Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett - How the Brain Creates Emotions

In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is in the top 1% of most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University and also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is chief science officer for the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior. In addition to the books, seven and a half lessons about the brain and how you emotions are made, Dr. Barrett has published over 268 peer-reviewed scientific papers appearing in science, nature neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic volumes. She's also given a popular TED talk with over 6.5 million views. From this conversation, you'll learn. Dr. Barrett's groundbreaking theory of emotions and its implications for mental health and well-being, how you emotional granularity can enhance your quality of life, why everything we see is a concept and why this matters, Dr. Barrett's thoughts on free will and personal responsibility, and more. You can learn more about Dr. Barrett's work by going to www.lisafelmanbarrett.com. Okay, Lisa, welcome to the show. I suppose a question I'm curious to ask to get started would be, you know, what is your theory of emotions and how does this conflict with the classical view of emotions? Sure, I'm really happy to be here, so thank you. I should say at the outset that when I talk about a theory, I'm not really talking about just a set of ideas. I'm talking about a set of ideas that have a lot of scientific evidence to back them up. So, let's actually start with the classical view because I think that's a little easier for people to understand. It's probably a lot of people's intuition, which is the idea that each of us is born with a set of circuits that are pre-wired that come from some long evolutionary history, either from our hunter-gatherer past or even much further back than that. So we'd one for anger, one for fear, one for sadness and so on, and that something happens in the world and it triggers a circuit, say, for fear. So you see a snake or you see a horror movie or something. It triggers your circuit for fear and you have a set of physical changes in your body. You make a very diagnostic facial expression, like a wide eyed gasping face, and that you feel dread and there's this whole almost obligatory set of consequences to triggering that circuit. And if some of those things don't happen, let's say you don't make that facial move, set of facial movements or your heart rate doesn't increase or your breathing rate doesn't speed up, whatever, it's because some other set of mechanisms came in and influenced the outputs of the circuit, right? So that maybe you live in a culture where there are very strong rules for how you express emotion and so that that would be an extra set of mechanisms or maybe you engaged in emotion regulation and that would be an extra set of mechanisms, right? But the idea is that that probabilistically there's going to be a whole ensemble of physical changes in the body, in your face, in the parts of the brain that create experience and these are routinely consistent and half across instances of fear that we could just measure them objectively and diagnose you as being in a state of fear. And these, this ensemble, a fingerprint, you could say, or a signature for fear would be consistent across people, across cultures, across instances, maybe even across animals. That's the general idea. And it's an idea that is very consistent with the broader view of how psychology theorizes and understands mental life, right? So the idea that there are these modules in your brain that are very separate for different categories of psychological events for thinking, for problem solving, for decision making, for attention, for various kinds of attention, for various kinds of memory. Every word corresponds to a module in your brain with its own circuit that produces its own set of outcomes. And you know, there's not a lot of evidence for that view. And I will say that in the history of psychology, people have been pushing back against that view really since psychology became a science in the mid to late 18th century. So the great William James, who's considered one of the founding parents, if you will, of American psychology, really pushed back against that view. And he lost that battle. And actually sequentially throughout history, the history of the field, you can see people pushing back against that view because the data never support that view. And that was a really surprising thing to me, actually, is to realize that this whole journey that my lab and my collaborators and I have been on about the science in the science of emotion, not only has been traversed before, but also in other fields, like subfields of psychology. And so instead, you know, our view is really one that's very data driven. It's very, we're taking our lead from the century or so, century and a half or so worth of evidence, which suggests that emotions don't happen to you. They're not something that's just triggered in your brain and perfunctory. They're made by your brain. They're made by you. They're constructed by you out of mechanisms that are what we would call domain general, meaning that the mechanisms that construct emotion also construct your thoughts, construct your memories. They construct your perceptions. They're really kind of all-purpose computational mechanisms. And the general idea is that your brain is always, first of all, your brain doesn't react to things in the world. It's predicting. It's always using past experience to try to guess what's going to happen next. And those guesses are, you know, your brain basically changing the firing of its own neurons to prepare for sights and sounds and smells and physical changes in the body. So I think that's the first thing to understand is that your brain is predicting. It's not reacting. And those predictions really are what we would call memory or knowledge. They're based on the past. What's happened in the past, your brain is making a pretty good guess of what's going to happen in a moment from now. And it starts by guessing what actions you have to take and what physical changes in your body have to occur in order for you to perform those actions. So your brain starts with movement. It starts by preparing, making a guess about what movements need to happen in the next instance. And actually what you perceive and experience is a consequence of those changes. So another difference, right, is between, you know, our work and the sort of classical view is a classical view assumes that there's a stimulus, a stimulus occurs and it triggers something in you. And then you produce a response. But actually what the evidence suggests is that your brain is using past experiences to make a guess about what to do next. So it's preparing the response first. And then there are copies, literal neuronal copies, they're called efferent copies or corollary discharge, they have a couple of names in the neuroscience literature. The neurons that prepare your physical changes for the in the next moment actually send collateral axons to the visual, the parts of your brain that are important for vision and for audition and for, right. And so what you, so your brain is basically guessing, it's like, well, based on what's happened in a similar situation in the past, when I prepared this movement, what did I see next, what did I hear next, what did I smell next, what did I feel next. That's actually right. So your experience is a consequence of your brain's regulation of your body. It's not, it doesn't come first, it comes second. And then the final piece is that, well, where, so, you know, where does this knowledge come from. So when your brain is constructing an instance of fear or an instance of anger or an instance of ligate or an instance of any emotion category that you, that you're familiar with and that you know, or even one that you don't know, maybe it's combining pieces of emotions, like, you know, Shadenfreude, right, was something that Americans didn't know, which is sort of a, you know, a feeling pleasure at somebody else's misfortune, but also a little guilt, right. And so there's like a mix of a bunch of different, you know, US categories for emotion. And so in that case, your brain is combining bits and pieces of the past from different instances, different categories of emotion to predict what, what's, what to do next and what's going to happen next. And so where does that knowledge come from? And the answer is it comes from your past. It comes from your experience because infant brains are not miniature adult brains. They're brains that are why they were, they need wiring instructions from the world to finish wiring themselves. And some of those wiring instructions teach the infants, the categories for all kinds of culture specific experiences and actions. And so of course, emotion knowledge is hardwired into your brain. It's just not hired. It's not the transfer of information from one generation to the next isn't by genes alone. It's by genes that make the brain open to the world that, right, so that the brain can wire itself to specific environments, to specific cultural contexts. So the transfer of information is called cultural inheritance, which is how humans learn a lot of stuff. And so those are just some of the ideas that we work with that are backed up by, you know, considerable amounts of data, I would say. And as you can tell, the theoretical perspective draws from evolutionary biology and cultural evolution and it draws from, you know, developmental neuroscience and from psychology. And you know, it's in order to answer the question of how a brain creates a mind, you need to draw from a lot of different literatures. Okay, I think we can end the interview there. I know. I tend to, you know, it's the beauty of the classical view is that you know, you know, you can just sort of, you know, say it in like a sentence or two, but this idea that your brain is a meaning maker. And it's, it's taking in, you know, sense data from all the sensory surfaces of your body and combining it, those, those signals with signals from your past, that is memories. And that, you know, mixture is ongoing through your whole life. And that's the, that's really the basis for every experience you have, every action you take. It requires like a lot more background knowledge and setup. So it's not really easy to, you know, give like a two sentence answer to the question. Or, you know, if you do, it's, it doesn't really answer anything like, you know, emotions are, you know, constructed perceptions or, you know, emotions are predictions. That doesn't really explain, you know, how emotions are made really unless you already have that background knowledge. 100%. So in preparing for this, you know, whenever I did start to sort of grasp the idea even slightly, it's sort of the sense that my word was sort of being turned upside down a little bit. You know, this is a, this is a serious implications, this, this idea. And I sentence in the book that really helped to sort of help me grasp it was, it was along the lines of, you know, emotions are your brain's construction of what bodily sensations mean in a specific context. And in the book, you use an example of when you were, I think when you were a postgraduate student or whenever you were younger, you went on a date in a coffee shop and you want to tell us about that. That really helped me to understand. And so if you maybe could tell us about that example, I think that could help, help for people. Sure. Sure. So the important thing to understand is that physical signals in your body, like a change in heart rate or change in breathing or increase in cortisol or, you know, these changes have no inherent psychological meaning. They have to be made meaningful. Those signals have to be made meaningful in an ensemble of other signals. In some of those signals come from the world, like what's happening outside you right now. And some of those signals are only in your brain. That is, they are memories from the past that your brain is reassembling. And you don't, you don't have the experience of remembering, but that's really what your brain is doing. Reassembling, reconstructing the representations from the past. It's like reinstituting them. And this is always true. Because we don't experience this on a regular basis and you have to come up with, you know, there are examples that we can come up with to sort of show people in talks and in classrooms and so on. But for me, the really good example was, you know, there was, I was a graduate student. And there was this guy who kept asking me out for coffee and, you know, I just wasn't that interested. And, but he, you know, he persisted. And finally, I thought, well, okay, I'll just go out with him once and, you know, get this over with and then maybe he'll leave me alone. And so we went out for coffee and as we were having coffee, I noticed that I, you know, I started to feel a little warm. Like my cheeks were a little flushed and I felt kind of warm. And also, I felt kind of jittery, you know, like, like a little, like worked up a little on edge, you know, like a little fluttery. And also I was, you know, having, I was having a little trouble. Like I felt kind of foggy headed a little bit, not a lot, but just a little bit. And I thought, so what I started, what I wondered was I thought, well, but maybe I'm attracted to this guy actually, like, maybe I do like him, you know, like maybe what I'm feeling is, you know, so this situation. Where I wasn't like really sure, well, what were the sensations that I was experiencing? And I thought, well, okay, you know, I'm on a date, right? So maybe I'm, maybe I am really interested in this guy. And so we, so you know, he took me home after this coffee and we've made plans to see each other again. And I literally, I like, I opened the door to my apartment, you know, close the door, put the keys, you know, down and ran to the bathroom. And let's just say, pray to the porcelain gods, as it were. You know, like I was, and then I was in bed for a week with the flu. So probably the source of the biological source of those sense data were a virus that was starting to infect my system, but my brain made sense of that those sensations as attraction and lust. And you can say, well, your brain was mistaken, but my brain wasn't mistaken because my brain is doing, my brain did what it always does, which is it makes sense of the experience. It made sense of the sense, sense data to create an experience. So the experience isn't a mistake. It's the experience, right? And I ended up dating this guy for about nine months. And in the end, we broke up and I probably could have saved myself, you know, like nine months of misery. I think if I had realized that I really hope he never recognizes himself in that description. But, but I'll say that, you know, like, here's another example, right? Before the pandemic, like literally days before it was announced, I guess it was probably going on at that point, but it had been like officially announced. I was in New Zealand and I was on a book tour. So I was talking, yeah, universities about my research. And then I was also in a book, you know, like at this book festival and talking about my books. And my daughter was planning to fly. She was flying over from Boston to New Zealand because it was spring break. And we were going to travel around for, you know, a week or so. And as she's in the air and, you know, it's a pretty long flight to get from the US to New Zealand. As she's, you know, mid flight, I'm listening to news stories about infections or on the rise and, you know, everywhere. And I'm thinking to myself, and I'm starting to, you know, my heart rate's going up and I'm starting to feel sweaty and I'm thinking to myself, should she, should I meet her at the airport and turn around and, you know, take her home or should we have our vacation? Because at that point, there were really like, I think five or four or five, I think, infections in in Auckland. And