January 6, 2025 • 50 mins
Are emotions something that happen to you, or are they bodily signals we interpret? Does everyone show emotions in the same way -- that is, are there particular markers of the face or the body that always mean anger, sadness, or joy? And what does this have to do with Charles Darwin, the truth about facial expressions, or the movie Inside Out? Join Eagleman with this week's guest, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of hundreds of papers and "How Emotions are Made", for a deep dive into the truth about our feelings.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
What are emotions? Are they something that happened to you?
Or are they bodily signals that we interpret? Does everyone
show emotions in the same way? Are there particular markers
of the face or body that always mean anger or
sadness or joy? And what does this have to do
with Charles Darwin or the truth about facial expressions or
(00:29):
the movie Inside Out. Welcome to enter Cosmos with me
David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford
and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three
pound universe to understand why and how our lives look
the way they do. Today's episode is about emotions. Now,
(01:12):
to set this up, let's think about emotion versus cognition.
In the past half century, neuroscience has been buzzing with
discoveries about cognition, like how we perceive information, how we
decide that sort of thing, and this has all been
enhanced by all the recent advances in artificial intelligence. So
(01:33):
cognition is all about acquiring and using knowledge, recognizing patterns,
storing and retrieving informations, creating mental representations, but real neural
networks the ones living inside organisms. They operate in a
very different context. Organisms are driven by needs and motives
(01:55):
and pain and emotions. Without these driving all the cognitive
processes like learning and representing and taking action.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
These would lack purpose or direction.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
In other words, if nothing matters to an organism, there's
no reason for it to learn or do anything. This
is why understanding the brain requires us to include emotion,
not just cognition, and this consideration has given rise to
a field that we call affective neuroscience, in other words,
(02:30):
the neuroscience of emotions as a complement to the field
of cognitive neuroscience.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
So what is.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Different about these two fields, Well, at least traditionally, neuroscience
thinks about cognition as representational and involving symbols and computation
and degrees of accuracy in how well it reflects the world.
But emotions they don't fit that model. Take something like fear,
(02:58):
it's not exactly about rep presentation or symbols that it
doesn't have accuracy, but instead it varies in intensity. If
emotions are like forces that rise and fall, or they mix,
or they remain pure, then cognition is maybe more like
an encyclopedia, something structured and informational. Now These metaphors are imperfect,
(03:21):
but I'm just using these to tee up the divide
between cognition and emotion in conventional thinking. Now, why has
cognition received all the attention in the laboratory.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Well, it's because we.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Can build models or artificial neural networks to tackle cognitive
tasks like chess and go and math problems. It's a
lot harder to set up clear experiments with emotions, and
so these have traditionally received a lot less attention in
the research world. But the thing to note is that
(03:56):
emotions are much more ancient and at least here to
span the animal kingdom, while chess games do not, so
emotions may be more fundamental in brain wiring. So how
do emotions get studied? Let's start with Charles Darwin. In
his book The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Which he published in eighteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Two, Darwin proposed that emotions are biological phenomenon. They're deeply
rooted in our evolutionary history. So he argued that our
facial expressions of joy or sadness, or anger or fear
they evolved to communicate essential information to ourselves and others.
So for example, it makes sense, he argued, for a
(04:43):
person who is angry to stand tall and loom large
and glare and tense their muscles.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
These actions prepare them for physical.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Action, and these actions can also just serve as a
visual threat of action. So Darwin proposed that he motions
are survival tools passed down through the generations, like well
oiled machinery.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Although its a.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Side note, he did mention that this appropriateness hypothesis can't
be the whole story, since a lot of things didn't
seem to fit, like a person who is sad moping
around and recreating conversations in his head and feeling drained.
But we'll come back to this. So the general thing
that Darwin emphasized is that certain emotions prepare our body
(05:28):
to do the next thing, and he suggested this was
universal across the animal kingdom. He said, look, expressions are
essentially the same across mammalian species, and things can even
look a little similar between mammals and reptiles and birds,
like when the animal is afraid or angry or showing
(05:49):
parental love. So Darwin said, the core emotional operations relevant
to behavior are evolutionarily highly conserved, so fast forward to
the twentieth century, and this research gained momentum with researchers
like Paul Ekman. Ekman went around the world and he
concluded that he could identify six basic emotions. There was happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust,
(06:19):
and surprise. And these six emotions, he argued, are universal
whether you are in New York or New Guinea. A
smile means joy, and if you have a furrowed brow,
that means worry and so on. And this model of
basic emotions that are universal, we see this framework everywhere
around us. You've probably seen the Pixar movie Inside Out,
(06:42):
which brought emotions to life. You had the characters of
joy and sadness and anger and fear and disgust, and
each one was personified as a little being running the
control panel of a young girl's mind. And it was
a great movie and it captured the publicma because it
felt sort of true. Right, these emotions seem like individual
(07:06):
entities living inside us. They're always there, They're waiting to
surface and take charge of the control panel. But what
if I told you that everything you just heard about
Darwin and Eckman and Inside Out is not really the
full story about emotions. What if emotions aren't actually universal?
What if they're not hardwired programs that move us like
(07:28):
a marionette, but instead something we create and interpret. So
the story of the neuroscience of emotions really started taking
a turn with the work of one neuroscientist, Lisa Feldman Barrett.
She's a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and she
wrote a book called How Emotions Are Made. Over the years,
(07:49):
Barrett's work has really challenged everything we thought we knew
about emotions. In her view, emotions aren't universal biological reflexes.
They are constructed experiences, shaped by our brains, by our past,
and by our culture. So I called up Lisa to
join us here today, and as we're about to see
(08:10):
her research flips the script. It suggests that your brain
doesn't feel emotions as much as it predicts them. So
that wave of joy or that stab of anger, it's
not a reaction, it's your brain interpreting the signals of
your body in the context of your situation and your
(08:31):
life experience. So Lisa, first I want to ask you
what the classical view is of emotions, and then we're
going to transition into how you see it and what
your research has revealed.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
So let's start with the classical view.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
What is any student can learn in their psychology or
neuroscience textbook about emotions.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Right, So you open up an intro textbook, or you
could even open up a Harvard Business Review or often
even read the newspaper, and what you see is a
view that humans are born with six somewhere between six
and some I don't know, twelve fifteen circuits, one for
(09:19):
each type of emotion, Anger said, fear discussed. You know,
the different scientists disagree on how many there are, but
the ideas that you have these inborn emotions, something happens
in the world triggers one of them, and you make
a universal facial expression to express the state. Your body
(09:41):
changes to express the physical state that is characteristic of
that emotion, and you are likely to perform a specific behavior. So,
for example, if your fear circuit is triggered, you'll make
a wide eyed, gasping face, which is supposed to be
universe soul. Everybody around the world is supposed to make
(10:02):
that face when they're afraid, and recognize that as an
expression of fear. Your heart rate is supposed to race,
and you're supposed to be likely to flee or freeze
or make some kind of characteristic movement.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
So that's a bit of a caricature, but not that much.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
That's that is actually the view that a lot of
people still hold.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Actually, And when you started graduate school, I assume you
felt that was the right model as well. That's what
you were taught, and so you started doing some research
and what happened there?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Yeah, So I wasn't even doing research on emotion, David.
I started graduate school doing research on something else. But
I had to measure emotion, and I was measuring emotion
the way a lot of psychologists do, which is to
ask people, how are you feeling? And what I did
was I, instead of, you know, analyzing what people say,
(11:00):
I looked at the statistical structure of what they said.
So instead of just averaging the ratings and saying, oh,
this person is, you know, reporting sadness or fear, I
looked at the whole pattern of their reports. And I
found people on average don't distinguish between feelings of sadness
and fear and discuss. They basically group like all the
(11:21):
negative emotion words together to report I feel terrible and
all the positive words to I feel great, So I
feel good, I feel bad, I feel comfortable, I feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
That's generally, on average, what it looked like.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
And I thought, well, everybody knows there are universal expressions
for emotion, and everybody knows that there are these physical patterns,
you know, for different emotion categories, and eventually, you know,
everyone knows there are different circuits in the brain. So
I should be able to objectively measure somebody's emotional state
and then I can compare that to their reports. Because
(11:59):
it turned out but when I looked a little closer,
I could see that actually, on average, it looks like
people aren't distinguishing, but some people distinguish pretty well, and
other people, you know, use anger said and fearful to
mean are synonyms. So I thought, well, I can just
figure out like who's reporting accurately and who isn't. And
I thought, you know, not being an expert in emotion
(12:21):
and also having the exuberance and unrealistic expectations of a
graduate student, I thought, oh, this will just take me
a couple of months, Like, I'll figure it out and
then I'll be able to objectively, you know, measure emotion
I'll move on and it'll be great.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
And that is not what happened.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
So what did you find.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
I've went to the literature because like probably you and
almost everybody I know, we were all taught that each
emotion category that is anger, is a category of instances.
