'Where do feelings come from'
'Where do feelings come from'
Shankar Vedantam's Hidden Brain podcast interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett
If you’re here for the first time, you can learn more about me by clicking here. ‘Why did I start Carer Mentor?’
Three most recent articles have focused on the work of Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett (LFB)1:
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 more context to the previous four articles.
This is the podcast with the full transcript
The brain is locked in total darkness It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull. Never in the light. And yet the world of constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with colour and movement. So how does the brain which lives without a spark of light, build for us, a world full of light. It's not just about light, of course.
The world inside our heads is full of sound, movement and sensation. It is suffused with feelings and emotion. Imagine for a moment that your brain was a person locked inside your head. How does this person create a world so rich, so varied and so beautiful? When she is permanently trapped within the cage of your skull? Most of us have already answered the brain has many messengers that bring it information, signal stream in from our eyes and ears and skin. The brain takes in all these signals, and like a film editor splicing together a movie assembles our perceptions of the world. But in recent years, some scientists have come to believe that this is not what actually happens. The light we see, and the sounds we hear, are not really comprised of signals from the outside world instead they are mostly creations of the mind itself.
Sound exercise: The audio was gibberish until Shankar shared what was being said, amongst the white noise.
Because your brain knew what was coming. It predicted what it was going to hear. The brain is doing this in every domain. What you hear yes, but also what you see what you touch what you smell. Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has spent years studying how the brain constructs reality and the surprising implications of our ideas for our emotional lives.
Lisa Feldman Barrett grew up in Toronto, Canada. He was the late 1960s Her dad was out of the picture. So her mom raised her. Lisa would spend every weekend with her maternal grandparents. When she was five, her mom remarried. Lisa vividly remember something that happened with her new stepfather on the day of the wedding.
LFB: I remember his parents were there and I remember his parents saying to me, so I think I met them maybe once or twice I didn't really know them at all. And I remember his my step grandmother saying to me, well go over to your grandparents and congratulate them on on this wedding. Now as you're saying this to a five year old. What does a five year old though? And I remember saying to her? Why do I have to do that? I don't have to go congratulate my grandfather. You know just sort of like why? don't tell me what to do.'
Shankar: Lisa's step grandmother got upset. She smacked Lisa across the face. In time, Lisa would receive other messages that she was responsible for how people felt. Another incident took place a couple of years after the wedding.
LFB: 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 to do whatever I was going to do and my mother became very irritated that I had left a bowl in the sink Instead of rinsing it out that I had left it for her. And my stepfather became pretty enraged that I had upset my mother this was a theme that was you know, 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. So I was grounded so I couldn't go to the circus which 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. Oh my god, which left welds that was something that he didn't do all the time but he sometimes did. And it left welts, you know and marks in my on my skin that took a long time to heal.
Shankar: And this is for leaving a bowl of milk in the sink
LFB: because it upset my mother 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.
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. For example, when I was 12 You know I lived in a Jewish area. My family is Jewish. Everyone was having bar mitzvahs and Bat Mitzvahs. I personally wasn't because I didn't go to Hebrew school. We couldn't afford that. But everyone was going to bar mitzvahs and bar mitzvahs and it's not crazy. Like it is now where people are spending you know, like $100,000 or whatever on these like massive parties. But you know, there was still a party that you had to go to and a present that you had to give and you had to wear a dress and you needed shoes and I didn't have dresses and I didn't have shoes. I had one pair of shoes. And they weren't party shoes. And I remember I wrote a little note to my mother on a piece of paper and I like decorated it with you know, because I like to draw so I decorated it with like, all sorts of flowers and balloons and like party things and I said can I have a pair of party shoes? I slipped it under the door when she was in the bathroom. I honestly don't think that my mother would say to my stepfather. She made me feel this way. I think she would say probably. I'm guessing but my good knowing my mother the way that I do I I would expect that she would say I feel bad that we don't have the money to buy her a pair of shoes. And so, though let's just say that I didn't go to bar any bar mitzvahs or bummis. Was for like a month, which made me very unpopular, because I had already RSVP that I was going to these parties and then at the last minute sort of had to cancel because I was grounded.
