together, sometimes the function of anger is to make you feel part of a group, sometimes anger helps you compete better, sometimes it helps you win a debate or a soccer match, so anger… Sometimes anger is pleasant. It’s not always unpleasant. So the point here is that just in the way that birds change their features depending on the functions that they’re serving, this is also true of emotion, categories of the instances of emotion, so the instances of anger are not one thing with one pattern.

0:45:20 LFB: There is a population of instances, your brain can make many concepts for anger, and that means that it can control your body in ways that are tied very closely to the situation, in flexible ways to allow you to deal with the situation, so essentially, emotions are not your reactions to the world. They are your brain’s construction of what the sense data mean in your… The sense data in your body, what they mean… What their meaning is relative to what’s going on around you in the world, and it’s a prescription for action about what you should do next to deal with that situation.

0:46:07 SC: I really liked the… I think that it was you who made this analogy… Sorry if I’m getting it from somewhere else, but the analogy with how different people perceive colors, there’s physicists can think about colors as different, spectra and wavelengths of light and so forth, but real human beings have the ability to perceive different colors, and they’re gonna see two things that are almost exactly the same wavelength and call them the same color. So there’s some core screening that goes on and it’s real, there’s overlap from person to person, but it’s not absolutely objective and universal, different people will do it in a slightly different way…

0:46:43 LFB: Absolutely. Yeah absolutely.

0:46:46 SC: And it maps on to the idea that emotions are not like… There’s an anger circuit and a fear circuit in your brain, and you can go and poke those neurons, it’s something that is a little more plastic, a little bit more developing, a little bit more socially constructed than that.

0:47:00 LFB: Absolutely, I think that how emotions are made, the framework, the theoretical framework, and the evidence to support it really is a neuroscience explanation for social construction… This is something that I deal with in Seven and A Half Lessons About the Brain too, it’s really the… Well, it comes up in a couple of lessons, but it’s really the topic of the final lesson, and that is that much of what we think of as the natural world, the physical world is actually created by us, and what I mean by that is that we… Humans have this capacity that no other animal has as far as we know, which is to create what’s called social reality, it’s to take something physical and impose a function on it that it doesn’t have by virtue of its physical nature, but if we all agree that it has that function, then it takes on that function only by virtue of our agreement.

0:48:23 LFB: So the perfect example of this is money, different things have served as currency, things like paper, plastic, the promise of paper in the future, which is a mortgage, but for the promise of money in the future, salt, diamonds, barley, big rocks in the ocean that don’t move, Bitcoin, all of these things basically, they only derive their value by virtue of what’s called a collective agreement, a bunch of humans agree that this thing can be traded for material goods and poof, it has value, if these humans then decide that this can no longer be traded for material goods, or some people withdraw their consent then poof it no longer has value, that’s it. Basically, money is the perfect example of social reality because it’s so malleable in this way, it’s like a collective illusion that we all create together by virtue of our agreement to impose a function on something physical that the thing doesn’t have by its physical nature.

0:49:46 SC: But it’s very real for all of that, it has enormous power, a causal influence in the world…

0:49:50 LFB: Oh my goodness, it has tremendous causal influence, and in fact, you can stick someone’s head in a brain scanner and have them earn little pieces of money and you get very real brain activity changes based on money. But the point here is that much of our everyday lives is influenced in civilization, by things that we ourselves have constructed and imposed meaning on, and so for example, a wide-eyed gasping stare in the West is considered to be the stereotypic expression of fear. And there are scientists who will give you some concocted evolutionary tale about why this is the case. The only problem with it is that in many parts of the world, that is not… That facial configuration is a configuration of threat, like when you wanna threaten someone, you wanna threaten them with harm, that’s the face that you make, so there’s nothing specifically meaningful in a physical sense about any facial expression, per se, it’s that we have, in a psychological sense, we have imposed meaning on it, and if you and I share that meaning, we agree that that movement has that meaning in this context, then that makes me more predictable to you, and it makes you more predictable to me, and that reduces the metabolic burden on our brains because things that are predictable are just less expensive metabolically speaking, and so there’s a real advantage to having things be predictable.

0:52:09 SC: It very much is sympathetic or analogous, I guess, to the physics concepts of emergence in some sense, where you have a way of talking about a system which is vastly simpler than all of the data that you might imagine is required, yet nevertheless gives you a really strong handle on what’s going to happen. My favourite example is just the center of mass of a planet. If you wanna know how the earth goes around the sun, you don’t need to keep track of all the 10 to the 50th atoms in the earth. You need relatively little amounts of information, and this idea seems to be… I always worry that I’m sort of over-physic-sizing things, but it seems to be that you’re saying that emotions are kind of a handle on the world that allows the brain to convert impulses into action in a way that is not absolutely determined by the world out there, but is a shortcut that allows us to get by in a more efficient way.