So we were taught that there are certain categories that
are universal and should have objective markers. So I started
(13:02):
with the face because everyone knows that Charles Darwin. I
mean when I say everyone, I mean you know, scientists
know Charles Darwin wrote a book called The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals, and he claimed that
there were these universal expressions. And so I went to
the literature and I started to read, and what I
(13:22):
discovered was that if you just read the introduction of
papers and you read the discussion section of the papers,
there are lots of claims about universal expressions.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
But if you actually look at.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
The results and you read you sort of dig into
the results, you don't see anything which looks like universal expressions.
Actually what you see is real variations. I'll give an
example of a recent meta analysis. So this is a
statistical summary of you know, hundreds of studies. Right, people
on average scowl when they're angry. Scowling is the supposed
(14:02):
universal expression of anger. People scowl when they're angry about
thirty five percent of the time, so that's more than chance,
and therefore it will get you a good publication if
you report that finding. But that means sixty five percent
of the time people are doing something else that is
(14:22):
meaningful with their face when they're angry, and other research
suggests that about half the time when people scowl, they're
not angry. They're feeling something else, and oftentimes it's not
an emotion.
Speaker 4 (14:35):
And if you combine that with.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Evidence from people who live in remote cultures who have
less access to Western values and norms for emotion, what
you see is that there's nothing that looks like universality
for anger or for any category that's ever been studied.
So scowling and anger is certainly one set of facial
(15:01):
movements that people make in the West when they're angry,
but it doesn't come anywhere close to having the reliability
or specificity that we would need to see for a
universal expression. And I'll just say that in my lab,
we were very fortunate to be able to visit Tanzania
(15:21):
and work with members of the Hudsa hunter gatherer culture.
And we basically took six emotion categories that don't exist
in English. They don't exist in Hadzane either. They have
never been claimed to be universal, and then we just
made up expressions for them, like literally, we sat around
(15:43):
a table just made up expressions for them. We pretested
them with American subjects. To make sure that American subjects
thought these were reasonable expressions of these emotions, we had
to tell them what the emotion was, you know, like
there were one emotion category it was gigle, which is
the desire to squeeze a baby's cheeks, you know, like
(16:05):
when you see a really cute baby and you just like,
So there was and then we plopped it into the
method that everybody uses when they do these cross cultural studies,
and the method produced evidence that five of the six
of these categories were universal. So what I'm saying here
is that there's a method that scientists are using that
(16:30):
basically is teaching people what the right answers are. But
the basic answer here is that for every claim of
a universal marker or signature for emotion, if you just
look closely and you start to poke a little bit
at the research. You know, it's like a house of cards,
(16:51):
it sort of falls apart, and instead what you see
is that variation is the norm, meaning you, David, probably
do many things when you're anger. You probably sometimes feel unpleasant,
and sometimes you probably might even feel pleasant. You know,
your body probably does many things in anger. It's not random.
It's structured by the situation, and that leads us to
(17:13):
ask a whole set of different questions about emotion.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So when we think about an emotion like anger, it's
not that there's one thing going on. It's not as
though I have an anger circuit. So instead, there are
lots of ways that I might express that based on
the context that I'm in. Can you give an example
of that? Sure?
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Have you ever laughed in anger?
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I don't remember if I've ever laughed at anger. It's
possibly what would be a situation where someone might do that.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
I think.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
People laugh in anger when they're insulted in some way,
and they cry in anger. I've certainly cried in anger.
People sit stoically in plot the demise of their enemy.
In anger, they make no expression whatsoever. I mean, you know,
I'm sure you've been in a faculty meeting where you've
(18:20):
done that. I certainly have had my moments. I think
if you look to the literature, what you see is
that people do all kinds of things in anger. Heart
rate can go up, it can go down, blood pressure
can go up, it can go down, it can stay
the same. There's not a single pattern. And when it
comes to the brain, there is no single circuit for
anger or sadness or fear. It's not even like there
(18:42):
are multiple circuits. What you see in the brain is
that there are ingredients or components that work together. So
anger is a whole brain state. It's not a single circuit.
In fact, any research that claims to have identified a
distinct circuit for an emotion is usually equating an emotion
(19:04):
with a specific action. So when you read research that
talks about the fear circuit, they mean the circuit in
animals when the animal freezes. Really careful research shows, for example,
if you place a rat in a testing box and
you expose the rat to us tone and then a
(19:25):
foot shock, eventually the rat will come to freeze when
it hears the tone. This is what scientists refer to
as learned fear, so they're equating a freezing behavior to fear,
and then they look for the circuit for that freezing behavior,
and then they call it the circuit for fear. The
really interesting thing is that recent research, for example, will
(19:48):
train a rat in the way that we just discussed,
mark the neurons that increase their firing, and then reactivate
those neurons opt genetically with light, and then they look
throughout the entire brain, Well, what else is being so
not just looking at the you know, the circuit, like
(20:10):
let's say the little subcortical circuit that they might be
interested in, but they look at through the whole brain
and what you see is that there's actually a whole
brain ensemble of neurons which are increasing their firing. Two
interesting things to me in this body of work. Oftentimes
scientists think the fear circuit is in neurons in this
little area called the amygdala, which is deep inside the
(20:33):
temper lobe of a vertebrate brain. If you reactivate the
neurons in the amygdala and you bring up this whole
brain wide ensemble of neurons, but you interfere with the
firing of the other neurons, including in the cerebral cortex,
you don't get freezing behavior. So it's the whole ensemble
(20:55):
that's producing that behavior, not just the neurons in the
But even more so, what's interesting is that if you
put the animal in a different box, one that doesn't
look very much like the box in which it learned
to freeze, those neurons that you've activated are part of
a different ensemble, and no freezing behavior happens. So you've
(21:21):
got this situation where the neurons in question are clearly
doing something, but whatever they're doing, they're working in a
larger group, So their psychological meaning is related or relational
or dependent on that group. And it's very context sensitive,
and it's just explaining freezing behavior. It's not explaining all
(21:44):
the other things that animals do in fear. This is
just one thing they do in a particular kind of context.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
So when you look in a movie like Inside Out
and you've got these different emotions and they hit a
button and cause some behavior, what your research has shown
for a few decades now is that it doesn't seem
to be the right explanation for emotion. Why do you
think that view is so popular? And more importantly, what
is your theory about constructed emotions?
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Explain that to us.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Yeah, well, first, can I just say about Inside Out.
I have to say I've seen both movies and I
love them. I think they're totally fun. They have really
really clever metaphors that I love, and I think in
the second movie, I particularly loved on Wei.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
I just love that character.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
But what I'll say is that I also really like
Roadrunner and Wiley Coyote cartoons, but I don't think that
I can learn physics from it. So the idea that
you could learn neuroscience, the neuroscience of emotion from a cartoon,
and particularly from Pixar that can put emotions into cockroaches
and cars, and you know, they're so clever, right. I
(22:55):
think there's nothing wrong with what Pixar did. It's it,
but the marketing is is pretty problematic.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
And I also want to point out that you just
watch any single one.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Of those characters, anger or embarrassment, any of them, and they.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
Show a rate.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
They have a range of emotions, they display a range
of expressions. If they only ever did their one thing,
it would be a really boring movie.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah, so tell us about your theory of constructed emotion
and what the right way is to think.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
About this, Well, I don't know if it's the right way,
but it's certainly a different way, and I think a
way that's more justified by the available evidence. And so
I'll say that for a long time I didn't have
a theory. I just was trying to learn. You know,
we're faced with a paradox, really, and that is that
(23:48):
there's no single biological marker or pattern of biological markers
that like, no biomarkers for any category of emotion. Yet
when I I'm angry, I feel angry, and I don't
feel sad or happy or you know, I have an
(24:09):
immediate reaction and I don't think about why I'm having
it or which one I'm having.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
And pretty much.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
People, you know, that's their experience. They feel like emotions
happen to them. It feels like something's being triggered. So
you've got the subjective experiences of certainty.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
And then on the other hand.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
You've got this biological question of like, well, they're no
markers anywhere. Plus what you have is tremendous variation across cultures,
just even in the categories that exist. So not all
the categories that we think of as basic in English
actually exist in other languages, and there are many other
categories that are basic for other languages that don't exist
(24:55):
in our language. So how do you account for all
of this in one theory? This this was a puzzle
to me for a really long time. So what I
did is I started to study brain evolution. So how
did brains evolve and how are they structured? And how
do they work? So instead of doing what most scientists
do is they say, okay, well, I'm I'm really interested
(25:16):
in anger, fear, sadness, so I'm going to go looking
for the physical basis of those emotions in the brain
or in the body. I started with the brain and
body and said, okay, well, to the best of our knowledge,
how did a brain like ours evolve, How does it work,
how is it structured, what's its anatomy? And then how
is it, you know, communicating with the body. And then,
given that we have that kind of biology, how could
(25:39):
it be creating the instances or the events that we
experience as emotion. And I came up with a really
different set of hypotheses that required a really different way
of doing science. And it's a little more complicated. Then
you've got a circuit in your brain that you were
born with the triggers and then produces a you know,
(26:00):
an emotion, prototypical motion, and the theory goes something like this,
Your brain's most important job is regulating your body. It's
not to think or feel or see even it's to
regulate the systems of your body in a metabolically efficient way.
