Are Your Emotions Telling You the Truth?

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychologist and neuroscientist, joins hosts Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch to unpack her theory of constructed emotion: the idea that emotions aren't hardwired reactions but stories the brain builds to explain physical signals like a racing heart or a furrowed brow. Dr. Barrett explains why there's no universal facial expression for anger or fear, how the same racing heart can be read as fear or excitement depending on your Perception Box™, and why "you have more control over your interpretation than you think," even if that control takes practice to build. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychological scientist and neuroscientist, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, and originator of the theory of constructed emotion. She is the author of How Emotions Are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Wednesday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend! Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information. Chapters: 03:17 Brain as Prediction Machine 07:41 Why Predictions Feel Invisible 13:55 Feelings Versus Emotions 18:43 No Universal Expressions 30:31 Babies And Basic Affect 32:03 Training Emotional Flexibility 38:42 Rewiring Predictions Over Time 41:45 Letting Go Of Convictions

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There's no inherent emotional meaning in a racing heart, or a sweaty palm, or, you know, a furrow of your eyebrow. Your brain is making sense of those signals, and it can make sense of those signals as, I'm tired, or I'm excited, or I'm determined, or I'm afraid.

• 0:18Heather Berlin?

  Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. What's a perception box? It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives inside, built from the material of our beliefs, life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences. You could think of it as a kind of reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. This podcast explores how, although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity, awe, and wonder, or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger. In each episode, we invite experts to share how to create lasting shifts in our perception.

• 1:03Heather Berlin?

  I'd like to introduce our esteemed host, Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Kristoff Koch, chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box. This week, our guest is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. As Dr. Barrett's work shows, emotions are physical sensations that meet a story in our mind, a story constructed from our historical context, past events, and beliefs we took on when we were very young. Which means, no matter how powerful we feel something inside of us, that emotion is an interpretation, not objective fact.

• 1:48Heather Berlin?

  When we see that, our entire world begins to shift. Before we get into the conversation, I wanted to ask you, Kristoff, about your personal perspective. Do you ever notice that your brain is creating very different emotions at the same time, like even in a single moment?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  This morning, I had a big interview on NPR, and, you know, you sweat a little bit more, you know, your heart beats faster. And I used to think of that as anxiety. But, you know, across the years, I've reformulated that, re-categorized that, or reframed that. No, that means I'm very well-prepared and I'm ready for action. I don't perceive it as anxiety anymore, but it's excitement.

• 2:28Heather Berlin?

  That's actually very similar to an experience I had when I was growing up. I was like the lead in the school play. I was Snow White in elementary school. And I was very nervous to get onstage in front of all, you know, this big audience. And I remember my mom said to me, like, those butterflies you feel, it's not nervousness, it's excitement. And when I reframed that, it changed my perspective. So, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your research and your perspective on emotion. I think it's going to be really interesting for our audience because there's so many theories of emotion out there. So, really appreciate you sharing your perspective. Let's start out with a question of, kind of, what's happening in our minds and our brains

• 3:13Heather Berlin?

  when we're experiencing multiple emotions at the same time?

• 3:17Speaker 00

  So, I think, in order to answer a question like that, I always like to take one step back and just talk a little bit about what your brain is actually doing in general. And then, once we understand that, we can use that language to try to talk about how your brain is constructing emotions, how it's generating emotions. So, I like to think about the brain as a signal processor. What it means is that you have sensory surfaces everywhere on your body, your retina of your eyes, the cochlea in your ears. You know, your skin has receptors. You have receptors inside you. And these receptors are sending signals to the brain all the time. And the brain has to

• 4:01Speaker 00

  make sense of those signals. Basically, our brains are reinstating past patterns of signals to make meaning of these incoming signals. And the brain is doing that all the time, whether we're experiencing emotion or not.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  So, that's what we call, by the way, the perception box, the act of this construction of my sense of reality.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. The really cool thing is that the brain is remembering in advance. So, it's not like the signals come in and then the brain metaphorically says, oh gee, what is that? Instead, based on the patterns that are existing now, the brain is, figuratively speaking, metaphorically speaking, asking itself, what is this like? What is this similar to in my past? And reinstating patterns that are similar to the present in some way to predict those incoming signals.

• 4:56Heather Berlin?

  So, ultimately, it lands on a single emotion? Like, is that sort of the search process of like, what am I feeling right now? I'm trying to figure this out. Is it excitement? Is it sadness? Is it... And then it lands on something?

• 5:09Speaker 00

  More or less. I think this is a really new way of thinking about things. So, there's some of the scientific details in what you just said, I think, are not known yet. So, for example, when the brain is generating, it's generating a set of predictions, not just one, but a bunch, right? Some number, each of which has some probability. And it's using something to judge similarity. It's trying to find a pattern match to the present. And it's not literally reinstating or remembering literal past experiences. It's really putting together bits and pieces of past experiences to create something potentially even new.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Well, which features of similarity? So, right now, as we're talking, my brain is constructing predictions. Is it using the fuzzy chairs? Is it using the fact that you have dark hair? I don't think we really know the answer to that question. What we can say is the following. If your brain is using a really abstract feature like threat as the feature of similarity, that means that all of the past experiences you've ever had in your whole life or ever heard about that are threatening are fair game for the present. That would be overgeneralization, right? On the other hand, if your features are too specific,

• 6:38Speaker 00

  like the color of a pair of pants, or the color of the tree, or some very, very detailed sensory feature, that's like you're trying to remember a specific instance. That's also not good. It's not sufficient generalizability. You're not using your experience in a more generalizable way. And that's associated with brains that are described as non-neurotypical, being on the spectrum, for example.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Well, except if you smell something. Marcel Puz, the Madeleine, right? If you smell something and it instantly brings you back a powerful association often of childhood, right? Oh, I last smelled this as a little kid.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Right, so there certainly are contexts in which a single feature

• 7:24Speaker 02

  can be...

• 7:25Speaker 00

  can be very meaningful experience. But in general, there are lots and lots of features in everyday life. And your brain can't use all of them. It's only going to use some. But we don't really know exactly how that decision is being made.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Lisa, but how do you explain the fact? So, you earlier mentioned, you know, the brain does this predictive thing where it assigns some probability to this and some probability to that. I don't experience that, right?

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Not at all.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  I experience one emotion or one reality. So, what's the disconnect? What happens here?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Well, I think, I'm not the first person to say that our brains don't make us aware of most of what they're doing.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  The foggy and unconscious.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  So, I think, and I, you know, I tend to use, I have a habit of speech, right? When I'm talking about something that your brain is doing automatically, I will say, "your brain." And when I'm talking about something that your brain is doing with awareness, I talk about you, because you are your brain. You know, you are your brain as it is processing and making sense of all these signals. But it's sort of a habit of speech to... Otherwise, it sounds like everything... English is very unfortunate language in that there's a lot of... It implies there's a lot of deliberation going on when there isn't.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And so, what do you mean? There are some circuits in the brain that do these computations, and they may not be consciously accessible?

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Well, they're mostly not consciously accessible. And I would say it's large portions of... I mean, I think it's the hippocampus and actually the entire cortical sheet, so the cerebral cortex. I mean, right now, we're actually working on... There's a functional hierarchy in the brain that you can use to understand what is the origin of these rememberings and how are they, how do they work?

• 9:16Heather Berlin?

  But is it kind of like, you know... So, the idea of how we even just construct our own perception of, you know, seeing things, it's a prediction based on our past experience?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  An inference.

• 9:26Heather Berlin?

  It's coming, you know, based on what's coming in, and you're inferring...

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 9:30Heather Berlin?

  So, the same thing is what you're kind of saying is with emotions as well?

• 9:33Speaker 00

  It's exactly the same, actually.

• 9:34Heather Berlin?

  But then I have a question with, let's just say, a person has had the unfortunate circumstance of having a really traumatic childhood, really traumatic experiences. Now, are they trapped in a particular perception box to experience, to be predisposed to predict that the world is a dangerous place?

• 9:52Speaker 00

  So, what I would say is that everybody's trapped in a perception box. Every moment of your life, your brain is regulating your body, and your body is sending signals back to your brain. That's always happening, even when you just look at a cup or look at a flower, or, right? So, and it turns out that these signals that we're really largely unaware of, there's some reasonable amount of evidence to suggest that they're even gating. They help to determine which visual signals you... like which visual signals you pay attention to and which ones you ignore. So, that's always happening, even in emotion, even if, whether you've had a lovely childhood experience

• 10:36Speaker 00

  or a traumatic childhood experience. So, that's the first thing to say. The second is that...