Wait, yes. Your stepfather grounded you because you sent this note to your mother? Yeah, like
LFB: I slipped it under the door. Asking Can I please have a pair of party shoes? Yeah, the response was, you know probably came like a day later. And it was swift and intense.
Shankar: As you can tell, Lisa had a strange relationship. With her stepfather. She was also something of an outlier in her family. She was the first to go to college and then to graduate school. But our story today is not about parent child relationships, or even about the particulars of Lisa's own childhood.
The reason these stories are relevant to our episode today is because the illustrate an idea that is ubiquitous in all of our lives. You probably had times in your own life when someone told you that you made them feel sad or angry or happy that you were the cause of their emotions, that you were responsible for how they feel.
You have surely felt this way about others. someone cuts you off in traffic, and you say that the other driver made you upset. A friend brings over some food when you are sick. And you say your friend has comforted you. We see that a winning sports team has cheered us up and that a losing sports team has brought us down. It suddenly feels as though our minds are taking in signals from the outside world and assembling our internal world that our emotions are caused by the things that happen to us. But as Lisa went on to become a psychologist and neuroscientist, she was to discover that our feelings are not in fact, responses to the world. They are really predictions about the world. She began to ask herself a question what happens if we change those predictions?
Shankar: When high school students start to learn to conduct experiments that teachers usually tell them to start by repeating or replicating famous experiments from the past. The physicist Isaac Newton, for example, discovered a long time ago that heavier objects do not fall faster than lighter objects. All objects on Earth experience gravity. And this gravitational force is constant regardless of whether the object is heavy or light. When I was in high school, I remember a teacher showing us how to replicate Newton's experiment using two balls of different weight that roll down an incline. When Lisa Feldman Barrett started working on her PhD, she decided to replicate some famous experiments. She was planning to become a clinician and help people suffering with anxiety and depression. But she also enjoyed doing research.
LFB: The theory that I was working with was something called self discrepancy theory. There were a very a set of very simple experiments that had been published where people were just asked to list the attributes or properties of who they thought they were. You know, I'm a nice person, I'm an honest person, I'm a complex person, I'm a whatever. And then the features of who their ideal self and then you can compute the similarity or dissimilarity and then you can also ask people how they feel.
The idea was that if there were mismatches between how people describe themselves and who they want it to be, this would make people sad. As part of the experiment, Lisa had to ask people how they felt and carefully distinguish emotions like sadness, from emotions, like anxiety.
That's what I did in the first couple of studies, where I was asking people in different ways or I was attempting to measure emotion in different ways. But I never I was never able to replicate those experiments.
Shankar: Lisa's volunteers seem to have a hard time accurately classifying how they felt as a graduate student, Lisa figure she had not run the experiment properly. She tried again, and again and again.
LFB: I thought, Well, I must be doing something wrong. Maybe I'm I'm not sampling properly or maybe I'm sampling people at at the wrong time of the semester.
After she failed for the eighth time, Lisa said, Okay, I am clearly missing something here. What am I not getting?
LFB: I went back and I looked at the eight experiments that had failed and I realised Oh, actually, the reason why they're feeling was that when people are reporting how they feel, how much sadness do you feel, how hopeless do you feel? How depressed you feel? You're basically giving them a set of words and you're asking them to describe their feelings. And you can do the same thing with anxiety. How anxious do you feel? How jittery do you feel, how, how fearful Do you feel and so on and so forth. And what I noticed was that when people were reporting that they were feeling intense sadness, they were also reporting that they were feeling intense anxiety. When people reported that they were feeling calm. They were also reporting that they were feeling happy.
So what was happening here in these eight studies is that people were reporting that they felt both sad and anxious or that they felt neither of those emotions that they felt calm and happy. Basically, people were using sadness and anxiety as synonyms for I feel like crap. And this was happening across eight different studies. And so I thought, well, that's the problem. The problem is that people are not reporting accurately how they're feeling.