That's actually the basis of everything your brain does, and
(26:23):
anything you see or feel, or hear or think is
in the service of that regulation.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
So that's the first piece. Your brain is part of
this regulation.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
It's always receiving signals from the body and signals from
the world. So every experience you have, every action you take,
is some combination of what's inside your brain and what's
outside your brain coming to the sensory surfaces of your body.
So your brain's always regulating your body. Your body is
(26:55):
always sending sensory signals back to your brain to report
on the sensory constantquences of those movements inside your body,
your heart beating, your lungs expanding, whatever. But also you're
always receiving sensory signals from the surfaces, sensory surfaces that
we think of as exte receptive signals The interesting thing
(27:16):
is that these signals from the brain's perspective are ambiguous
because the brain is trapped in a dark, silent box
called your skull, and these signals are the outcomes of
some set of changes in the body and in the
world that the brain has no access to. Right So,
like a loud bang could be a door slamming, a
(27:40):
car backfiring, or a gunshot, what your brain will do
to keep itself alive and well is very different in
those circumstances. So how does it know? And the answer
is it has to guess. This is what what philosophers
call an inverse problem. And you know where you receive
the outcome, but you don't know the cause. You have
to guess at the cause. And what does the brain
(28:00):
used to guess? It uses past experience. It's remembering, and
you don't experience yourself remembering. But basically your brain is
remembering a bunch of instances from the past that are
similar to the present. A bunch of things which are
similar is called a category.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
So your brain's.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Basically using the past to construct categories in the moment
that will allow it to prepare action. The interesting thing
is that research suggests the brain is functioning predictively, which
means the guest starts before the sensory signals arrive. So
(28:39):
if we were to stop time right now, your brain
is modeling that what it believes to be the sensory
state of your body and the sensory conditions of the world,
and based on that it's remembering. It's reinstating a bunch
of partial representations a category that's similar to the present
as a way of preparing the regulation of the body,
(29:02):
anticipating the needs of the body, and preparing to meet
those needs before they arise, so that movements can occur
like eye movements or muscle movements, and the consequences of
those movements are the predicted sensory inputs that are arriving
from the sensory surfaces, and so the brain is comparing
those and the result is your experience. So what's interesting
(29:28):
about this perspective is a couple of things. One is
that it's not like you see something and then react
to it and then move Perception is a consequence of
movement preparation, not the other way around. The brain is
functioning predictively, even though it creates experiences of the world
as if it's reacting to the world. So it's there's
(29:50):
a real puzzle here, which is why would a brain
function predictively but create experiences of reactions. Nobody knows the
answer to that question. And the way that emotions are
constructed are the way that every psychological feature is constructed.
There's no specific set of mechanisms to emotion that would
(30:13):
be different from cognition or perception or attention or what
have you.
Speaker 4 (30:17):
Do.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
You think of emotion as being sort of a wider
angle lens on a situation. So when I think about cognition,
it feels like, Okay, what's the next chess move I'm
going to make, and I'm really focused on something. Emotion
sometimes feels to me like, you know, give me the
wider view of what's happening here. Is this a good situation?
This is a bad situation.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I think that things like cognition and emotion and attention
and perception are features of a brain state. I think
if there are features that happen to be very salient,
then we call the event a thought or a memory,
or an emotion or a perception. But I think about
the brain holistically as a dynamical system, a system of
(31:02):
neurons and other bits and bobs that moves from state
to state to state, and or you could say traverses
of state space, you know, like it always is in
a state and the nature of the state changes. So
I think about emotions as you know, for example, your
brain is always regulating your body, or you'd be dead.
(31:25):
So it's always regulating the body. Body is always sending
signals back to the brain. It's very infrequently that you
will experience those signals as your heart pounding or your
lungs expanding. You never feel, you know, your liver excreting
chemicals or hormones, like, you just don't experience those things.
The brain's tracking it, but it's not making that information
(31:47):
available to itself. Instead, what we feel is affect We
feel pleasant, we feel unpleasant, we feel calm, we feel
worked up. Those are really simple feelings there that are
with us all all the time, in every waking moment
of life. So they're really properties of consciousness. When they
get really intense, those are the moments that we experience
(32:10):
them as emotions, but they're always there, even in moments
of cognition or perception for example. I also want to
say that there are many cultures in the world that
don't distinguish cognition from emotion, Like, that's not how people
in certain cultures experience themselves in the world. They don't
make that distinction. That's a very Western distinction. And I
(32:33):
think we have to have a theory of brain function
that accommodates everybody's experience, not just certain people's experience. Because
we happen to be the ones with the money and
who are in control of the journals.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
You know, that's interesting. I mean, what's your experience.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I feel like when I'm concentrating on something very specific,
like the chest move, that feels different to me than
if I'm just feeling generally happy or sad or something.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
It does, but so does in one instance of happiness
can feel entirely different than another feeling of happiness. So
my point the question we would ask, is there something
similar to the brain state for lots of different instances
of happiness. So we took all the instances where you
were deciding on a chess move, would those brain states
look more similar to each other than if we looked
(33:26):
at all the brain states you had for chess moves
and happiness. And the answer is not so far. There's
just structured variation. So when you're happy, that's not the
same state for you all the time. You know, people
do lots of things when they are happy. They express
(33:47):
in different ways. They have their menta mental features of
their experience can change, their physical state can be different.
It's not random. It's structured by the situation that they're in,
including the physical condition of their body and their metabolic state.
And there's nothing objectively more similar about those instances of
(34:11):
happiness than is objectively different between happiness and instances of
planning a chess move. And the interesting question there is
why it feels that way to us. It's a question
of consciousness, it's not a question of objective brain function.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
What is your take on that answer?
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Why it feels different, Why we have a distinction, let's say,
in the West, between let's say, cognition on one end
of the spectrum and emotion on another end of the spectrum.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
I don't know exactly why we have categories for cognition
and emotion that are so entrenched, but I will say
that they derived not out of a theory of brain function,
but of a theory of morality. In ancient Greece, so
that's how old they are. That you have an inner
beast of emotions and instincts, and that inter beece has
(35:00):
to be kept in check by cognition, by rationality. And
if you keep that inner beast in check, you know
you're a moral person and you're a healthy person. And
if you don't, then you're either immoral, or you're immature,
(35:24):
or you're mentally ill. This idea of that your mind
is a battleground between cognition and emotion is a very
old idea. You can see it in Plato's writings, and
it's embedded in the law, it's embedded in economics. It's
just a pervasive idea that has no evidence to support
it in brain evolution or brain function.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
I have a question, though, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I think that's the distinction that I feel about, you know,
keeping the beast in check. It's more like, if I'm
planning my next let's say, chess move, then I'm thinking
about steps.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
I can do it in a very clear, rational way.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
But if I'm at a party and I'm thinking, Wow,
I'm having a great time at this party, or oh,
I don't really like this party so much, or something
I just you know, I have some feeling about it.
I might not be able to specify the details of why,
but nonetheless I'm you know, I'm a wash in some feeling,
some emotion about this. And that's the distinction that I
(36:24):
intuitively feel. I'm curious if you if you see that
as a as a meaningful spectrum.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
So I would say it's a meaningful question about consciousness.
