'An architect of my emotions?'

Agency and curiosity & how we can rewire our brains for better predictions. (Part 4)

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These recent articles have focused on Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett’s (LFB) work and research¹:

• How Emotions are made

• How do we construct emotions

• Why are brain predictions important

• 'What influences Brain predictions? How can we build better predictions? Solving for unpredictability as a caregiver.

In this Hidden Brain interview, Shankar Vedantam orchestrates a broader, chronological perspective of Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett’s (LFB) work by walking us through key events in her life.

This interview gave me a greater appreciation and understanding of LFB and her decades of research. This article provides a broader context to the previous four articles, explaining how LFB has applied her findings to her everyday life.

Can we be the architect of our emotions? Can we help others with theirs?

This is the podcast.

The article is an edited version of the podcast transcript. The full transcript of this episode is here.

LFB shares personal experiences of feeling responsible for her mother's emotions and being punished for upsetting her by her stepfather.

'It was a Saturday morning. I was probably seven years old. I was watching cartoons which is something I used to do on Saturday mornings with my sister. I probably just finished some kind of sugary cereal. But I never really liked the sugary milk that was leftover. So I put the bowl in the sink. And then I went off to my room.. my mother became very irritated that I had left a bowl in the sink instead of rinsing it out... And my stepfather became pretty enraged that I had upset my mother.

This was a theme that was, constant in my home, that I was responsible for my mother's emotions and I had upset her and he basically grounded me for a month. My grandfather was going to take me to the circus that afternoon I was grounded so I couldn't go .. I'd been looking forward to for a really long time. And then he hit me with a belt with the buckle of a belt which left welts. That was something that he didn't do all the time but he sometimes did. And it left welts, marks on my skin that took a long time to heal.

…Because it upset my mother he became irritated.

Shankar: I mean you must have burst into tears right then and there.

LFB: Absolutely. But you know what you also learn to control your tears because your tears can make someone feel guilty for their own bad behaviour in which case if you're being held responsible for their feelings, then you pay the price.

Shankar: You've said a couple of times that your stepfather held you accountable for your mother's feelings. And you also just said that your stepfather might hold you accountable for his feelings. Talk about that idea for a moment. How did you pick up on the sense that you were responsible for how they felt?

LFB:  Well, he would say it he would say you made your mother feel embarrassed you made your mother you embarrassed your mother, you made your mother angry. You made your mother sad.'

At the start of her career as a clinician LFB started to research self-discrepancy theory². She was unable to replicate findings. It seemed like participants were inaccurately reporting their emotions.

The bad date: She'd agreed to go on a date with someone she didn't think she was attracted to. During the date she felt herself feeling warm, flushed, she had a jittery stomach and was second guessing if she liked the guy. Shortly after she was violently sick and had the flu for a week.

What she thought was romantic attraction was not in fact, romantic attraction. She had just been falling sick. How could anyone mix up these two very different things?

This was an extreme form of what LFB’s volunteers had been doing in her eight failed experiments. They had been mixing up anxiety and depression, or calmness and happiness.

She was mixing up the signals of a viral infection and romantic attraction. But Lisa failed to draw the right implications from what had happened.

She was still certain that people felt happy or sad or anxious or angry. They just had a hard time articulating what they felt.

Her job as a scientist was to find an objective way to identify emotions. It took Lisa a long time, and well after she had graduated, to realise her data had been telling her a different story for a very long time.

It took her about 10 years of research work to come to the conclusion that there are NO objective indicators for emotions.

An emotion is actually a category of highly variable instances. When  you're angry, you may shout, laugh, cry.

Sometimes, you scowl, about half the time when people scowl, they're not angry. That's a significant result compared to chance. It means that 50% of the time if you assume that when someone is scowling, they're angry, you're going to be wrong.

When we refer to an emotion, we're really referring to an instance of a category.

When you look at someone and their scowling, it could be that the person is angry, or that somebody just told them a really bad job, or they're concentrating really hard, or experiencing, a bad bout of gas. You have to make a guess based on your past experiences to know what that scowl means in this context.

LFB and her colleagues did a study to answer the question, what is driving people's perceptions? Is it the expression on the face? Is it the context or is it some combination of both? And the answer is it's mostly the context.

Context always trumps the actual facial movements. When you're asking the question about how is the perceiver experiencing a person's face? There's no inherent meaning in the face. The signals in the face are not inherently meaningful as emotion. The context is creating the meaning, for what those facial movements mean.

LFB had an epiphany IF a context is what helps us read the emotions of others, is it possible that it is the context that also shapes how we read our own emotions?

