'What influences Brain predictions?'

and how can we build better predictions? Solving for unpredictability as a caregiver. (Part 3)

Hello Carer Mentor Readers! I can hardly believe that we’re in the last week of May.

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Three most recent articles have focused on the work of Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett¹:

• How Emotions are made

• How do we construct emotions

• Why are brain predictions important

Summary

This article debunks some older scientific concepts and myths about emotions.

Affect exists because one of your brain's most important jobs is ‘running a body budget’. Your body constantly runs its metabolic system, and your brain makes micro and macro predictions to budget your energy efficiently.

Your mood, or affect, influences your perception of the world. Your brain uses predictions based on your ‘affect’ to make sense of your experiences, which can lead to different interpretations of the same physical sensation in different contexts.

Affect is one ingredient in building emotions. Your brain creates a story, an explanation, using knowledge about emotion you have learned from your past to predict what you will see, hear, and feel. It's also how you make every thought, feeling, decision, and action.

When something goes wrong, you use this explanation as a tool to figure out how to fix it.

Can we improve our prediction capabilities? Can we free ourselves from repeating patterns?

Video: Your mood influences what you see and hear (Part 1)

Your mood influences what you see and hear. Your brain is wired this way. Every sense you have in every waking moment of your life is coloured by how you feel and has powerful consequences. Scientists have named this ingredient Affect.

Affect is not emotion it's more basic than emotion. Affect is running a budget for your body. It's keeping track of your glucose and oxygen, water, salt, hormones, immune system, and other things to keep you alive and well.

This body budgeting is transformed into a mental feeling that we sometimes call mood.

Evolutionary history shows us that when it came to body budgeting, prediction beat reaction. The scientific name for body budgeting is allostasis. It means automatically predicting and preparing to meet the body’s needs before they arise.²

Affect comprises two aspects: valence (how pleasant or unpleasant we feel) and arousal (our energy level—idle or activated). It is a simple barometer of your body budget without much detail.

Changes in our affect can alter our perception of people and situations without our conscious awareness.

I think caregivers can tell when our loved ones are struggling with their condition or illness because we are usually on the receiving end of their mood (affect).

I remember watching over Dad and thinking he was waging a war inside himself. His metabolic system and internal electrical signals were bankrupt, in an energy deficit, and his mood was dark. It’s not surprising that he couldn’t find the energy or words to converse, irrespective of his diagnosis of vascular dementia.

Video: Your mood influences what you see and hear (Part 2)

Your mood influences what you see and hear. Your brain uses prediction to make sense of your affect, which becomes a reality—a self-fulfilling prophecy of predictions.

If you feel uncomfortable, and it's about noontime, your brain might predict that hunger is the cause of your affect so that you will feel hungry. But before a big speech, those same feelings may cause your brain to predict that you're nervous.

Every person on this planet always feels some sort of affect. What they eat or how they sleep can influence every moment, resulting in a certain level of energy and a certain amount of pleasantness or unpleasantness.

The state of your body, which you experience as affect, is another important ingredient that your brain is using to construct emotions and to construct every waking moment of your life.

So, if you think someone is irritating or attractive, perhaps you’re experiencing the world through affect-coloured glasses.

The Biggest myths about emotions debunked. (May 29 2023)

The video introduction:

With the growth of self-help books and the fight to destigmatize therapy, people today are perhaps more unafraid than ever to talk about their emotions. But this has led to some common myths about emotions, and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett wants to debunk them.

Barrett argues that emotions are not hardwired into the brain from birth, but rather stem from events that the brain creates based on past experiences and predictions of what's going to happen.

Contrary to popular understanding, emotions are not just reactive events that happen to us — we play an active role in creating them.

By learning new things, watching movies, or even acting in a play to get outside of the normal range of what the brain predicts, Barrett argues that it’s possible to change those predictive patterns, and by doing so, to become the architects of our future selves.

Understanding how our brain creates emotions can help us manage them — freeing us from repeated patterns of behavior and empowering us to control our emotions and heal ourselves.

Misconceptions that people have about emotions and how they work.

One myth is that emotions are hardwired into the brain at birth, universal across all humans and maybe even shared with other animals.

Another myth is that the brain produces emotions in a very reactive kind of way. It's based on the idea that you have this animalistic part of a brain, and when the rational side of your brain wins, you are a moral, healthy person. And when the emotional side of your brain wins, then you're either immoral because you didn't try hard enough, or you're mentally ill because you couldn't control your emotions.