It's not a meaningful question about brain structure or brain
function in the sense that intuition, our intuitions, our experiences
of the world in general are very bad explanatory guides
for how the world works. And this is also true
(36:54):
when the brain, when brains are trying to explain themselves, right,
So I would say, yeah, I mean, there are probably
times when you're planning a chess move that you're really frustrated,
and there are probably times when you're really happy that
you're thinking about strategically, how can I meet that person
or how can I get away from this person? Or
(37:14):
so I think that this is a question of which
mental features are in the focus of attention and which
ones are in the background. Like right now, for example,
if you are sitting, are you sitting.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Or stating I'm sitting.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Okay, So right now, for example, you're probably not concentrating
on the press of the chair against the back of
your thighs until now that I just said it, you
probably are thinking about that for a minute, right. So
there are features of experience that are available to you
that are not in the forefront of your experience, but
you can move them in and out pretty easily. And
(37:49):
that's really how I think about it. So, for example,
the next time that you find yourself being really really hungry,
take a moment and focus your attent on your stomach.
Are you hungry or are you tired? Because if you're
tired and you need some energy, your first reaction will
(38:09):
be to eat, because you have a history of learning
that energy comes from, Like the feeling of having more
energy happens after you eat. But a lot of the
time when we're tired, we should be drinking water, not eating,
because dehydration is fatigue.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
You know.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Research shows, for example, that when you drink a whole
glass of water. Drink a glass of water, your thirst
is immediately quenched, but actually it takes twenty minutes for
the water to make its way into your bloodstream. To
change the osmolarity of your blood to get to the
brain to tell the brain that now you are hydrated.
So the brain is constructing experience. It's predicting what the
(38:49):
sensory consequences of actions will be, and you start to
experience the consequences well before the actual input arrives to
the brain to confirm those So I wouldn't go looking
for distinctions between cognition and emotion because people have looked
for those distinctions for years and years and years, and
(39:11):
the one thing that we've learned from all of that
research is that it's the wrong question to be asking. Instead,
it's a question about experience and the way the brain
is constructing experience lived experience, and that's where we should
be asking those neuroscience based questions.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
I think, could the concept of constructed emotions tell us
something about AI and the future of machines being able
(39:56):
to simulate or understand our.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Everything from evolutionary biology and neuroscience tells us that the
core of brain function is rooted in the regulation of
the body. There are metabolic constraints and selection pressures that
give us the kind of mind we have, and that
(40:23):
means that there's this sort of imperative that is largely hidden,
but that scaffolds everything we see and feel and think.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
AI doesn't have that. I'm not saying an AI has
to have a body.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I'm saying it has to have a set of really
complicated systems that it has to regulate, because that's actually
at the basis of our human minds, actually of any
mind of any living creature. I'm not reducing everything to
metabolism or bodily regulation, but it's a hugely important piece
(41:03):
that we all overlook because we are not aware of it.
Right now, You and I and every listener has a
whole drama going on inside each of us that we
are I mean, I hope we're largely unaware of because
whenever we become slightly aware of that drama, we're usually
really uncomfortable and we can't pay attention to anything outside
(41:24):
in the world. So I think that that's a huge
piece of what it means to have a human mind.
Evolutionarily and structurally and functionally, at the core of your brain,
it's predictive regulation of the body. So exactly the same
(41:45):
brain regions, exactly the same neurons in certain cases that
are regulating the body are also implicated in attention or memory,
or emotion or vision. Right, So the hippocampus. People think
of this structure as being for memory or for spatial navigation,
(42:07):
but it has more endocrine receptors than any other part
of the brain.
Speaker 4 (42:11):
Except the hypothalamus.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
It is clearly a hub for the predictive regulation of
the body, but that's not how people think of it
because they're more concerned with understanding the other functions which
result from that regulation, like memory or spatial navigation.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
How does your theory.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Of emotion change the way that we think about mental
health treatments like depression or anxiety.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
The way the brain regulates metabolism is that it's running
a budget for the body, and I would say depression
is a bankrupt body budget. The brain believes that there's
a metabolic problem somewhere in the body, and so it's
reducing energy output. And the way the brain reduces energy
output is by reducing movement, reducing sensitivity to the outside world,
(43:07):
and inducing feelings of fatigue so that you won't move
very much. So you get context insensitivity, which is a
major symptom of depression. You also get fatigue and motor retardation,
so people don't move as much, They move more slowly,
so the brain is attempting to reduce energy output. And
(43:29):
the clincher for me is that a couple of things.
One is that there's a test biological tests for depression
that involves looking at cortisol levels, which is a chemical
that people call a stress hormone. Cortisol is a is
a glu It regulates glucose metabolism, So if you have
(43:52):
problems with glucose metabolism, then you will very likely have
depressed mood. And serotonin actually evolved as a metabolic regulator.
Serotonin uptake reaptake inhibitors are not happiest drugs. They're drugs
that influence metabolism, and whatever affective consequences they have are
(44:12):
because they are regulating metabolism.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
So, Lisa, tell us some practical takeaways from your research
that listeners can think about when they're thinking about how
to manage their own emotions.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
The first thing I would be doing is asking yourself, like,
when you feel like crap. Feeling like crap doesn't mean
that something's wrong. It could mean that you're just doing
something really hard, or that you didn't get a good
night's sleep, or that you're dehydrated in some way, so
it doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong with your life
(44:46):
or something is wrong with you. In our culture, we
believe that thoughts cause feelings, but actually, if you look
at the predictive functioning of the brain, it suggests that
the signals which give rise to feelings also.
Speaker 4 (44:59):
Give right to thoughts.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
So if you feel like shit, you're probably going to
feel it's going to feel to you like you're a
horrible person and that the world is terrible, or you
need to divorce your spouse or your kids are you know,
misbehaving or whatever. We have a tendency to see the
world through affect colored glasses because of how we're wired.
So the first thing that I do when I feel
(45:24):
like the world is ending, you know, because lots of
bad things are happening, The first thing I ask myself
is did I get enough sleep last night? Have I
had enough water to drink? Is it better for me
to have a bath and go to bed and get
up tomorrow and things will look different even in the
worst of circumstances. That's always a good strategy.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
That was Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor at Northeastern University and
one of the world's experts on emotion, and I'll just
mentioned she's one of the top one percent of the
most cited psychologists in the world.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
So to summarize what we.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Saw today, for decades there was a research avalanche suggesting
that emotions are the same across all people. And we
had Darwin's universal expressions of emotions, and we had Paul
Ekman's suggestion that there were a handful of basic emotions,
and we had pixars inside out. There seemed to be
(46:27):
a clear map of the emotional landscape that was coming
into focus. But as we saw, Barrett and her lab
came to very different conclusions. She became skeptical that there
was universality of emotional expression, like what she mentioned about
the assumption that people scowl when they're angry. But it
turns out when you study this carefully, sixty five percent
(46:49):
of the time people do something else when they're angry.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
They don't scowl.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
And also when you do see a scowl, it's only
a fifty percent chance that this has to do with
anger versus something else. So Barrett argues that emotions are
not universal reflexes. They are instead constructed. They're shaped by
the brain's predictive power, and our cultural context and our
individual experiences. In other words, her framework highlights the role
(47:16):
of the brain's internal model in interpreting sensations from the
body what's called introception, and signing meaning to those sensations,
creating what we label as emotions. It's a paradigm shift
that invites us to reconsider not only what emotions are,
but what they mean. If emotions are constructed, then they're
(47:38):
not simply happening to us, they're happening with us. So
take a minute to think about some moments in your
life when you felt something deeply love or rage, or
despair or hope. Barrett's framework suggests that in those moments,
your brain was hard at work pulling together past experiences
(48:00):
in bodily sensations and environmental clues to create the emotion
that you felt. It wasn't a reflex, it was a narrative.
And if emotions are readouts from the body, then maybe
we can get just slightly more agency over them. Not
in the sense of controlling our feelings, they're too complex
for that, but in shaping how we interpret and respond
(48:24):
to them.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
Take something like.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Anger in the classical view anger is a red hot reaction.
It's the little guy with fire coming out of his head.
It's beyond our control. But if anger is constructed, maybe
we can probe it a bit. What is my body
telling me? Why does the situation feel threatening? How can
I reframe this moment? Because emotions appear to be not
(48:48):
something we simply have, but something we make, not pre
programmed reactions, but dynamic constructions, shaped by our past and
our brains predictions of the future. Understanding this can change
potentially how we see ourselves and others. Are moments of
joy and fear, and love and anger. They're not fixed,
(49:11):
but they're flexible. They're a reflection of the stories that
our brains create, and perhaps in knowing this, we can
maybe learned to shape those stories a little better, not
as readers, but as authors. Go to Eagleman dot com
(49:33):
slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to
Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
to leave comments.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
Until next time.
Speaker 1 (49:49):
I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
What are emotions? Are they something that happened to you?
Or are they bodily signals that we interpret? Does everyone
show emotions in the same way? Are there particular markers
of the face or body that always mean anger or
sadness or joy? And what does this have to do
with Charles Darwin or the truth about facial expressions or
(00:29):
the movie Inside Out. Welcome to enter Cosmos with me
David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford
and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three
pound universe to understand why and how our lives look
the way they do. Today's episode is about emotions. Now,
(01:12):
to set this up, let's think about emotion versus cognition.
In the past half century, neuroscience has been buzzing with
discoveries about cognition, like how we perceive information, how we
decide that sort of thing, and this has all been
enhanced by all the recent advances in artificial intelligence. So
(01:33):
cognition is all about acquiring and using knowledge, recognizing patterns,
storing and retrieving informations, creating mental representations, but real neural
networks the ones living inside organisms. They operate in a
very different context. Organisms are driven by needs and motives
(01:55):
and pain and emotions. Without these driving all the cognitive
processes like learning and representing and taking action.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
These would lack purpose or direction.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
In other words, if nothing matters to an organism, there's
no reason for it to learn or do anything. This
is why understanding the brain requires us to include emotion,
not just cognition, and this consideration has given rise to
a field that we call affective neuroscience, in other words,
(02:30):
the neuroscience of emotions as a complement to the field
of cognitive neuroscience.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
So what is.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Different about these two fields, Well, at least traditionally, neuroscience
thinks about cognition as representational and involving symbols and computation
and degrees of accuracy in how well it reflects the world.
But emotions they don't fit that model. Take something like fear,
(02:58):
it's not exactly about rep presentation or symbols that it
doesn't have accuracy, but instead it varies in intensity. If
emotions are like forces that rise and fall, or they mix,
or they remain pure, then cognition is maybe more like
an encyclopedia, something structured and informational. Now These metaphors are imperfect,
(03:21):
but I'm just using these to tee up the divide
between cognition and emotion in conventional thinking. Now, why has
cognition received all the attention in the laboratory.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Well, it's because we.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Can build models or artificial neural networks to tackle cognitive
tasks like chess and go and math problems. It's a
lot harder to set up clear experiments with emotions, and
so these have traditionally received a lot less attention in
the research world. But the thing to note is that
(03:56):
emotions are much more ancient and at least here to
span the animal kingdom, while chess games do not, so
emotions may be more fundamental in brain wiring. So how
do emotions get studied? Let's start with Charles Darwin. In
his book The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Which he published in eighteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Two, Darwin proposed that emotions are biological phenomenon. They're deeply
rooted in our evolutionary history. So he argued that our
facial expressions of joy or sadness, or anger or fear
they evolved to communicate essential information to ourselves and others.
So for example, it makes sense, he argued, for a
(04:43):
person who is angry to stand tall and loom large
and glare and tense their muscles.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
These actions prepare them for physical.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Action, and these actions can also just serve as a
visual threat of action. So Darwin proposed that he motions
are survival tools passed down through the generations, like well
oiled machinery.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Although its a.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Side note, he did mention that this appropriateness hypothesis can't
be the whole story, since a lot of things didn't
seem to fit, like a person who is sad moping
around and recreating conversations in his head and feeling drained.
But we'll come back to this. So the general thing
that Darwin emphasized is that certain emotions prepare our body
(05:28):
to do the next thing, and he suggested this was
universal across the animal kingdom. He said, look, expressions are
essentially the same across mammalian species, and things can even
look a little similar between mammals and reptiles and birds,
like when the animal is afraid or angry or showing
(05:49):
parental love. So Darwin said, the core emotional operations relevant
to behavior are evolutionarily highly conserved, so fast forward to
the twentieth century, and this research gained momentum with researchers
like Paul Ekman. Ekman went around the world and he
concluded that he could identify six basic emotions. There was happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust,
(06:19):
and surprise. And these six emotions, he argued, are universal
whether you are in New York or New Guinea. A
smile means joy, and if you have a furrowed brow,
that means worry and so on. And this model of
basic emotions that are universal, we see this framework everywhere
around us. You've probably seen the Pixar movie Inside Out,
(06:42):
which brought emotions to life. You had the characters of
joy and sadness and anger and fear and disgust, and
each one was personified as a little being running the
control panel of a young girl's mind. And it was
a great movie and it captured the publicma because it
felt sort of true. Right, these emotions seem like individual
(07:06):
entities living inside us. They're always there, They're waiting to
surface and take charge of the control panel. But what
if I told you that everything you just heard about
Darwin and Eckman and Inside Out is not really the
full story about emotions. What if emotions aren't actually universal?
What if they're not hardwired programs that move us like
(07:28):
a marionette, but instead something we create and interpret. So
the story of the neuroscience of emotions really started taking
a turn with the work of one neuroscientist, Lisa Feldman Barrett.
She's a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and she
wrote a book called How Emotions Are Made. Over the years,
(07:49):
Barrett's work has really challenged everything we thought we knew
about emotions. In her view, emotions aren't universal biological reflexes.
They are constructed experiences, shaped by our brains, by our past,
and by our culture. So I called up Lisa to
join us here today, and as we're about to see
(08:10):
her research flips the script. It suggests that your brain
doesn't feel emotions as much as it predicts them. So
that wave of joy or that stab of anger, it's
not a reaction, it's your brain interpreting the signals of
your body in the context of your situation and your
(08:31):
life experience. So Lisa, first I want to ask you
what the classical view is of emotions, and then we're
going to transition into how you see it and what
your research has revealed.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
So let's start with the classical view.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
What is any student can learn in their psychology or
neuroscience textbook about emotions.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Right, So you open up an intro textbook, or you
could even open up a Harvard Business Review or often
even read the newspaper, and what you see is a
view that humans are born with six somewhere between six
and some I don't know, twelve fifteen circuits, one for
(09:19):
each type of emotion, Anger said, fear discussed. You know,
the different scientists disagree on how many there are, but
the ideas that you have these inborn emotions, something happens
in the world triggers one of them, and you make
a universal facial expression to express the state. Your body
(09:41):
changes to express the physical state that is characteristic of
that emotion, and you are likely to perform a specific behavior. So,
for example, if your fear circuit is triggered, you'll make
a wide eyed, gasping face, which is supposed to be
universe soul. Everybody around the world is supposed to make
(10:02):
that face when they're afraid, and recognize that as an
expression of fear. Your heart rate is supposed to race,
and you're supposed to be likely to flee or freeze
or make some kind of characteristic movement.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
So that's a bit of a caricature, but not that much.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
That's that is actually the view that a lot of
people still hold.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Actually, And when you started graduate school, I assume you
felt that was the right model as well. That's what
you were taught, and so you started doing some research
and what happened there?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Yeah, So I wasn't even doing research on emotion, David.
I started graduate school doing research on something else. But
I had to measure emotion, and I was measuring emotion
the way a lot of psychologists do, which is to
ask people, how are you feeling? And what I did
was I, instead of, you know, analyzing what people say,
(11:00):
I looked at the statistical structure of what they said.
So instead of just averaging the ratings and saying, oh,
this person is, you know, reporting sadness or fear, I
looked at the whole pattern of their reports. And I
found people on average don't distinguish between feelings of sadness
and fear and discuss. They basically group like all the
(11:21):
negative emotion words together to report I feel terrible and
all the positive words to I feel great, So I
feel good, I feel bad, I feel comfortable, I feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
That's generally, on average, what it looked like.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
And I thought, well, everybody knows there are universal expressions
for emotion, and everybody knows that there are these physical patterns,
you know, for different emotion categories, and eventually, you know,
everyone knows there are different circuits in the brain. So
I should be able to objectively measure somebody's emotional state
and then I can compare that to their reports. Because
(11:59):
it turned out but when I looked a little closer,
I could see that actually, on average, it looks like
people aren't distinguishing, but some people distinguish pretty well, and
other people, you know, use anger said and fearful to
mean are synonyms. So I thought, well, I can just
figure out like who's reporting accurately and who isn't. And
I thought, you know, not being an expert in emotion
(12:21):
and also having the exuberance and unrealistic expectations of a
graduate student, I thought, oh, this will just take me
a couple of months, Like, I'll figure it out and
then I'll be able to objectively, you know, measure emotion
I'll move on and it'll be great.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
And that is not what happened.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
So what did you find.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
I've went to the literature because like probably you and
almost everybody I know, we were all taught that each
emotion category that is anger, is a category of instances.