• 10:42Speaker 00

  You know, there's really interesting work by a psychologist named George Bonanno, who has studied people who have been exposed to adversity. Sometimes it's childhood trauma, sometimes it's the loss of a loved one, sometimes it's rape or murder, war. What he finds really is that the majority of people who have experienced trauma, or they've experienced adversity in their background, are not trapped in a perception box defined by threat.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Where's the difference between those that do and those that don't? And what can I do to be in the former group?

• 11:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think that is, this is something everybody has an opinion about, but there's not really good evidence right now to be able to say definitively, what can you do? What we can say is, well, what are the differences between the people who are trapped in a world of threat and the people who are not? Whose brains can create different meanings and therefore different experiences out of the same, you know, the same sensory signals? So the people-

• 11:58Speaker 02

  This is what they call grit, right, and resilience? Some people seem to have this mystical quality called grit and resilience in the face of adversity.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, right, so I think people who have grit are people who are tenacious and they stick with things and they are not disrupted by unpleasant feelings, you know? They have those feelings. You know, not every unpleasant feeling is an indication of threat. Sometimes it's an indication that you're just doing something really hard.

• 12:27Heather Berlin?

  I think what people want to know, patience, whatever, is how much control do we have over our interpretation? Like, can we change it?

• 12:33Speaker 00

  What I always tell people is, you definitely have more control than you think you do. But that control doesn't look the way you expect it to. It's harder to get than any of us would like. It often takes longer, you know, to be able to master it like a skill. What I can say is that there are some things that generally work, and if you practice these things before the heat of the moment when you need them, you will be more likely to have more control over what you experience. But it's not a silver bullet.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  I understand. It's a complicated matter. So what are some of these practices or techniques or mind tricks that you can use to overcome negative emotions or deal with adversity?

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I would say, I don't think dealing with adversity and overcoming negative emotions are exactly the same thing. I think one thing you have to be, one thing that you learn to do is, you learn that not all unpleasant feeling is an indication that something is wrong. Sometimes you feel unpleasant merely because you are doing something hard. It's an indication that you're working hard at something. So that's-

• 13:49Speaker 02

  You mean during a long run, when I feel-

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  -nauseated or something?

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly, exactly. I think one thing that we, in our work, do is we make a distinction between emotions and simple feelings. So simple feelings are feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling worked up, feeling calm. The brain doesn't, your brain doesn't make you aware of all the little details of the whole drama going on inside your own body. Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body's always sending signals back to your brain. But an emotion is a more elaborate version of those feelings, where your brain is basically telling a story about what caused those feelings, what you should do about those feelings.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  So merely feeling like crap doesn't have to be anger or sadness or fear. It could just be, I didn't get enough sleep last night. It could be, I really need to have, I'm dehydrated. It could be-

• 14:50Speaker 02

  So you wouldn't call that an emotion? You don't think of that as an emotion?

• 14:53Speaker 00

  No, I don't think of it as an emotion.

• 14:54Heather Berlin?

  So you think emotions, then, it sounds like what you're saying is that emotions are actually more cognitive.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Yes and no. I think if we were having a scientific conversation, I'd probably pick at the details of the way you phrased it. But I think basically, yes. The cortex, it's not that that's more cortical and the feelings are more subcortical. That is not, there is no cognitive part of your brain or emotional part of your brain or anything like that. Your cortex is pretty much always involved. It doesn't have to be, but in a neurotypical brain, it is. And also, your subcortex is, you know, very involved even when you're not having an emotion. I mean, I could tell you experiments where we just have somebody do a very simple memory task and we see massive changes in subcortical areas.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  What I'm suggesting is that there's no inherent emotional meaning in a racing heart or a sweaty palm or, you know, a furrow of your eyebrow. Those signals, your brain is making sense of those signals. And it can make sense of those signals as, I'm tired, or I'm excited, or I'm determined, or I'm afraid. There isn't-

• 16:03Speaker 02

  So you don't think I can read off looking at your face?

• 16:07Speaker 00

  You absolutely cannot. There is absolutely no consistent evidence that we read emotions in other people's faces. That is a very-

• 16:16Speaker 02

  I mean, this is Darwin's little book.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  The book that you're referring to is called The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals. And in that book, Darwin makes the claim that emotional expressions in humans are vestiges of an animal past that have no function, but that give evidence of emotional states. Very influential on the origin of species. And Darwin made the decision to not publish the last chapter of that book, which was, which became The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals. He published it as a separate volume.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Many years later, right, 1871, I think.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  But he published it as evidence, really, for his theory being applied to humans, where he basically says, your facial expressions are like your tailbone. They have no meaning. They have no, it used to have a meaning, but in humans, it doesn't have any meaning. So this idea that Darwin said that expressions were functional and that you could read them is something that was a reinterpretation of Darwin that came many years later. Actually, it was Floyd Alport, the social psychologist, who reinterpreted Darwin. His work should be read in the historical context in which it was written.

• 17:34Heather Berlin?

  Forget about an individual researcher or scientist, but is, like, is, the question is about the evolution of emotions, I think. And, you know, Ekman, obviously, he, so Ekman, you know, did this research and basically said there were these five basic emotions that cut across cultures based on, like, facial expressions.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:54Heather Berlin?

  And the other, well, if we're going to just get historical, too, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on Ekman, or just the genetic, the, you know, evolutionary aspect of emotions, but also, is there a particular, like, theory of emotions that you think would fit best into what your, what your research has shown in terms of emotions? Like, there was the, you know, Cannon-Bard theory of emotion, and, you know, if we go back to Psych 101, there are these basic theories of emotions. You feel something first, then you labeled it.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  James Lang.

• 18:21Heather Berlin?

  James, exactly. James Lang, Schachter-Singer, two-factor theory. So there's all these theories of emotions. And I'm curious, I guess it's two questions. One is, your take on this, you know, evolutionary perspective of emotions, what they evolved for, you know? And also, is there a particular theory that fits best with the research that you're doing in emotions?

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Sure, happy to answer those. So the first thing to say is that when we just look at the empirical evidence, and I'm talking now about many studies, meta-analyses of many studies on people in urban areas, like live in an urban culture, in the east, in the west, and also studies of remote cultures, you know, like in Namibia or in Tanzania. So our lab, for example, was in northwestern Namibia. We went to Tanzania. We tested the hunter-gatherers, the Hadza hunter-gatherers. There is really no consistent evidence for the universal expression of emotions. None.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Including fear and-

• 19:26Speaker 00

  That's correct.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And surprise?

• 19:28Speaker 00

  That's correct. So, and I feel that I can say this with pretty good authority on, for a couple of reasons. It doesn't mean that there isn't an evolutionary theory of emotion, which I'll get to in a second, but I'm just saying, the evidence is really clear. And I can tell you about that evidence. I'll just give you one example. So studies show, this is a meta-analysis. So a meta-analysis is a statistical summary of lots and lots and lots of studies. Okay? So in this case, we're talking about people in urban cultures, so not remote cultures, both in the east and in the west.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  People scowl in anger about 35% of the time, which is more than what you would expect by chance. So it gets you publication in a paper, in a journal. But that means 65% of the time, when people are angry, they are doing something else that's meaningful with their face. And half the time, when people scowl, they are not angry. They are curious, concentrating, they are-

• 20:42Speaker 00

  You tell them a bad joke, or they are experiencing discomfort like gas, for example. My husband, when I met him,

• 20:52Heather Berlin?

  I can see how gas led to your husband.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yes, right, yeah, well, actually. And my husband, when I first met him, and he still does this now, he makes a full facial scowl, like the stereotype of anger, right? And even so much so that even now, after all these years and all this data, I say to him, "Really, okay? Like, did I do something to piss you off?" To which he says, "Who are you and what did you do with my wife?" Like, my wife would never ask me that question because, right? So this is just one category of emotion, but this finding holds for every emotion that's ever been studied. We did come to consensus. And the consensus is there are no universal expressions of emotion.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  What we call universal expressions are stereotypes. They're Western stereotypes.

• 21:42Heather Berlin?

  So can I, just to pull back for a second, just to clarify this, because it feels very radical. But I think what you're saying is there's no, there's no universal expressions of emotions, meaning how we express how we're feeling. But that's not to say there's no universal emotions.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  There are no internal, universal emotions.

• 22:03Heather Berlin?

  See, I think that's very radical, because...

• 22:05Speaker 02

  But universal, by the way, do you mean across all people? Or people within a culture, or...

• 22:11Speaker 00

  Here's an experiment that we did. You yourself, let's say I, or you, I strap a bunch of electrodes on you, okay? Like little sensors, okay? And I'm measuring your cardiovascular signals and your respiratory signals, and measuring your facial movements. And then I use unsupervised machine learning, so fancy AI, to detect physiological motifs. That means patterns that your brain brings your body into over and over and over again. Can we detect this? We absolutely can detect it. I'm gonna make up. But like, let's say you have 10, and maybe you have 12. And maybe I have 4, okay? All right.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  In these moments where your heart rate, really it's inner beat interval for any nerds out there, which is the time between beats, anytime it changes some, some percentage over baseline, like 15%, that means that if you're not moving a lot and you're not, you know, talking loudly, that means there's been a state change in your brain. Something has changed. So we would probe people in those moments. And we would ask them, "What's going on for you right now? Where are you? What are you doing? How are you feeling? What are you thinking about?" What we find is that, first of all, those motifs are really predictable within a person.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  But at least 2/3 of them are not generalizable across people. Meaning you have yours, I have mine, you have yours, we share some, but...

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Even within the same culture, the same study?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  These are all within the same culture. You could say, "I'm angry," or "I'm sad," or "I'm happy," but you could also say, "I'm, you know, I'm doing my homework," or whatever.

• 24:00Heather Berlin?

  But this is how I'm interpreting it. We have physiologic responses to the environment. Something happens, whether it's something scary, or there's something threatening, whatever it is, are, subjectively, we interpret it as a particular emotion or not.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  But first of all, we don't have physiologic reactions to the environment. Our brain is predicting, and those predictions begin with a motor response to control the internal environment of the body. The heart, the lungs, the, they're called visceral motor for the viscera. So those predictions begin as a visceral motor plan.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Isn't that a react? If this building starts to shake, because there's an earthquake, we would all instantly be concerned and look around and get very nervous.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  Yes, we would, but most of the time, we're predicting pretty well. We don't walk around being surprised all the time. Most of the time, our brains are predicting well. Based on this moment, the way, the patterns that, for me and for each of you, the patterns that are in your brain that capture this moment, the neck, the brain is predicting what's gonna happen next. Those predictions begin as a set of motor plans. So it's preparing a physiologic response before the stimulation actually arrives. And that preparation is also an explanation for the anticipated signals.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  So basically, what I'm saying is that you yourself don't have one pattern for anger. You could have 3, or 10, or 8, or 12. There's a physiological, physiologists, there was a physiologist named Oberst in the 1970s and 1980s, who showed really clearly that your physiological pattern is yoked really tightly to what your brain is predicting you will do next. Like what, the action that you will take, or the action that you're anticipating. So think about what you do in anger. What do you do when you're angry? Do you always shout and bang your fists? Sometimes when I'm angry, I will laugh.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I sit silently and plot the demise of my enemy in anger.

• 26:16Heather Berlin?

  That's a good one. I like that one.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do lots of things in anger, and so do you.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  So Lisa, if somebody walks in here with a gun, are you saying that none of us, I would predict all of our blood pressure would rise instantaneously?

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Well, empirically, it's not true. Actually, if you look at, for example, there, this is, there's work by Judith Anderson, who is at the University of Toronto, and she studies police officers and firefighters. On some simulations, like in a given simulation, one officer's heart rate could race, another person's heart rate could not go up. You know, their heartbeats could not speed up very much. For some people, their blood pressure goes up a lot. For some, it doesn't go up very much. That's exactly what I'm telling you.

• 26:59Heather Berlin?

  So that's what you mean by no universal, like, there's no clear physiologic pattern that maps onto a particular emotion? But I guess then the question is, how does the brain decide which, based on whatever physiologic reactions are happening, or sensations are happening, how does the brain decide which emotion gets assigned? Or how a label is formed about these physiologic sensations?

• 27:23Speaker 00

  So I think the first thing to understand is that a category of emotion is not a single thing. It's a category of highly variable instances. Anger isn't one thing. It's an entire population of instances. This is really similar to Darwin's population thinking in On the Origin of Species, right? Where there isn't a single best example of a dog, or a cat, or that really, a category is a group of variable things. So I think that's the first thing. I think the second thing is...

• 27:57Speaker 02

  The exception is, by the way, dogs. Bernays-Mann dogs are dogs.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Are those your dogs? Yeah, okay, well, I would say, yeah, I would say it's, it's huskies, because, you know, we have a husky. But, but I think the next thing I would say is that, part of what's really hard about this is that most scientists and therapists, and basically, we all start with our own experiences of the world, and then we use those experiences to start asking questions about how stuff works. So it makes sense to ask the question, "Well, how does the brain assign a category?" As if there is a category called anger with a label, and what the brain is doing is it's remembering some instance of that category.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  But that isn't really how the brain works. I think what the brain is doing is remembering bits and pieces from the past that are similar to the present in some way. It's the category, it's constructing a category in the moment. If the brain is constructing a bunch of instance, potential instances that are similar to the present, a bunch of things which are similar is called a category. That in psychology, that's what a category is. A bunch of things which are similar in some way, they will serve the same purpose in some way. They could look nothing alike, they could sound nothing alike, they could feel nothing alike. Like anger is sometimes unpleasant, but sometimes it's pleasant. Anger can, you can be really worked up in anger. Sometimes you could be dead calm in anger.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  So the, the, the business problem here...

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Is how is the brain, first of all, dealing with all of that variety? How does it, how does it make sense of that variety? And how is it, when it's constructing a category? How does it know which past instances to sample? And what I would say is the best available evidence is that it's sampling on the basis of the best plan for controlling the body. And sometimes that goes along with mental features of anger. And sometimes it goes along with mental features of fear. And sometimes it goes along with mental features of happiness. The brain isn't deciding to feel angry.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  It's deciding to put into play an action plan. That action plan, based on the context, can, in the past, have gone with fear, or gone with anger, or gone with, you know, it can be associated with-

• 30:32Speaker 02

  So what about in a, in a baby? When the baby doesn't have a large past to call upon? Is it then innate? Are there some innate fear and hunger? A few innate affects or emotions?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Well, I think, I think everybody would probably agree that, that affective feelings are, are there at birth. What I would say is the following, that-

• 30:56Speaker 02

  So affective, just to enumerate? Those are what things like hunger, thirst, cold, I mean, the basics?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, hunger, thirst, cold, probably pleasantness or unpleasantness, comfort, discomfort. Babies can be calm and they can be worked up.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  And so those are more universal innate?

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Those are more universal.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  But you don't call those emotions?

• 31:18Speaker 00

  Well, we don't, because they're with you all the time. We think of those as features of consciousness. They're with you always, always, always, always.

• 31:26Heather Berlin?

  But it, it feels like, but just like, subjectively, you know, when I'm dealing, let's say, with a patient, or just in my own subjective experience, it feels like, you know, something happens in the environment. My body feels sensations, I'm experiencing these feelings. And then I look to the environment to interpret, how am I going to interpret this? And then I land on an emotion. I feel angry, I feel upset, I feel scared. It ultimately feels like I land on a thing. I'm feeling angry right now.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what I would say is that that's, you described really well what is in our awareness. But I don't actually think that's what's happening under the hood.

• 32:03Heather Berlin?

  But what, so then, there's the science of it, what's actually happening under the hood. And then there's the practicality of what can a person do to positively impact how they're interacting with the world, or how they're experiencing these emotions? Is there something that we have control over?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Well, sure.

• 32:21Heather Berlin?

  Based on what we understand about what's happening under the hood, that can be like a takeaway for people to say, okay, when I'm feeling triggered, or, you know, having an unpleasant emotion, is there some way that people can change their perception slightly, to retell a different story, to experience fundamentally those sensations in a more positive way?

• 32:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say in a more productive way, because I don't, I don't really think positivity is the goal here. The goal here is to not suffer. You can maintain a feeling of discomfort without suffering. And sometimes you don't want to get rid of that discomfort. The discomfort is actually really functional and useful. But nobody wants to suffer. One thing that you can do, if your brain is constantly predicting, and it's, this is happening outside of your awareness, and these predictions are basically like, your brain is starting to make meaning and create an emotion before the signals even reach your brain, right? What you, what you would like to do is to have flexibility

• 33:24Speaker 00

  in what you can experience. And so you can train yourself to learn to have that flexibility. You can learn more emotion concepts, more emotion words. You can practice making sense of signals differently before the heat of the moment, so-

• 33:43Speaker 02

  So can you give us a practical example?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Yes, I can. So, for example, there's a, a large literature on the importance of awe and wonder, right? You had a podcast episode on that.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  That helped, no?

• 33:55Speaker 00

  And I, you know, I'm inherently skeptical person. So I, when I, when this research first started being done, I thought, yeah, okay, I'm gonna practice experiencing awe every day for five minutes. And I'm gonna see if it has any effect on my life. And at first, I started with really easy things. I started with, you know, the stars at night and the sound of the ocean. And I eventually got myself up to, you know, there's a dandelion, gnarly little dandelion poking its head out of a broken sidewalk. And I could experience the, I could marvel at the power of nature

• 34:40Speaker 00

  to be unconstrained by humans' attempts to control it. For real. I was in many different physical circumstances, but I was generating an experience for myself, practicing, if you will, just like when you're driving. You learn, when you first start learning to drive, you have to prac, it's a skill. You practice, you have to concentrate, but eventually-

• 35:02Speaker 02

  So did it help?

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Yes, it helps a lot. In fact, I can be in a really difficult situation, a situation that might, you know, normally make me completely lose my shit. And I can generate an experience of awe and feel-

• 35:21Speaker 02

  So that means, so people that, let's say, people for whom the world is full of triggers, they should try to learn things like awe as a remedial technique to help them?

• 35:31Speaker 00

  Well, awe is just one example, but, and, but I want you to notice, I didn't experience one experience of awe. There were many different experiences. You know, awe historically is not always a pleasant feeling. Awe, originally, actually, was, meant, there was, the experience of awe was-

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Awful, full of awe?

• 35:52Speaker 00

  So I trained myself to practice so that I could automatically experience just a variety of different instances of awe, because that variation is what will prepare my brain in the future.

• 36:07Heather Berlin?

  But this is how I translate it. I mean, I think, you know, when we take a different perspective of something maybe also greater than ourselves, outside of ourselves. I know, like, when I'm feeling triggered or, or upset about something, I'll look out at the sunset, I'll go for a walk, I'll look at the trees and breathe the air and feel, okay, my little problems in my little life, there's something greater, and I connect with that outside of myself.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  In psychology, we learned that that, you know, there's this, there's stimulation out there. There's stuff, shit happens out in the world. You process it cogn, you perceive it, then you process it cognitively. Then, you know, you maybe you have an emotional reaction, or maybe you don't, and then your brain makes an action plan. That's not really how it works. The evidence suggests that what happens is, in the moment, your brain is making a prediction about an action plan. And the literal copies of those signals become the sensory predictions about what you will hear next and see next and feel next and smell next.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Basically, you can train yourself to categorize differently, very automatically. You can focus, you can shift your attention in the moment deliberately. Sometimes we do that by literally, by moving our heads, or by literally getting up and moving somewhere else. So these are all ways of shifting the trajectory of your brain's predictions. And another thing that you can do, which is not in the heat of the moment, but, but before the heat of the moment, is, and this one is, you know, it sounds like me being a mother, and I am a mother. And when I say this to my daughter, you know, her eyes roll back in her head.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  But really, it's that, to keep yourself physically healthy. That is, to get enough sleep and stay hydrated and stop eating pseudo-food. I say this, being like a great lover, you know, of potato chips. You know, your brain's most important job is not thinking, it's not feeling, it's not seeing, it's regulating your body. That's what brains evolved for. And everything else it does, it does in the service of that. And if that's a hard job, then you will feel more unpleasant affect and have the opportunity to make much more unpleasant emotion than if you keep yourself metabolically, you know, fit, basically.

• 38:42Heather Berlin?

  But our predictions aren't always accurate, also. I mean, there are a lot of people who kind of see the world through depression-colored glasses, anxiety-colored glasses, you know. Our predictions even about our behaviors, or, they can be inaccurate, right?