0:53:12 LFB: Absolutely, I think the main thing to understand though, is that it only works when you’re in a context where other people share the same concepts as you, right, because emotion concepts are concepts of social reality, so the analogy, for example, to color categories, I think is really apt. You don’t always experience light at a particular wavelength, as a particular color, it depends on the context that you’re in and actually, it also depends on the concepts that you have, that your brain is able to make, so concepts aren’t these abstract things, they are very, very sensory and motor. So for example, if I ask you, if you keep your eyes open and look at some… Focus on something in the room, keep your eyes open and… But in your mind’s eye, imagine an apple of the kind that you would eat, like a red McIntosh apple. Can you do that?

0:54:31 SC: I can, yes.

0:54:32 LFB: Okay, and imagine grasping that apple and imagine taking a bite of that apple, can you hear the crunch of the apple, can you taste the tartness of the apple?

0:54:51 SC: I can… Yes, my eyes are closed, I’m imagining all these things.

0:54:54 LFB: Okay, so you’ve just created the concept of an apple of a McIntosh apple, that’s what a concept is, it’s actually changing the firing of your own neurons so that you can see a ghostly apple, you can get the gist of a taste of that apple, you can hear the crunch of the apple. If I had your head in a brain scanner with your eyes closed, we would see changes in early visual cortex, the neurons that are important for vision, we’d see changes in the parts of the brain that are important for moving your body, we’d see changes in the parts of your brain, that prepare your body to eat, we would see all of these changes, even though your eyes are closed, you’re not eating anything, even if I just say the word apple, that we can see these changes happen in someone’s brain. And they’re happening in your brain as I speak words, which are communicating concepts, and as you speak words and communicate concepts to me, they’re happening in my brain, and that’s how we perform essentially mental telepathy on each other when we communicate, we’re planting or sending or lobbying concepts at each other, and these concepts are not abstract things, they…

0:56:25 LFB: Literally, your brain remarkably, is changing the firing of its own neurons to prepare for incoming sense data, so that’s what you’re doing when you have a song going through your head that you cannot get out of your head no matter what you do, that is the same process neurally as prediction or making a concept, when someone has tinnitus and they hear the frequency of sound in their head, that they’ve lost, the ability to hear from the world, that’s also something very equivalent to prediction, I have this great like making a concept.

0:57:10 LFB: I have his great gift that someone shared with me, which I now use in my talks all the time, which is this, it’s a movie of a jumping… Of a electrical tower playing jump rope, and when people look at it, I use it to sort of explain how concepts work because when you look at at first, you can see that it’s electrical towers playing jump rope. And so this shows us a couple of things, one thing it shows us is that the way that your brain makes concepts is what we would call generative or meaning, your brain can take bits and pieces of past experience and combine it in new ways, so that you can experience something that you’ve never experienced before, like have you ever in your real life, ever seen electrical towers playing jump rope? No.

0:58:06 SC: No. [chuckle]

0:58:06 LFB: But you can immediately understand that that’s what you’re looking at, because you’ve… Yeah. Okay. But the really cool thing about it is, even though there’s no sound, this is just a black and white movie that is silent, you can hear the towers something as they hit the ground and you can feel the vibration in your chest.

0:58:29 SC: And I guess that makes sense, because in some sense, one of the many lessons I get from conversations like this is that there’s less of a difference between what happens inside our brain when we experience sensory input from the outside world, and when we imagine that input, then we might think similar things are happening in the brain.

0:58:51 LFB: Yeah. Exactly. When you’re dreaming, when you’re imagining, when you are actually perceiving what’s going on in the world, very, very, very similar things are actually happening under the hood. Exactly. And so when I say your brain is making a concept or it’s creating a prediction, it’s changing the firing of its own neurons. Your brain is changing the firing of your neurons to prepare you to act completely outside of your awareness and with great, very quick and very automatically, it’s preparing to… Your body to act in a particular way, and it’s also preparing… It’s inferring or guessing, what are you… If you act in this way, what are you likely to hear? What are you likely to see? What are you likely to feel? Because there will have been changes inside your body, it’s preparing these in exactly the same way as it conjured an apple. With sights and sounds and tastes and so on.