It can feel like emotions happen to you: they bubble up and cause you to do and say things that may be ill-advised. But that explanation doesn't capture how your brain is making emotions.

The experience that emotions are events that happen to you and that you have to deal with is an illusion that the brain creates.

An instance of emotion: Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sensory information back to your brain, like how much glucose, oxygen, and salt. What's the status of almost every metabolic factor that keeps you alive and well?

Your brain isn't wired in a way that allows you to experience those sensory changes, specifically. Instead, you experience a summary- and that's where those simple feelings come from.

Feelings are properties or features of emotion, an episode of emotion— but they're not synonymous with emotions.

Just like sound can be quiet or loud. You can experience feeling very activated or very calm.

Your brain tells itself a story about what is happening inside your body relative to what's happening in the world.

Your brain creates a story using knowledge about emotions you learned from your past to predict based on the sensory input. It's also how you make every thought, feeling, decision, and action.

Why is it important? When something goes wrong, you need to use your ‘explanation’ as a tool to figure out how to fix it.

E.g. in depression, you are metabolically compromised because your brain believes there's a metabolic problem in your body. The symptoms of depression are the consequence of the brain's attempt to cut costs. You feel fatigued or unpleasant. You feel like you can't concentrate or move because moving your body is metabolically expensive. That's where depression comes from.

It doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong in the world or with you, although sometimes it does mean that.

Part of managing your emotions is figuring out when unpleasant feelings are diagnostic about something in the world and when they're simply an indication that you’re spending a lot of metabolic energy, e.g. because things are uncertain or that you're doing something really difficult.

If you understand that the brain's most important job is regulating and coordinating the body's systems, you will start to think about treatment differently.

The fact that emotions don't happen to you—that your brain makes them—and that your brain uses your past experience as fodder for predicting what will happen has big implications.

The first big implication is that you are an architect of your experience. It’s not about trying to control or break the predictions. It involves seeding your brain with new experiences so that it will predict differently moving forward.

You're not necessarily a prisoner of your past, but your past experiences, reconstituted in your brain, are a fundamental ingredient of your current predictions and, therefore, how you will behave in the present context.

It's hard to try to change the meaning of past instances and how you experienced them; that's what psychotherapy is for.

But if we know that what we’ve done in our past (experiences) informs how our brains predict, then we can cultivate experiences that expand our range of predictions.

Not everybody has as much control as they might like, but everybody has a little more control than they think they do.

Solving for the unpredictable nature of caregiving.

In a calm care routine, we have our bearings, and we can be the compass for our loved ones. This is part of what I’ve called ‘the caregiver telepathy and burden we carry’.

A predictable, stable context for translating Dad’s emotions was manageable.

Issues arose when his competing illnesses diminished his overall health, and everything became unpredictable. It was not an emergency crisis, but I was walking on eggshells all day, unsure of what would happen next.

Calm periods became shorter, and declines were more frequent, faster, and more acute. We had to pivot hard and often.

My senses were not only hyper-firing in terms of care needs for my Dad, but my brain was also trying to make sense of everything I was feeling and how to navigate my emotions.

Without much previous context to orient me, my mood was discombobulated, and sometimes I just felt numb.

When I felt like this, to regain my bearings, I’d reach into the toolbox of self-compassion, journalling and mindfulness or delve back into the work of Brené Brown or Susan David for inspiration because I had no past experience to lean into, and I was desperate for support.

There were minimal resources and very few ‘big picture’ longitudinal perspectives of what I could expect or predict moving forward.

This is why I chose to build a website to share resources. I wanted a dynamic resource for caregivers to share experiences and resources and cross-pollinate ideas. One person’s experience is unlikely to fit another, but different ingredients from many different people can create a helpful recipe for caregiving ideas.

This portal of hope offers access to bite-sized resources and the ability to network with others. We can help prime each other, orient ourselves and, by sharing our unique experiences, help others.

Can this diverse network of voices and experiences inspire others' caregiving (predictions)?

In hindsight, perhaps those years of discombobulation made the last months of caring for Dad possible—not easier but more doable because my predictive experience had evolved.

I hope this website offers some insights and ideas for your unpredictable situations!

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.

In addition to the books Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain and How Emotions are Made, 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. Feldman Barrett, Lisa. Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (p. 8). Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition.