'What is social reality?'
What social constructs frame our lives and influence us? (Part 5)
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These recent articles have focused on Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett’s (LFB) work and research1
These articles have summarised key insights by Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett (psychologist and neuroscientist), focusing on how emotions are made.
The articles highlight three dimensions: the predicting nature of the brain, Affect/mood—how we feel inside, and Social Reality and concepts.
A final question in this series: What is social reality, and how does it affect us?
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s YouTube Videos and transcripts
April 12 2023: Social Reality is all around us
Physical reality is the Earth with its rocks and trees and deserts and oceans social reality occurs when we humans impose new functions on physical things together for example different collections of human brains throughout the ages impose the function of money on different physical things allowing people to trade things like seashells tulip bulbs salt big gray rocks in the ocean and little sparkly rocks on pieces of gold for material Goods like food and shelter the boundary between social reality and physical reality is porous.
For example scientific experiments show that people prefer the taste of coffee when they drink it out of a cup labeled eco-friendly compared to when they drink it out of a cup that is unlabeled your brain steeped in Social reality changes the way you experience what you eat and drink.
Social reality is a human superpower you can simply make stuff up, and if other people treat it as real, it becomes real.
Why does red mean stop? We could have chosen purple cyan-or even waved a flag. A superpower works best when you know you have it
April 12 2023: What is Social Reality
Most of your life takes place in a made-up world—a city or town whose name and borders were made up by people. Your address is spelt with letters and other symbols that were also made up by people. You buy stuff with something called money which is represented by pieces of paper metal and plastic and is also completely made up you can even trade made up money to buy other made up things like the privilege to sit and watch other people play a made-up game with made up rules you actively and willingly participate in this made-up world every day it is real to you. As real as your own name or my name which was also made up by people these are examples of social reality.’
Social reality means that we impose new functions on physical things collectively.
Nothing in chemistry or physics determines the boundaries between countries or that a specific Arc of the Earth's orbit around the Sun is called January. People make it up and if they agree it becomes real that is social reality
May 6 2023 Your Brain Runs a Simulation of the World
For many years scientists believed that your neurons spend most of their time asleep and wake up only when stimulated by something in the world now we know that all your neurons are firing constantly nudging one another at various rates this is called intrinsic brain activity and it's one of the great discoveries of modern neuroscience even more compelling is that this intrinsic brain activity represents millions of predictions of what you will experience next based on all the experience of your past.
These predictions all combine into a simulation of the outside world. Prediction turns shapes and sounds into trees and grass and runners.
0:49 Your brain predicts a honk is from a car or a honk is from a goose
1:01 There's no sound here what you're experiencing is a consequence of your brain simulating the world.
How does social reality affect us?
Victoria’s interpretation… our social reality, simulations and concepts are part of our brain’s reference system of the past, and they’re a translation box for our brains to decipher what we are experiencing in the present moment.
Within this framework, our brain makes predictions influenced by our affect/mood. We constantly try to interpret the electrical signals of internal and external sensory input.
Like the old US TV series ‘Jeopardy!’, we must determine the cause of all the signals and reference inputs and identify a question we must respond to. We can’t take action if we don’t know the question. Our body, together with the brain, is, on one hand, an antenna and, on the other, a responder—figuring out how to answer the question.
Some responses are automatic involuntary actions, that we take for granted like breathing. Other responses are constructed. This is where affect/mood (electrical signals in our body), predictions and social reality influence our response. Predictions are imperceptible micro-predictions. Others are macro predictions that we can sometimes influence.
With a healthy level of curiosity, we can ensure we sense the whole context of a situation. Otherwise, our brain’s macro predictions are beholden to unconscious bias or old, outdated reference points.
It may be okay to protect ourselves from threats and danger, but other times, ‘suspending our beliefs’ can open our minds and avoid a skewed perception, or worse, a biased action based on what we think we are seeing.
Without curiosity, we could be ‘blindly’ accepting what we think and assume we know what’s happening versus the reality of events.
Opening our minds to what could be and allowing space for new concepts of social reality can help us avoid being entrenched in outdated or biased frames of reference.
My takeaway messages from all the articles.
We have more control than we think to ‘kaleidoscope’ our emotion-lens. By trying to prime our brains to learn to predict differently, we can retrain ourselves to have more agency over our emotions. ‘Get your butterflies to fly in formation’.
It’s in our interest to be more curious and expand our view of what we ‘think’ we are sensing and feeling. In this way, we can have a more expansive, broader context and articulation of what we are experiencing.
With greater details, we can empower ourselves to articulate our feelings and the reasons behind those feelings, to ourselves and others. Granularity can help us be more emotionally agile. We can also avoid the default mode of being overly reductive.
In the Caregiving context, there are many social reality constructs
For example: caregiving is a woman’s role.
A Personal Reframe:
We all do caregiving in all our relationships because it’s a human trait; we care for kids, each other, and those less able to care for themselves.
We have a collective social responsibility to care for each other; it is not the responsibility of one person, AND especially not defined by gender.
Demographic and social trends have altered how we care for each other. For example, households are now smaller and blended, and communities are less integrated and interconnected than in the past. Therefore, we must strengthen our support system for care.
Everyone is trying to financially meet basic needs by working simultaneously as caring and are conflicted regarding both time and emotional well-being.
There is now a term ‘care economy’ where caregiving is defined in an economic frame: financial and productivity terms and values. As a result, caregiving is devalued because it is not seen as economically productive. Yet, it’s one of the few ways those providing care can be seen within the economically defined society.
We could shift the narrative into a modern-day frame of empathy, inspiration, hope and kindness. Redefine the value and contribution within communities, and to each person. Not as a monetary social construct but as a human-centred, basic need and inter-relational necessity.
Perhaps by openly discussing caregiving, we can build communities that engage in sharing the caring, rather than burning and burdening the few.
Perhaps if we considered caregiving as a shared responsibility of everyone, not just a few, we could bring diverse talents, skills and ideas to bear, and elevate the care support for each person within a community. Couldn’t we?
What other ‘care or caregiver’ social constructs can you think of?
Thinking of yourself or another caregiver friend, what social constructs or internalised beliefs have you defaulted to?
Think about how you would challenge the construct to empathise and comfort yourself or your friend. Care to share?
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'An architect of my emotions?'
Shankar Vedantam's Hidden Brain interview of Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. (1 hour duration). This article is based on an edited transcript.
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).
Thank you, Victoria! I agree that our perspective on caregiving is defined by our cultural and social values. It is crazy to me that caregiving was prioritized throughout our history on Earth and has only recently been devalued. We need to model the respect and gratitude for the caregivers in our life. Thank you for this article.