So we were taught that there are certain categories that
are universal and should have objective markers. So I started
(13:02):
with the face because everyone knows that Charles Darwin. I
mean when I say everyone, I mean you know, scientists
know Charles Darwin wrote a book called The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals, and he claimed that
there were these universal expressions. And so I went to
the literature and I started to read, and what I
(13:22):
discovered was that if you just read the introduction of
papers and you read the discussion section of the papers,
there are lots of claims about universal expressions.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
But if you actually look at.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
The results and you read you sort of dig into
the results, you don't see anything which looks like universal expressions.
Actually what you see is real variations. I'll give an
example of a recent meta analysis. So this is a
statistical summary of you know, hundreds of studies. Right, people
on average scowl when they're angry. Scowling is the supposed
(14:02):
universal expression of anger. People scowl when they're angry about
thirty five percent of the time, so that's more than chance,
and therefore it will get you a good publication if
you report that finding. But that means sixty five percent
of the time people are doing something else that is
(14:22):
meaningful with their face when they're angry, and other research
suggests that about half the time when people scowl, they're
not angry. They're feeling something else, and oftentimes it's not
an emotion.
Speaker 4 (14:35):
And if you combine that with.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Evidence from people who live in remote cultures who have
less access to Western values and norms for emotion, what
you see is that there's nothing that looks like universality
for anger or for any category that's ever been studied.
So scowling and anger is certainly one set of facial
(15:01):
movements that people make in the West when they're angry,
but it doesn't come anywhere close to having the reliability
or specificity that we would need to see for a
universal expression. And I'll just say that in my lab,
we were very fortunate to be able to visit Tanzania
(15:21):
and work with members of the Hudsa hunter gatherer culture.
And we basically took six emotion categories that don't exist
in English. They don't exist in Hadzane either. They have
never been claimed to be universal, and then we just
made up expressions for them, like literally, we sat around
(15:43):
a table just made up expressions for them. We pretested
them with American subjects. To make sure that American subjects
thought these were reasonable expressions of these emotions, we had
to tell them what the emotion was, you know, like
there were one emotion category it was gigle, which is
the desire to squeeze a baby's cheeks, you know, like
(16:05):
when you see a really cute baby and you just like,
So there was and then we plopped it into the
method that everybody uses when they do these cross cultural studies,
and the method produced evidence that five of the six
of these categories were universal. So what I'm saying here
is that there's a method that scientists are using that
(16:30):
basically is teaching people what the right answers are. But
the basic answer here is that for every claim of
a universal marker or signature for emotion, if you just
look closely and you start to poke a little bit
at the research. You know, it's like a house of cards,
(16:51):
it sort of falls apart, and instead what you see
is that variation is the norm, meaning you, David, probably
do many things when you're anger. You probably sometimes feel unpleasant,
and sometimes you probably might even feel pleasant. You know,
your body probably does many things in anger. It's not random.
It's structured by the situation, and that leads us to
(17:13):
ask a whole set of different questions about emotion.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So when we think about an emotion like anger, it's
not that there's one thing going on. It's not as
though I have an anger circuit. So instead, there are
lots of ways that I might express that based on
the context that I'm in. Can you give an example
of that? Sure?
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Have you ever laughed in anger?
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I don't remember if I've ever laughed at anger. It's
possibly what would be a situation where someone might do that.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
I think.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
People laugh in anger when they're insulted in some way,
and they cry in anger. I've certainly cried in anger.
People sit stoically in plot the demise of their enemy.
In anger, they make no expression whatsoever. I mean, you know,
I'm sure you've been in a faculty meeting where you've
(18:20):
done that. I certainly have had my moments. I think
if you look to the literature, what you see is
that people do all kinds of things in anger. Heart
rate can go up, it can go down, blood pressure
can go up, it can go down, it can stay
the same. There's not a single pattern. And when it
comes to the brain, there is no single circuit for
anger or sadness or fear. It's not even like there
(18:42):
are multiple circuits. What you see in the brain is
that there are ingredients or components that work together. So
anger is a whole brain state. It's not a single circuit.
In fact, any research that claims to have identified a
distinct circuit for an emotion is usually equating an emotion
(19:04):
with a specific action. So when you read research that
talks about the fear circuit, they mean the circuit in
animals when the animal freezes. Really careful research shows, for example,
if you place a rat in a testing box and
you expose the rat to us tone and then a
(19:25):
foot shock, eventually the rat will come to freeze when
it hears the tone. This is what scientists refer to
as learned fear, so they're equating a freezing behavior to fear,
and then they look for the circuit for that freezing behavior,
and then they call it the circuit for fear. The
really interesting thing is that recent research, for example, will
(19:48):
train a rat in the way that we just discussed,
mark the neurons that increase their firing, and then reactivate
those neurons opt genetically with light, and then they look
throughout the entire brain, Well, what else is being so
not just looking at the you know, the circuit, like
(20:10):
let's say the little subcortical circuit that they might be
interested in, but they look at through the whole brain
and what you see is that there's actually a whole
brain ensemble of neurons which are increasing their firing. Two
interesting things to me in this body of work. Oftentimes
scientists think the fear circuit is in neurons in this
little area called the amygdala, which is deep inside the
(20:33):
temper lobe of a vertebrate brain. If you reactivate the
neurons in the amygdala and you bring up this whole
brain wide ensemble of neurons, but you interfere with the
firing of the other neurons, including in the cerebral cortex,
you don't get freezing behavior. So it's the whole ensemble
(20:55):
that's producing that behavior, not just the neurons in the
But even more so, what's interesting is that if you
put the animal in a different box, one that doesn't
look very much like the box in which it learned
to freeze, those neurons that you've activated are part of
a different ensemble, and no freezing behavior happens. So you've
(21:21):
got this situation where the neurons in question are clearly
doing something, but whatever they're doing, they're working in a
larger group, So their psychological meaning is related or relational
or dependent on that group. And it's very context sensitive,
and it's just explaining freezing behavior. It's not explaining all
(21:44):
the other things that animals do in fear. This is
just one thing they do in a particular kind of context.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
So when you look in a movie like Inside Out
and you've got these different emotions and they hit a
button and cause some behavior, what your research has shown
for a few decades now is that it doesn't seem
to be the right explanation for emotion. Why do you
think that view is so popular? And more importantly, what
is your theory about constructed emotions?
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Explain that to us.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Yeah, well, first, can I just say about Inside Out.
I have to say I've seen both movies and I
love them. I think they're totally fun. They have really
really clever metaphors that I love, and I think in
the second movie, I particularly loved on Wei.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
I just love that character.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
But what I'll say is that I also really like
Roadrunner and Wiley Coyote cartoons, but I don't think that
I can learn physics from it. So the idea that
you could learn neuroscience, the neuroscience of emotion from a cartoon,
and particularly from Pixar that can put emotions into cockroaches
and cars, and you know, they're so clever, right. I
(22:55):
think there's nothing wrong with what Pixar did. It's it,
but the marketing is is pretty problematic.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
And I also want to point out that you just
watch any single one.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Of those characters, anger or embarrassment, any of them, and they.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
Show a rate.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
They have a range of emotions, they display a range
of expressions. If they only ever did their one thing,
it would be a really boring movie.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah, so tell us about your theory of constructed emotion
and what the right way is to think.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
About this, Well, I don't know if it's the right way,
but it's certainly a different way, and I think a
way that's more justified by the available evidence. And so
I'll say that for a long time I didn't have
a theory. I just was trying to learn. You know,
we're faced with a paradox, really, and that is that
(23:48):
there's no single biological marker or pattern of biological markers
that like, no biomarkers for any category of emotion. Yet
when I I'm angry, I feel angry, and I don't
feel sad or happy or you know, I have an
(24:09):
immediate reaction and I don't think about why I'm having
it or which one I'm having.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
And pretty much.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
People, you know, that's their experience. They feel like emotions
happen to them. It feels like something's being triggered. So
you've got the subjective experiences of certainty.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
And then on the other hand.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
You've got this biological question of like, well, they're no
markers anywhere. Plus what you have is tremendous variation across cultures,
just even in the categories that exist. So not all
the categories that we think of as basic in English
actually exist in other languages, and there are many other
categories that are basic for other languages that don't exist
(24:55):
in our language. So how do you account for all
of this in one theory? This this was a puzzle
to me for a really long time. So what I
did is I started to study brain evolution. So how
did brains evolve and how are they structured? And how
do they work? So instead of doing what most scientists
do is they say, okay, well, I'm I'm really interested
(25:16):
in anger, fear, sadness, so I'm going to go looking
for the physical basis of those emotions in the brain
or in the body. I started with the brain and
body and said, okay, well, to the best of our knowledge,
how did a brain like ours evolve, How does it work,
how is it structured, what's its anatomy? And then how
is it, you know, communicating with the body. And then,
given that we have that kind of biology, how could
(25:39):
it be creating the instances or the events that we
experience as emotion. And I came up with a really
different set of hypotheses that required a really different way
of doing science. And it's a little more complicated. Then
you've got a circuit in your brain that you were
born with the triggers and then produces a you know,
(26:00):
an emotion, prototypical motion, and the theory goes something like this,
Your brain's most important job is regulating your body. It's
not to think or feel or see even it's to
regulate the systems of your body in a metabolically efficient way.