Shankar This was why the results of the studies were muddled. If people reported feeling sad, when they really should have said they were feeling anxious, or vice versa. The researchers wouldn't be able to tell how mismatches between people's ideal selves and actual selves produce sadness.
LFB: If I want to measure emotion, I've got to find a way to measure how they actually feel then I'll be able to properly test the hypothesis of the self discrepancy hypotheses, and maybe I might I will also figure out why is it that people are having trouble separating anxiety and and sadness because everyone knows that anxiety and depression, sadness and fear that they're these are different emotion categories? And I became just captivated and intrigued. By this new problem that I had encountered.
Shankar: In her third year of graduate school, Lisa experienced something in her personal life that match the experience of a volunteer.
There was someone at the university who you know, kept asking me out for coffee or a dinner. I just didn't find that person very appealing, I guess, and I wasn't really that interested and I just ignored his advances, so to speak his interest, but he was persistent. You know. And so finally, I thought, all right, well, I'm just gonna go out with a party. And then, you know, I'll tell them, I don't want to starve. So we went out for coffee. And we went to, you know, this place very close by the university. That other graduate students weeks ago. And we're sitting there having coffee in this wonderful little Mediterranean restaurant. And I started to notice that, like, my cheeks are and I'm flushing and I'm I'm a little warm, and my heart was pounding a little harder than usual. And I was having a little trouble concentrating.
And I thought maybe he is more interesting than I thought maybe not that bad looking and I’m sort of more interested than I thought I was before. Okay, maybe I was wrong, ... And, you know, he asked me to see each other again, dinner and then I start to walk back to the place where I'm living and I'm thinking to myself, Okay, so maybe there's something here and, you know, you shouldn't believe your first impression. I fumbled from it, as I always do. I unlock the door.
And then a wave of intense nausea just flared up. I dropped my stuff on the floor, slam the door, run to the bathroom. And let's just say spend some time. praying to the Porcelain God and then was in bed for a week.
Shankar: Lisa, her 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? If anything? This was an extreme form of what Lisa as 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.
LFB: It took me probably systematically about 10 years maybe more to come to the conclusion that there are no objective indicators. for an emotion. An emotion word like anger isn't a thing. Anger isn't a thing. It's actually a category of highly variable instances. Sometimes, when you're angry, you shout sometimes when you're angry, you laugh. Sometimes when you're angry you cry sometimes when you're angry, you sit silently and plot the demise of your enemy. Sometimes, you scowl, about half the time when people scowl, they're not angry. That's significant compared to chance, but it also means that 50% of the time if you assume that when someone is scowling, they're angry, you're going to be wrong. anger or sadness or fear, whatever. When we refer to an emotion, we're really referring to an instance of a category. That's the first thing to understand. So when you look at someone in their scowling, it could be that the person is angry. It could be that somebody just told them a really bad job. It could be that they're concentrating really hard. It could be that that they're experiencing, you know, a bad bout of gas, any of those things and also other states could have produced that, that scowl on their face. And you have to make a guess based on your past experiences. You know what that scowl means in this context?
Shankar: Lisa ran an experiment that showed our ability to read emotions is heavily dependent on the context just like that garbled sentence at the top of the episode that made sense once you knew what I was saying, it is the context that helps us predict the emotions of others.
In the study, Lisa and her colleagues had an actor portray the emotion in various scenarios. One scenario asked people to imagine that a coworker had caught them stealing and was going to tell the boss, the actor tried to depict the facial expression of someone trapped in that difficult situation. Lisa then brought in volunteers and showed them the photos of the actor. She asked the volunteers to guess what emotion the actor was portraying. For another group of volunteers. She provided the scenario the actor was trying to portray and asked the volunteers to guess the emotions of people caught up in that scenario. A third group of volunteers got both the scenario and the photos of the actor. We compare people who rate the face alone to the people who read it the face in the context right to people who write the context alone. So we can ask the question, what is driving people's perceptions? Is it the the expression on the face? Is it the context or is it some, you know, is it some combination? And the answer is it's mostly the context.
The 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, basically, for what those facial movements mean.