1:00:00 SC: One of the issues that always comes up in these conversations is the free will question or the amount of control we have over ourselves, and I got this wonderful sentence from one of your papers where you say, “Actual executive control and the feeling of being in control are not synonymous. But I take it that they can both be there, it’s just that this feeling of control is a little bit different than the actual control to whatever extent we have that…

1:00:27 LFB: Yeah. So this is a really… This is a really tricky problem, I would say, in psychology and in neuroscience, and maybe it’s there in other sciences too, I don’t know, but we have common… We have words that mean things in common sense in everyday parlance, and then we have… Sometimes people… Scientists will use the same words to mean something technical, and that makes people mistakenly believe that the words are referring to the same thing when they’re not.

1:01:03 SC: Oh. Yeah. We know. [chuckle]

1:01:04 LFB: Yeah. So you have a set of… We all have a set of neurons connected… A network of neurons connected in our brains that help to select which inputs we will care about, which sense data we’ll care about, and which actions… Which predictions will be completed, and these are called the control network. [chuckle]

1:01:36 SC: Wow.

1:01:38 LFB: But they work all the time. In fact, probably they’re relaxed when you’re sleeping somewhat, and they’re relaxed if you take Psilocybin or ketamine, but… So you can chemically relax them or you can chemically enhance them by taking an amphetamine or something that will enhance dopamine, say. So you can… Or norepinephrine, you can enhance them or you can diminish them, but they’re never off, and your experience of control, of being in control, it is not related particularly to the function of these neurons. All of this stuff that’s happening, prediction and selection, and for the most part is happening without your awareness and without any sense of agency or control on… Without any sense of agency or control on your part, any feeling of control on your part. And usually when we’re talking about free will, we mean… Free will is a big topic that…

1:02:48 SC: I’ve noticed. Yes. [chuckle]

1:02:49 LFB: Scholars have been debating since there have been scholars to debate, and of course, I don’t really think of myself as an expert in this regard, but I will say this that the traditional idea of free will, people who… Scholars, writers, thinkers who question the traditional notion of free will are probably correct. That doesn’t mean that you have no control over your behaviour, and it doesn’t mean that you are not responsible for your behaviour. But the traditional notion of free will is, I think questionable, but you do have, I think… And this is something I talk about and how emotions are made, and it’s also something that I elaborate on in Seven And a Half lessons About the Brain, we do have control over our behaviour and we are responsible for our behaviour, but the manner of that control looks a little different than common sense might lead us to believe.

1:04:01 SC: Right. And that’s definitely one of the implications of this kind of research for, as I joked about before, sort of practical, everyday actionable information that we can get, but there’s others. You talk about the fact that tech companies are trying to read people’s emotions on their faces, and I was a big fan of the TV show, Lie to me, where Tim Roth would just be able to know everything about you by looking at micro-expressions, but if this view of emotions is not hard-wired and affected by social reality is true, then that’s gonna be a much trickier task that we might have guessed.

1:04:42 LFB: Yes. There’s so much to say about that, Sean, honestly. But maybe the simplest thing to say is this, facial movements are not a language to be read the way… Like words on a page. When you look at someone, your brain is making a guess about what those facial movements mean, and the brain is guessing, it’s inferring automatically and effortlessly. But it’s nonetheless, inferring based on the context that’s occurring not just spatially, not just spatially, but also temporally, and not just outside your body, but also inside your body, so the part of the context for inferring the meaning of facial movements in somebody else is what’s happening inside your own body in that moment and what’s occured previously. And I should say that one of the best experiences I had, I’ve had really as a scientist was I was asked with four other scientists, all of us senior scientists, all of us coming from very different theoretical positions on the nature of emotion, so very different priors, and some of us didn’t know each other in advance, or at least had not met in person, and we met for two and a half years, every week on Zoom, this was before the pandemic.

1:06:21 LFB: We read over a thousand papers about emotional expressions in adults, in children, in neurotypical adults, in children, in people who are born congenitally blind, and people who are from urban cultures and from remote cultures that are much… Somewhat more secluded, not completely secluded, but somewhat more distant from western cultural practices and norms and people from… The Hadza people who are hunters, gatherers in sub-Saharan Africa and so on and so forth. So really a huge literature, and we all… All of us, despite our starting positions, we all came to consensus around what the data showed, and in two cases, this was a major change for the scientists involved in their views about emotional expressions, because the data clearly show that scowls are one expression of anger, but they are not the expression of anger, they’re not even the dominant expression of anger.

1:07:46 SC: Right.