That's actually the basis of everything your brain does, and
(26:23):
anything you see or feel, or hear or think is
in the service of that regulation.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
So that's the first piece. Your brain is part of
this regulation.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
It's always receiving signals from the body and signals from
the world. So every experience you have, every action you take,
is some combination of what's inside your brain and what's
outside your brain coming to the sensory surfaces of your body.
So your brain's always regulating your body. Your body is
(26:55):
always sending sensory signals back to your brain to report
on the sensory constantquences of those movements inside your body,
your heart beating, your lungs expanding, whatever. But also you're
always receiving sensory signals from the surfaces, sensory surfaces that
we think of as exte receptive signals The interesting thing
(27:16):
is that these signals from the brain's perspective are ambiguous
because the brain is trapped in a dark, silent box
called your skull, and these signals are the outcomes of
some set of changes in the body and in the
world that the brain has no access to. Right So,
like a loud bang could be a door slamming, a
(27:40):
car backfiring, or a gunshot, what your brain will do
to keep itself alive and well is very different in
those circumstances. So how does it know? And the answer
is it has to guess. This is what what philosophers
call an inverse problem. And you know where you receive
the outcome, but you don't know the cause. You have
to guess at the cause. And what does the brain
(28:00):
used to guess? It uses past experience. It's remembering, and
you don't experience yourself remembering. But basically your brain is
remembering a bunch of instances from the past that are
similar to the present. A bunch of things which are
similar is called a category.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
So your brain's.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Basically using the past to construct categories in the moment
that will allow it to prepare action. The interesting thing
is that research suggests the brain is functioning predictively, which
means the guest starts before the sensory signals arrive. So
(28:39):
if we were to stop time right now, your brain
is modeling that what it believes to be the sensory
state of your body and the sensory conditions of the world,
and based on that it's remembering. It's reinstating a bunch
of partial representations a category that's similar to the present
as a way of preparing the regulation of the body,
(29:02):
anticipating the needs of the body, and preparing to meet
those needs before they arise, so that movements can occur
like eye movements or muscle movements, and the consequences of
those movements are the predicted sensory inputs that are arriving
from the sensory surfaces, and so the brain is comparing
those and the result is your experience. So what's interesting
(29:28):
about this perspective is a couple of things. One is
that it's not like you see something and then react
to it and then move Perception is a consequence of
movement preparation, not the other way around. The brain is
functioning predictively, even though it creates experiences of the world
as if it's reacting to the world. So it's there's
(29:50):
a real puzzle here, which is why would a brain
function predictively but create experiences of reactions. Nobody knows the
answer to that question. And the way that emotions are
constructed are the way that every psychological feature is constructed.
There's no specific set of mechanisms to emotion that would
(30:13):
be different from cognition or perception or attention or what
have you.
Speaker 4 (30:17):
Do.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
You think of emotion as being sort of a wider
angle lens on a situation. So when I think about cognition,
it feels like, Okay, what's the next chess move I'm
going to make, and I'm really focused on something. Emotion
sometimes feels to me like, you know, give me the
wider view of what's happening here. Is this a good situation?
This is a bad situation.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I think that things like cognition and emotion and attention
and perception are features of a brain state. I think
if there are features that happen to be very salient,
then we call the event a thought or a memory,
or an emotion or a perception. But I think about
the brain holistically as a dynamical system, a system of
(31:02):
neurons and other bits and bobs that moves from state
to state to state, and or you could say traverses
of state space, you know, like it always is in
a state and the nature of the state changes. So
I think about emotions as you know, for example, your
brain is always regulating your body, or you'd be dead.
(31:25):
So it's always regulating the body. Body is always sending
signals back to the brain. It's very infrequently that you
will experience those signals as your heart pounding or your
lungs expanding. You never feel, you know, your liver excreting
chemicals or hormones, like, you just don't experience those things.
The brain's tracking it, but it's not making that information
(31:47):
available to itself. Instead, what we feel is affect We
feel pleasant, we feel unpleasant, we feel calm, we feel
worked up. Those are really simple feelings there that are
with us all all the time, in every waking moment
of life. So they're really properties of consciousness. When they
get really intense, those are the moments that we experience
(32:10):
them as emotions, but they're always there, even in moments
of cognition or perception for example. I also want to
say that there are many cultures in the world that
don't distinguish cognition from emotion, Like, that's not how people
in certain cultures experience themselves in the world. They don't
make that distinction. That's a very Western distinction. And I
(32:33):
think we have to have a theory of brain function
that accommodates everybody's experience, not just certain people's experience. Because
we happen to be the ones with the money and
who are in control of the journals.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
You know, that's interesting. I mean, what's your experience.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I feel like when I'm concentrating on something very specific,
like the chest move, that feels different to me than
if I'm just feeling generally happy or sad or something.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
It does, but so does in one instance of happiness
can feel entirely different than another feeling of happiness. So
my point the question we would ask, is there something
similar to the brain state for lots of different instances
of happiness. So we took all the instances where you
were deciding on a chess move, would those brain states
look more similar to each other than if we looked
(33:26):
at all the brain states you had for chess moves
and happiness. And the answer is not so far. There's
just structured variation. So when you're happy, that's not the
same state for you all the time. You know, people
do lots of things when they are happy. They express
(33:47):
in different ways. They have their menta mental features of
their experience can change, their physical state can be different.
It's not random. It's structured by the situation that they're in,
including the physical condition of their body and their metabolic state.
And there's nothing objectively more similar about those instances of
(34:11):
happiness than is objectively different between happiness and instances of
planning a chess move. And the interesting question there is
why it feels that way to us. It's a question
of consciousness, it's not a question of objective brain function.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
What is your take on that answer?
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Why it feels different, Why we have a distinction, let's say,
in the West, between let's say, cognition on one end
of the spectrum and emotion on another end of the spectrum.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
I don't know exactly why we have categories for cognition
and emotion that are so entrenched, but I will say
that they derived not out of a theory of brain function,
but of a theory of morality. In ancient Greece, so
that's how old they are. That you have an inner
beast of emotions and instincts, and that inter beece has
(35:00):
to be kept in check by cognition, by rationality. And
if you keep that inner beast in check, you know
you're a moral person and you're a healthy person. And
if you don't, then you're either immoral, or you're immature,
(35:24):
or you're mentally ill. This idea of that your mind
is a battleground between cognition and emotion is a very
old idea. You can see it in Plato's writings, and
it's embedded in the law, it's embedded in economics. It's
just a pervasive idea that has no evidence to support
it in brain evolution or brain function.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
I have a question, though, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I think that's the distinction that I feel about, you know,
keeping the beast in check. It's more like, if I'm
planning my next let's say, chess move, then I'm thinking
about steps.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
I can do it in a very clear, rational way.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
But if I'm at a party and I'm thinking, Wow,
I'm having a great time at this party, or oh,
I don't really like this party so much, or something
I just you know, I have some feeling about it.
I might not be able to specify the details of why,
but nonetheless I'm you know, I'm a wash in some feeling,
some emotion about this. And that's the distinction that I
(36:24):
intuitively feel. I'm curious if you if you see that
as a as a meaningful spectrum.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
So I would say it's a meaningful question about consciousness.