Shankar: Lisa had an epiphany is 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? She thought that to the story of her bad date, when she thought about it again. She realised that the interpretation of our emotions completely dependent on the context
LFB: A more accurate way that I would describe what happened is that my brain made sense of those physical signals coming from the body as attraction. You know, 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.
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 basically. So what my brain did in that, during that coffee was take these sensory signals which were being caused by, you know, a pathogen, by Allah biologically speaking and in my body, but my brain didn't know about that pathogen. It just knew the outcomes of the pathogen, which is this which were the signals. So I think authentically, I felt romantic attraction in that moment. It's just that the biological cause was different than what it made might have been at other times. That's how I would understand what happened now.
Shankar: When you went on that date with your fellow graduate student, you'd have previously experiences of what it's like to you know, have coffee with someone you were attracted to, you sort of knew what your face being flushed could mean, and you knew what a flutter in your heart could mean and in some ways, as you're sitting there having coffee with this other person, your brain in some ways is saying, Where have these things happened to me before? What is the context that makes sense here and your brain is trying to make sense of what the signals coming in are actually telling you?
LFB: Yes, exactly. That's exactly right. And, you know, each guess each prediction isn't weighed equally, right? There's a prior probability, there's some increased chance that one predictive context on one one story is is going to be more likely than than another. And so your brain is is weighing those. Yeah.
Shankar: And if you hadn't gone on the date that day, if your face just fell flushed, and your heart felt like it was fluttering and you're and you felt a little uncomfortable, and you were just happen to be in your lab, you wouldn't have drawn the conclusion. Oh, I'm attracted to someone you might well have drawn the conclusion. Something's wrong. I think I might be feeling Yeah, exactly.
LFB: Exactly. That's exactly right. If I had been out for a run, and I was feeling flushed, I would experience it as you know, fatigue and that I need to, you know, have a have a glass of water or a chocolate muffin. I don't know. But you know, but there were other stories that my brain could have told and I'll just say that to me. What the evidence suggests is the following that emotions aren't built into your brain. They're built by your brain in the moment, as needed, and 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. When your child cuddles up next to you on the couch, your brain predicts it will experience one and you reach out to most of the time of course, our emotions don't feel like predictions. But there are times when we can actually see the predictive machinery in action.
So let's say you hear a loud bang, it could be a firecracker it could be a car backfiring, it could be a gunshot and a number of things. Exactly.
So, when a brain asks a question, it's a question of what do I need to do next, to keep myself alive? That's the question that the brain is always asking what do I have to do? But the interesting thing here is that, for the most part, brains are not reacting to the world. The brain doesn't hear a sound and then say, what is that? What the brain is doing is predicting. It's predicting all the time, what actions will be required in the next instance, and what sensory signals will be arriving in the next instance. And then it compares those predictions to the incoming sensory data. So the sensory signals from the body, you know, from your eyes and your ears and your skin and your nose and all the surfaces inside your body are not stimuli. They're signals that either confirm predictions, or they change them.
You know, I was in Orlando, Florida some time ago, and I was sitting in my hotel room in the evening, and I heard some booms loud noises. And for a minute, I was like, what are those noises? What could they be? And then I remembered of course, that I was at a resort in Disney World. I was there giving a talk. And I said it's Disney World. So it's it's evening and every day at the end of the day, disney world celebrates the end of the day with a fireworks display. So I rushed to the window, threw up with the blinds and got to watch the fireworks for a little while. But this process where you hear the booms, you're trying to figure out what it is you're trying to make sense. I'm taking into account the fact that I'm in Orlando, I'm at Disney World that changes the meaning of the booms that I'm hearing in my brain essentially has made a prediction of saying these booms are probably not someone opening fire on you. These booms are fireworks and you should rush to the window to get a glimpse of them. Exactly.
And in fact, if you read reports of people who have actually been in situations where there is gunfire, at first, they don't know what's happening. They can't tell necessarily that they're that what they're hearing is a gun and then when they realise it's a gun, they can't tell necessarily if it's Friend or foe. It's not a situation that we're in frequently because most of the time we're not sitting around wondering what is that flash of light? What is that? Chemical change? What is that? You know, most of the time, our brains are predicting pretty well. But there are these moments where you know, a brain makes itself aware of having to guess.