1:07:46 LFB: Smiling is one expression of happiness, but it’s not the expression of happiness, and so on and so forth. As I said before, the data show that you scowl about… People scowl about 30% of the time in western cultures, even in Eastern cultures, if they’re urban cultures in large countries, than… People scowl about 30% of the time, they’re meaningfully doing something else with their face, about 70% of the time. That’s low reliability. It’s not zero if it’s low, and people scowl when they’re not angry, they scowl when they’re confused, they scowl when they’re concentrating really hard, they scowl when you tell them a bad joke, they scowl when they have gas. That’s low specificity. So 30% of the time, better than chance may be good enough to get a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[chuckle]

1:08:42 LFB: And it may be good enough if you wanna use this kind of technology to try to sell something to someone, but the best software, what it can do is it can detect scowling but not tell you what scowling means. And what companies are doing right now is they’re confusing the observation of a movement with its meaning, with its emotional meaning. And that may be fine when all you’re doing is somewhat trying to sell somebody something. ‘Cause what’s the worst that can happen? They don’t buy it and you lose money, but when you are making judgements that will affect the outcomes of real lives, like who gets to go to what school, whether someone is charged with a crime or found guilty of that crime, whether…

1:09:36 SC: Who should be hired. Yeah.

1:09:37 LFB: You get hired for a job or not. Hmm?

1:09:39 SC: I was just saying exactly the same thing as you, whether someone should be hired for a job or not.

1:09:43 LFB: Yeah. Then it becomes a really, really serious matter, and one of the points that we make in the paper that we wrote together is that we… When we talk about interpreting a face in context, we don’t mean measuring one or two other signals like, okay, you can also measure people’s body movements and maybe measure their voice or maybe measure their heart rate, that’s really not what your brain is using when your brain looks at someone and makes an inference very automatically and effortlessly about what that facial movement means, your brain is using high dimensional data. Lots and lots and lots of signals that are spatially and temporally creating this really elaborate context, so emergence is not a bad metaphor for what is happening here, and as far as I know, no one is doing research quite like that, although we’ve been recommending it for some time.

1:10:53 SC: Well, we always like to spin what we say here on the podcast as advice to young people in high school, in college, now who are deciding what to do so that if they… If there are good open research directions, then by all means recommend them to the young people out there.

1:11:07 LFB: Yeah. Here is what I’ll say, I’ll say that one of the reasons why the theory of constructed emotion or construction isn’t more generally, people… Scholars used to make this distinction between evolutionary theories about the brain, which were heavily biological and then social constructivist theories, which were… Didn’t care about biology at all, and only were concerned about cultural influences, and one of the interesting things about the fear of constructive emotion is that it’s looking at… It’s really giving an evolutionary and biological foundation to how the brain constructs every experience you have and every action that you take, and it really, it’s providing a framework that can integrate evidence from molecular genetics and other forms of biology all the way up to cultural inheritance and anthropology and questions in sociology.

1:12:29 LFB: It’s a broad, broad, broad framework, and I’m speaking directly to young people when I say this, it’s a really, really exciting time to be asking questions about the human mind and human experience and human action, because this perspective opens up a ton of new questions that weren’t there before. Sometimes progress in science isn’t answering old questions, it’s asking newer better questions, and that’s really what this perspective allows you to do. And that in some way is why I wrote Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain because in my mind, science is incredibly fun, and it’s really, really interesting, and it allows you to be curious and experience wonder almost on a daily basis.

1:13:28 LFB: It’s a wonderful career, but science along with philosophy are also tools for living. Tools for living your best life. I don’t mean that in some kind of airy fairy way, I mean that honestly and authentically, real way. They are tools for living your best life, and the job of a scientist, of some scientists, to some of us, Sean, is to try to distill the technically complicated stuff into some usable nuggets for people who don’t make science their profession on a day-to-day basis, and that can happen in a podcast, it can happen in a book of essays, it can happen in a classroom, it can happen in a self-help book, it can happen all over the place, but one of the reasons why I wrote the book was I wanted to just take some nuggets of neuroscience that I thought were particularly fascinating and use them to invite people to think about big questions regarding human nature, and not really to tell people what kind of a human to be, but to get people to think about who do you wanna be? What kind of a person do you wanna be. How do you wanna…

1:14:50 LFB: How do you wanna live in this world? What do you want your impact to be on other people? Because understanding how your brain works as it’s having this continuous conversation with your body in the world surrounded by other brains and bodies… This is the world that you live in. And so understanding a little bit more about brains helps you make decisions that are a little more deliberate about who you wanna be and what kind of impact you wanna have on other people.

1:15:21 SC: Well, you’ve come to the right podcast, I couldn’t agree more with everything you just said, and it’s so perfect that I think that we can’t improve upon that as a place to end the conversation. So Lisa Feldman Barrett, thanks so much for being in the Mindscape Podcast.

1:15:34 LFB: It’s been my absolute pleasure, thank you so much for having me on your show.

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