It's not a meaningful question about brain structure or brain
function in the sense that intuition, our intuitions, our experiences
of the world in general are very bad explanatory guides
for how the world works. And this is also true
(36:54):
when the brain, when brains are trying to explain themselves, right,
So I would say, yeah, I mean, there are probably
times when you're planning a chess move that you're really frustrated,
and there are probably times when you're really happy that
you're thinking about strategically, how can I meet that person
or how can I get away from this person? Or
(37:14):
so I think that this is a question of which
mental features are in the focus of attention and which
ones are in the background. Like right now, for example,
if you are sitting, are you sitting.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Or stating I'm sitting.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Okay, So right now, for example, you're probably not concentrating
on the press of the chair against the back of
your thighs until now that I just said it, you
probably are thinking about that for a minute, right. So
there are features of experience that are available to you
that are not in the forefront of your experience, but
you can move them in and out pretty easily. And
(37:49):
that's really how I think about it. So, for example,
the next time that you find yourself being really really hungry,
take a moment and focus your attent on your stomach.
Are you hungry or are you tired? Because if you're
tired and you need some energy, your first reaction will
(38:09):
be to eat, because you have a history of learning
that energy comes from, Like the feeling of having more
energy happens after you eat. But a lot of the
time when we're tired, we should be drinking water, not eating,
because dehydration is fatigue.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
You know.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Research shows, for example, that when you drink a whole
glass of water. Drink a glass of water, your thirst
is immediately quenched, but actually it takes twenty minutes for
the water to make its way into your bloodstream. To
change the osmolarity of your blood to get to the
brain to tell the brain that now you are hydrated.
So the brain is constructing experience. It's predicting what the
(38:49):
sensory consequences of actions will be, and you start to
experience the consequences well before the actual input arrives to
the brain to confirm those So I wouldn't go looking
for distinctions between cognition and emotion because people have looked
for those distinctions for years and years and years, and
(39:11):
the one thing that we've learned from all of that
research is that it's the wrong question to be asking. Instead,
it's a question about experience and the way the brain
is constructing experience lived experience, and that's where we should
be asking those neuroscience based questions.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
I think, could the concept of constructed emotions tell us
something about AI and the future of machines being able
(39:56):
to simulate or understand our.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Everything from evolutionary biology and neuroscience tells us that the
core of brain function is rooted in the regulation of
the body. There are metabolic constraints and selection pressures that
give us the kind of mind we have, and that
(40:23):
means that there's this sort of imperative that is largely hidden,
but that scaffolds everything we see and feel and think.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
AI doesn't have that. I'm not saying an AI has
to have a body.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I'm saying it has to have a set of really
complicated systems that it has to regulate, because that's actually
at the basis of our human minds, actually of any
mind of any living creature. I'm not reducing everything to
metabolism or bodily regulation, but it's a hugely important piece
(41:03):
that we all overlook because we are not aware of it.
Right now, You and I and every listener has a
whole drama going on inside each of us that we
are I mean, I hope we're largely unaware of because
whenever we become slightly aware of that drama, we're usually
really uncomfortable and we can't pay attention to anything outside
(41:24):
in the world. So I think that that's a huge
piece of what it means to have a human mind.
Evolutionarily and structurally and functionally, at the core of your brain,
it's predictive regulation of the body. So exactly the same
(41:45):
brain regions, exactly the same neurons in certain cases that
are regulating the body are also implicated in attention or memory,
or emotion or vision. Right, So the hippocampus. People think
of this structure as being for memory or for spatial navigation,
(42:07):
but it has more endocrine receptors than any other part
of the brain.
Speaker 4 (42:11):
Except the hypothalamus.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
It is clearly a hub for the predictive regulation of
the body, but that's not how people think of it
because they're more concerned with understanding the other functions which
result from that regulation, like memory or spatial navigation.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
How does your theory.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Of emotion change the way that we think about mental
health treatments like depression or anxiety.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
The way the brain regulates metabolism is that it's running
a budget for the body, and I would say depression
is a bankrupt body budget. The brain believes that there's
a metabolic problem somewhere in the body, and so it's
reducing energy output. And the way the brain reduces energy
output is by reducing movement, reducing sensitivity to the outside world,
(43:07):
and inducing feelings of fatigue so that you won't move
very much. So you get context insensitivity, which is a
major symptom of depression. You also get fatigue and motor retardation,
so people don't move as much, They move more slowly,
so the brain is attempting to reduce energy output. And
(43:29):
the clincher for me is that a couple of things.
One is that there's a test biological tests for depression
that involves looking at cortisol levels, which is a chemical
that people call a stress hormone. Cortisol is a is
a glu It regulates glucose metabolism, So if you have
(43:52):
problems with glucose metabolism, then you will very likely have
depressed mood. And serotonin actually evolved as a metabolic regulator.
Serotonin uptake reaptake inhibitors are not happiest drugs. They're drugs
that influence metabolism, and whatever affective consequences they have are
(44:12):
because they are regulating metabolism.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
So, Lisa, tell us some practical takeaways from your research
that listeners can think about when they're thinking about how
to manage their own emotions.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
The first thing I would be doing is asking yourself, like,
when you feel like crap. Feeling like crap doesn't mean
that something's wrong. It could mean that you're just doing
something really hard, or that you didn't get a good
night's sleep, or that you're dehydrated in some way, so
it doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong with your life
(44:46):
or something is wrong with you. In our culture, we
believe that thoughts cause feelings, but actually, if you look
at the predictive functioning of the brain, it suggests that
the signals which give rise to feelings also.
Speaker 4 (44:59):
Give right to thoughts.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
So if you feel like shit, you're probably going to
feel it's going to feel to you like you're a
horrible person and that the world is terrible, or you
need to divorce your spouse or your kids are you know,
misbehaving or whatever. We have a tendency to see the
world through affect colored glasses because of how we're wired.
So the first thing that I do when I feel
(45:24):
like the world is ending, you know, because lots of
bad things are happening, The first thing I ask myself
is did I get enough sleep last night? Have I
had enough water to drink? Is it better for me
to have a bath and go to bed and get
up tomorrow and things will look different even in the
worst of circumstances. That's always a good strategy.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
That was Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor at Northeastern University and
one of the world's experts on emotion, and I'll just
mentioned she's one of the top one percent of the
most cited psychologists in the world.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
So to summarize what we.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Saw today, for decades there was a research avalanche suggesting
that emotions are the same across all people. And we
had Darwin's universal expressions of emotions, and we had Paul
Ekman's suggestion that there were a handful of basic emotions,
and we had pixars inside out. There seemed to be
(46:27):
a clear map of the emotional landscape that was coming
into focus. But as we saw, Barrett and her lab
came to very different conclusions. She became skeptical that there
was universality of emotional expression, like what she mentioned about
the assumption that people scowl when they're angry. But it
turns out when you study this carefully, sixty five percent
(46:49):
of the time people do something else when they're angry.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
They don't scowl.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
And also when you do see a scowl, it's only
a fifty percent chance that this has to do with
anger versus something else. So Barrett argues that emotions are
not universal reflexes. They are instead constructed. They're shaped by
the brain's predictive power, and our cultural context and our
individual experiences. In other words, her framework highlights the role
(47:16):
of the brain's internal model in interpreting sensations from the
body what's called introception, and signing meaning to those sensations,
creating what we label as emotions. It's a paradigm shift
that invites us to reconsider not only what emotions are,
but what they mean. If emotions are constructed, then they're
(47:38):
not simply happening to us, they're happening with us. So
take a minute to think about some moments in your
life when you felt something deeply love or rage, or
despair or hope. Barrett's framework suggests that in those moments,
your brain was hard at work pulling together past experiences
(48:00):
in bodily sensations and environmental clues to create the emotion
that you felt. It wasn't a reflex, it was a narrative.
And if emotions are readouts from the body, then maybe
we can get just slightly more agency over them. Not
in the sense of controlling our feelings, they're too complex
for that, but in shaping how we interpret and respond
(48:24):
to them.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
Take something like.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Anger in the classical view anger is a red hot reaction.
It's the little guy with fire coming out of his head.
It's beyond our control. But if anger is constructed, maybe
we can probe it a bit. What is my body
telling me? Why does the situation feel threatening? How can
I reframe this moment? Because emotions appear to be not
(48:48):
something we simply have, but something we make, not pre
programmed reactions, but dynamic constructions, shaped by our past and
our brains predictions of the future. Understanding this can change
potentially how we see ourselves and others. Are moments of
joy and fear, and love and anger. They're not fixed,
(49:11):
but they're flexible. They're a reflection of the stories that
our brains create, and perhaps in knowing this, we can
maybe learned to shape those stories a little better, not
as readers, but as authors. Go to Eagleman dot com
(49:33):
slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to
Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
to leave comments.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
Until next time.
Speaker 1 (49:49):
I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.