Shankar: Most of the time, our predictions don't feel like predictions. When I reach for the mug on the desk in front of me, it feels as though I am looking at the mug and directing my fingers to grasp the handle. But what is really happening is that I have reached for my mug so many hundreds of times that my brain can precisely predict the size, weight and location of the mug. It can predict how I will raise the mug to my lips and what my tea is going to taste. It still uses visual signals from my eyes. Tactile signals from my fingers, and the taste signals from my tongue, but only to fine tune its predictions. If I have forgotten to add sugar to my tea, my taste buds will inform my brain that its prediction of the taste of the tea was off. It will make me add some sugar
Why do all this predicting instead of simply painting a picture of the world from the signals coming into the brain? Since most of what most of us do most of the time involves things we have done before. Lisa says 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 and 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. This is a you know in psychology, we don't experience every hug we give every every emotion we experience every thought we have, you know every insult we bear, we don't experience these things in metabolic terms. We experience them in psychological terms, but there's always a metabolic cost because there's always electrical and chemical signalling going on underneath the hood. And it turns out that the metabolic cost of signalling is a major major concern that any organisms system has to deal with.
When I'm in the hotel room, and I hear a loud bang, my brain quickly asks itself a few questions. Are these booms taking place in a war zone or a holiday resort? Second, it asks, Where have I seen or heard this before? Third, and perhaps most important, it asks, What do I need to do?
So the brain is basically creating prediction signals that are fundamentally fundamentally they start, not as your experience of the world, but as your actions in the world. So your every prediction signal starts as a plan for regulating the body. And then the signals you know, come in that either confirm those predictions or change them if there's anything that's unexpected and in psychology, we have a fancy name for that. We call it learning. That's what learning is. And the goal from this predictive perspective. The goal is to predict better and more efficiently the next time right because at the bottom line is no matter what kind of goals we can't we sort of think about, that the brain creates for itself and there are psychological, the metabolic goal is is is metabolic efficiency.
Shankar Lisa has run many scientific experiments to spot the brain's predilection for prediction. But many years ago, she got a chance to see it in her personal life when she threw her daughter an unorthodox birthday party.
When my daughter was 12. We threw her disgust party. We had a bunch of activities that would make the children kind of exuberantly and joyfully disgusted you know, I made pizza and I put green food colouring on the Parmesan cheese and I made it look fuzzy like mould, and I made vomit jello. So I took peach coloured jello and I put little bits of vegetables in it. And I'm actually I'm my stomach is roiling, just even talking about it. And we took we took white grape juice and we put it in urine cups. Oh my God. And the goal here was to get the kids simulating, predicting if you will, discussed things that are very distasteful, but that they would find it really fun to do this. And they did. I mean, they were, they were shrieking and in pleasure. It was it was a it was a joy to behold. First of all, it demonstrates that prediction signals are not these abstract things. They are the brain changing the firing of its own neurons to begin to construct an experience before all the information is in from the environment. I mean, I have to tell you that I knew what I was doing and as I was pouring the grape juice into the urine cups, I'm telling you it smelled like pee, like it just there was a whiff of pee that that I could smell and basically, your brain is predicting and those predictions are real. signals that construct sensory experience.
Shankar: psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman. Barrett is the author of the book how emotions are made The Secret Life of the brain in it. She makes the case that emotions are constructed by the brain as it sits inside the cage of the skull and tries to guess the meaning of the electrical signals flooding in from the eyes and ears and skin. But if emotions are predictions that are designed to guide our behaviour, Lisa says we can exercise more control over those predictions than we realise. When Lisa'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 that involves making a new prediction about a cranky fairy.
LFB: 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, an Elmo chair a chair that was like was like a little a little Elmo character from Sesame Street. And that she could go to and sit in the chair when the cranky theory was was visiting and sort of vanquished the the cranky theory from her from her life for that day. And 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 you know, she might look at a book or she might play with some plastic animals or she might but basically, she was teaching herself how to regulate her own behaviour. And so these stories wove together to you know, give her options, other options than just making emotions, negative emotions out of the sensations that she was experiencing.