we were on the South Island, you know, anyways, pointing that my brain could have very easily constructed anxiety in that moment out of all those sense data. But what I did was I, I constructed a different experience, which was curiosity. Because I was just uncertain. What was, you know, when your brain can't make a good prediction, it, raise it, it, it, it increases the production of certain neurochemicals that will help you learn better, you know, kind of learn prediction error, learn the stuff that you didn't predict so that you can predict better the next time. And when that happens, you experience it often as an increase in arousal, like, you know, your body is jittery and you're, you know, you're, it's easy. Our kind of go to explanation for that is anxiety. And so we experience those sensations as anxiety. But they could be determination. They could be uncertain, just, just simple uncertainty. And why does it matter, you know, is this just like just a bunch of Jedi mind tricks? Like, why does it matter what you construct out of those sensations? And the answer is because it influence, because it, it, it determines what you do next. If I had created anxiety in that moment, I would have done something very different than if I had just created uncertainty. And, right? So one involves withdrawal usually and the other involves foraging for information and forging for information was exactly what I thought I should be doing in that instance. And I'm making this sound very deliberate. And in, in the case that I'm describing, it was deliberate. I was using what I know about the neuroscience of the brain to influence my actions and my experience. But most of the time, for most of us, our brains just do this kind of stuff automatically. And this is, this is the stuff that, where actions come from and where experiences come from. There's so much in there, I don't even know where it would start. So just going back to, so basically our, our bodily sensations, that's, that's affect. And that is basically raw material. And then our previous experiences causes our brains to predict what those bodily sensations mean in a specific context. So could you maybe help us distinguish between affect and emotions, make that clear distinction? And then I'd be curious to ask as well, how do you think about things like grief and things like loneliness? You know, is that, is that affect? Is that emotion? What are your thoughts there? What are those things? Yeah, so, um, so I think the first thing to, to answer your question, the first thing we have to understand is that the brain's most important job is not thinking. It's not feeling, it's not seeing. It's regulating the systems of your body. So you have a lot going on inside your body. So do I. So do all our listeners right now. There's a whole drama going on inside there. Lots and lots and lots of systems. They all have to be coordinated in a metabolically efficient way for you to stay healthy. And there's this constant transaction that's going on always throughout your entire life. Your brain sends predictions, sends, you know, neural commands to the body and the body sends sense data back to the brain constantly. Our dialogue is going on all the time. And we're mostly the brain, your brain doesn't make itself aware of that. So if you're aware of all that drama going on inside your body, something seriously wrong, and you're probably really suffering from discomfort because most of the time, you know, we're completely unaware. Maybe occasionally, you know, we'll run up the stairs or drink too much coffee and we'll feel our heart pounding against our chest. But even then, you know, you're not actually literally feeling your heart beat. You're feeling your heart vib the pounding is the vibration of your heart against your your bone, the bony part of your chest. And that's what you're feeling, right? So really, and everything you feel, you're feeling in your brain, you don't feel things in your body. You don't see in your eyes, you see, you know, in your brain, you hear, you know, if you pinch yourself, you feel that pinch in your brain, okay? There's this whole, you know, symphony of sense data that is moving up your spinal cord to your brain. But we're not wired to be aware of all those sensations. So if you think about vision, like, you know, high definition TV, then the sensory condition of your body is kind of like black and white TV from the 1950s with a bad antenna in the brain. You know, like you just, you get like these vague feelings, like, I'm feeling pleasant, I feel unpleasant, I'm feeling worked up, I'm feeling calm, I feel comfortable, I feel uncomfortable. It's an effect, or sometimes people call it mood. But basically it's this ever present feeling, are things okay? Are things not okay, right? Are my feeling really worked up? Am I feeling really sleepy? That's affect. It's with you 24/7 all the time, even when you sleep, right? You're feeling it. And you're basically, your brain doesn't, isn't really wired and doesn't, isn't really wired to make itself aware of the hundreds, if not thousands of sensory signals that are arriving all the time. And the ones that we are, we can be aware of, we're not usually aware of them unless something is really wrong. And then, what I'm saying is, you know, I'm not really aware of that. I'm not really aware of that. I'm not really aware of that.