When she thought back to that bad date she realised that the interpretation of her emotions were completely dependent on the context.

 My brain made sense of those physical signals coming from the body as attraction.’ Your brain is trapped inside a dark silent box called your skull, and it's receiving signals from your body. You have sensory surfaces all over your body in your retina, in each eye, the cochlea and each ear your skin. You have sensory surfaces inside your body for glucose for temperature. Your brain is constantly receiving sensory signals from the sensory surfaces of your body that inform the brain of the changes in the body and in the world. But the brain doesn't know the causes it only knows the signals themselves, which are the outcomes and this is what philosophers call an inverse problem.³ [check the footnote ;-)]

So your brain is constantly having to solve an inverse problem. It has to guess at the meaning of the causes of those signals. And even when your brain guesses wrong, those guesses become your experience.

So, what my brain did, during that coffee [date] was take these sensory signals which were being caused by, a pathogen, ..in my body, but my brain didn't know about that pathogen. It just knew the outcomes of the pathogen [symptoms], which were the signals. So [I really think I thought I was feeling attracted to the person]… authentically, I felt romantic attraction in that moment. It's just that the biological cause [of the signals] was different than what it might have been at other times. That's how I would understand what happened now. 

Where and when have these things happened to me before? What is the context that makes sense here. Your brain is trying to make sense of the signals coming in and their meaning.

Each guess each prediction isn't weighed equally. There's a prior probability. Your brain is weighing up, the likelihood of one predicted context against another.

If she’d been in a different environment, when she was suffering the flu symptoms she would have come to different assumptions, and thoughts.

Emotions are built by your brain in the moment, as needed. The specificity or granularity with which an emotion is built, depends on what past experiences your brain is bringing to bear to predict and make sense of the incoming sensory signals from the body and from the world.

Our feelings turn out to be predictions about the world, not reactions to it. They are ways our brains prepare us for action.

When you hear footsteps coming up quickly behind you in a dark alley, your brain is making a prediction that you might need to run away and you feel fear. Our emotions don't feel like predictions.

Why do all this predicting instead of reacting to the world as we experience it? It will be metabolically inefficient to process everything as if it were happening for the first time.

LFB: The most effective way to run a system is to predict the state of the system and correct when necessary. It's not to wait and react to things. Reaction is more expensive metabolically than prediction. It’s a major selection pressure on a species but also on an individual like an individual's ability for example, to remain healthy and to be able to reproduce. Pass its genes on to the next generation is metabolic fitness, metabolic efficiency.

There's always a metabolic cost because there's always electrical and chemical signalling going on 'underneath the hood. The metabolic cost of this signalling is a major concern that any organism's system has to deal with.

The brain is creating prediction signals about what’s happening. And then the signals come in that either confirm those predictions, or change them if there's anything that's unexpected. In psychology terms this is learning. The goal from this predictive perspective is to predict better and more efficiently the next time

When LFB's daughter was a toddler, she would throw tantrums. Lisa decided to help her daughter see that bad moods were really predictions and that she could choose to make different predictions when it came to fighting a tantrum.

Making a new prediction about a cranky fairy.

I wanted to give her other options for how to experience this mood. So I invented a cranky fairy when she would start to feel cranky or crabby. It meant that the cranky fairy was coming to visit and then whenever she would feel the cranky fairy preparing to make a visit, we gave her a special chair that was like a little Elmo character from Sesame Street. And that she could go to and sit in the chair when the cranky fairy was visiting and sort of vanquished the the cranky fairy from her from her life for that day.

Over time, what happened was, she would actually march herself to the chair when she felt like she was going to lose control and have a tantrum, and she would sit in that chair. And she might look at a book or she might play with some plastic animals. Basically, she was teaching herself how to regulate her own behaviour. And so these stories wove together to give her other options than just making negative emotions out of the sensations that she was experiencing.

She taught your daughter ways to create a different social reality. We have some control over our emotions in ways that many of us might not realise. Gaining control is a little harder than anyone might want, but if a three year old can do it, then anybody can do it.

Her daughter 'rewired her brain'. She could take advantage of the situation to give herself new experiences that her brain would learn so that it would predict differently in the future.

At first, LFB’s daughter would sit in the chair after she had a tantrum and then she would sit in the chair, right before she was having a tantrum and then she might go sit in the chair, and then 10 or 15 minutes before a situation prompted a tantrum. She was able to practice this skill. It was hard at first and took a lot of energy, but it was an investment in being a better you in the future.

If we start to see emotions as predictions about the world, instead of simply following our emotions, we might be more curious about them.

What is causing me to feel this way? What are the factors that might be driving this? Question the context, check in with physical sensations.

Curiosity is often underrated and undervalued. There are advantages to being curious instead of being rigidly confident that we know what’s causing sensations.

Get your butterflies flying in formation

When LFBs daughter was 12. She was testing for her black belt in karate.

She was barely five feet tall and she was going to have to spar that is fight with these like six foot hulking adolescent boys in order to get her black belt. Her Sensei, who is this 10th degree black belt this guy could break a board by looking at it, you know, sort of saunters up to her and he crosses his arms and he says, Get your butterflies flying in formation. And I thought that is brilliant. Because he's not saying be calm because she needs that arousal in order to perform in order to do the test but he gave her a different meanings for it. And therefore, she had a different set of actions that were available to her.

Allostasis and body energy regulation

Evolution says our brain's most important job is coordinating and regulating the body in the most metabolically efficient way. The brain is always attempting to predict what its energy needs will be in the next moment. Because that's the most efficient way to run a body. Brains regulate the body by anticipating those needs and attempting to meet those needs before they arise.

The technical term for the predictive regulation of the body is Allostasis. LFB’s metaphor is 'body budgeting'. Your brain is running a budget for your body. It's not budgeting money, it's budgeting glucose and salt and oxygen and so on.

Depression is like a bankrupt body budget. It's basically your brain is attempting to reduce its costs. And in doing this, it will create fatigue, which will lead you to move less. So that's a reduction in cost. The brain is trapped in it in its predictions. It's not going to update. It's not going to learn from prediction error because learning is metabolically expensive. So even if there are pleasant things in the world that could lead you to experience pleasure. You won't pay attention to them and you won't learn about them. You won't take advantage of them because it's just too expensive. Basically, the brain is trapped in these predictions that will lead to more unpleasant or continuing unpleasant mood.

When you feel stressed, it's because your brain has predicted that a big metabolic outlay is going to be necessary in the next moment. E.g. when you're being criticised by someone, bullied, or when you're having conflicts with people.

If you add lack of sleep, not eating healthfully or not exercising on a regular basis what happens is that your brain becomes less and less able to efficiently regulate the body. You will experience that as negative mood, fatigue or distress.

When you feel bad we look to the world to figure out what's wrong. And if you can't figure out what's wrong with the world, you assume there's something wrong with you. But actually, it could just be that there is a metabolic answer to your negative mood.

Two key insights LFB uses in her everyday life:

• One is from her husband ‘other people's opinions of you are merely electrical activity in their brains.’

• The second is from Buddhist philosophy, ‘anger is a form of ignorance.’ It prompts you to be curious about why someone is doing something that you might not like and that you might find even offensive, but they have a reason for doing it. And if you try to take their perspective for a minute, you still might not like it, but you won't be angry anymore. It just turns down the dial on the intensity of your discomfort in a way that I find to be really productive.'

Perhaps, I can be more accountable for how I feel, than I’d thought.

Reclaiming some agency, getting my fragile butterflies to fly in formation, is an image I can hold when I start to feel overwhelmed. Perhaps then I can curiously contextualise what’s happening and deescalate those sensations to feel just ‘whelmed’.

Remember, we are only perfectly imperfect humans trying to do our best for our loved ones and ourselves.

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1. Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is among the top 0.1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior.

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett, 2021.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett, 2017.

Dr. Barrett has published over 275 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic volumes published by Guilford Press. She writes regularly about science in the popular press, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Scientific American (see full list).

2. The self-discrepancy theory states that individuals compare their “actual” self to internalized standards or the “ideal/ought self”. Inconsistencies between “actual”, “ideal” (idealized version of yourself created from life experiences) and “ought” (who persons feel they should be or should become) are associated with emotional discomforts (e.g., fear, threat, restlessness). Self-discrepancy is the gap between two of these self-representations that leads to negative emotions. Developed by Edward Tory Higgins in 1987, the theory provides a platform for understanding how different types of discrepancies between representations of the self are related to different kinds of emotional vulnerabilities. Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-discrepancy; A theory relating self and affect, Psychological Review, 94, 319–340

3. Victoria’s interpretation - it’s like that old US TV quiz show ‘Jeopardy!’ - instead of traditional question-and-answer format we’re given clues in the form of answer-signals and we’ve got tot identify the question: the person, place, thing, or idea that the clue-signals describe. The problem is that our responses, are ideas that we don’t always form as a question. We often assume based on our experience, that we’re right about the cause/question. Can we phrase things as a question, like they did on the quiz show?