But there's a larger lesson in this for all of us. Not just for two year olds, which is that when we experience emotions, those emotions in some ways, as you're pointing out our predictions about what the world is like, what we should be feeling, how we should be responding, but those are predictions, and in exactly the same way that you taught your daughter to in some ways, create a different social reality. We have some control over our emotions in ways that many of us might not realise.
LFB: Exactly. And, you know, none of us have as much control as we would like, in gaining control is a little harder than anyone might want. But if a three year old can do it, then anybody can do it. And the point here is that we created a context for her to rewire her brain in a sense, right? She, she could take advantage of the situation to give herself new experiences that the brain would learn so that her brain would predict later in a different way. So at first, she would sit in the chair after she had a tantrum and then she would sit in the chair, you know, right before she was having a tantrum and then she might go sit in the chair, you know, even when you know the situation might in 10 or 15 minutes prompted tantrum, she was able to practice this skill. And it was hard at first but it's just like driving basically, it's hard at first it takes a lot of energy. It's an investment in being a better you in the future.
Shankar: There's another important insight that you are raising here at least, which is that when we experience emotions, if we start to see them as predictions about the world, one thing we might do is instead of simply following our emotions, we might actually be curious about them. We say what is causing me to feel this way? What are the factors that might be driving this so in other words, you're sitting across someone at a coffee shop and your face feels flushed. Instead of automatically saying, I'm attracted to this person, you could say, what might be the different reasons my face is flushed?
LFB: Exactly. And curiosity is really I think, underrated and undervalued in our culture, particularly at this particular moment in time. So, this is something that works when you are really even in the throes of great difficulty. You can become curious instead of becoming confident that you know what the causes of us have a set of sensations. So a perfect example of this was when my 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 in 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.
Shankar: You make the point in the book that one of the things the brain does is that it is very carefully calibrating how much energy it's using, and making predictions about how much energy it needs. And many of our mood states in fact are the brain's predictions about what is coming and how much how much it has by way of stored energy. What are the implications here for ordinary people Lisa with this idea of especially when it comes to things like food and exercise and sleep? You know, when we think about our well being what is your science say about those, those things that everyone struggles with?
LFB: Evolution tells us very clearly that the brain's most important job is coordinating and regulating the body in the most metabolically efficient way and you put it beautifully that 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, the energetic needs of the body by anticipating those needs and attempting to meet those needs before they arise.
The metaphor that I often use for the brains regulation of the body is that the brain is running a budget for the body. So the technical term for the predictive regulation of the body is Allostasis but the 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 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 like 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 like 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.
So, basically, the brain is trapped in these predictions that will lead to more unpleasant or continuing unpleasant mood. So 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. So like when you're being criticised by someone or when someone is bullying you or when you're having conflicts with people and so on. And then if you add to that, maybe not getting enough sleep, or maybe not eating healthfully or not exercising on a regular basis. What happens is that your brain becomes less and less and less able to efficiently regulate the body and that you will experience that as negative mood. You will experience that as fatigue or distress. And typically, we have psychological explanations. You know when when you feel bad you look to the world to figure out what's wrong with the world. 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.
Shankar: Do you feel like you have used these ideas? I mean, the ideas that you have about the brain as a prediction machine, do you feel like you use these ideas yourself Lisa in your life? Do you feel like you stop yourself sometimes when you jump to a conclusion about something and sort of say, Is this really how the world is or is it just a prediction I'm making everyday all the time?
LFB: I didn't come to these scientific insights for the purpose of using the my own life but I I absolutely do and here Here are two that I find really useful. One is from my husband actually, which is other people's opinions of you are merely electrical activity in their brains. I love that. Yeah, it's really useful in in faculty meetings. The other one is, this is from Buddhist philosophy, which is 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.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist at Northeastern University. She's the author of how emotions are made The Secret Life of the brain, and seven and a half lessons about the brain. Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today on hidden brain.
It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Remember, we are only perfectly imperfect humans trying to do our best for our loved ones and ourselves.
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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).