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so your, your predictions cannot match the base rate of what hap, of what will happen, for sure. But I think the important thing to realize is that brains wire themselves to their world. And the world, your world, your brain's world is your body in the larger environment that you're in, your niche. And if you lived in an environment where the base rate of threat was high, you will, your brain is wired that way. And it, it, the most predictions that are, gonna be most likely are the ones-

• 39:37Speaker 00

  From that your brain is wired to to create. And so if you want to shift that, you have to give yourself new experiences and encode them and remember them. And you have to practice it. Because the predictions that you make today become the experiences that you make today, which become the predictions of tomorrow. So in a sense, everything you experience right now is creating the person who you will be tomorrow. If you want to shift your perception box, you have to actually cultivate experiences for yourself that are different from the ones that you have. And when we're little kids, we don't have any control over the environment that was

• 40:22Speaker 00

  cultivated for us. But when we're grownups, we do. And not everybody has the same opportunities to do that. And for some of us, it's harder than others. But we all have the capacity to do it. But what it means is that, and it doesn't just mean practice feeling awe, you can also practice feeling like shit and then get yourself out of it. You know, I grew up in Canada, and the first thing that you do when you live in a snowy place, when the first snowstorm of every year, you get into your car and you deliberately put yourself into a tailspin so that you can remember how to get out of it. So you can also practice, so for example, when you go for a run, you can go for a

• 41:07Speaker 00

  longer run than you normally would. Or you can deliberately not drink and get a little dehydrated, not a lot. But you could, basically, you can put yourself into situations where you don't feel very good and then try to get yourself out of them. Practice this recategorization.

• 41:25Heather Berlin?

  We have control over our life in the sense of if we can sort of change the algorithm by changing our experiences, that's one of the levers of control we can have of sort of shifting our perception box.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 41:45Heather Berlin?

  Every episode, we ask a question designed to expand our own perception box. And this week, I've selected the question. So you're both gonna, you both have no idea what I'm gonna ask. When have you ever let go of a deeply held conviction?

• 42:01Speaker 02

  It's a great question.

• 42:02Heather Berlin?

  Thank you.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Two and a half years ago.

• 42:04Heather Berlin?

  Yes.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  On a beach in Brazil.

• 42:07Heather Berlin?

  Oh, boy.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  I let go of the belief that everything is reducible to the physical. It was an abrupt experience, and since then, I don't believe that anymore. Science works wonderfully, but I just fundamentally shifted. It was a very discreet change.

• 42:23Heather Berlin?

  And now you believe not everything is reduced to physical and...

• 42:26Speaker 02

  No, in fact, it may well be possible that everything is ultimately reducible to something mental. It was a very discreet change that really affected my life in all sorts of expected and unexpected ways.

• 42:39Heather Berlin?

  Interesting.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  So thanks for asking that.

• 42:41Heather Berlin?

  You're very welcome. And do you have something that...

• 42:44Speaker 00

  I do, I have several. In psychology, we learn that causation that is mental can be separated from causation that is physical. This goes all the way back to Wilhelm Blunt, who was one of the, you know, original psychology, he was a physiologist who then started to study...

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Psychophysics.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  He studied psychophysics, but he tried to use the methods of physiology to study something mental. And eventually came around to the idea that you didn't need physiology at all. And I originally started studying mood. That was what I studied originally. And so I always thought of mood as causal. And I would ask questions like, well, how does feeling unpleasant cause you to do this? Or how does feeling happy or pleasant cause you to do that? When I was retraining as a neuroscientist, I actually retrained with anatomists and, you know, like really low level, very detailed neuroscience.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Ever since psychology became a science, scientists had been starting with their own subjective experiences and then going to look for the physical basis of those in the brains of humans and other animals. And that probably a better idea would be to start with the evolution of the brain and the development of the brain. So actually, start with the brain. Start with the nervous system. And then ask, well, given that you have a nervous system like this, and you have the kind of environment, you know, or what we call a niche, how does a brain, how does a nervous system like that with a body like that and an environment like that produce these experiences? So I really took the question and I flipped it on its head.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  And that led me to the realization that feelings aren't causal. They are evidence that something is happening. They're not causing things to happen. They're evidence that something is happening. When you feel like crap, the first thing you do is you look to the world to figure out what's wrong. And when there's nothing out there that's wrong, then you look to yourself, like, well, what's wrong with me?

• 44:54Speaker 02

  And by the world, you mean including your body?

• 44:56Speaker 00

  No, I mean, you usually start with the world, like, well, you know...

• 45:00Speaker 02

  I thought you usually start, well, is there something wrong? Do I have fever? Is there something...

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm talking about, well, I'm really talking about, before I sort of came to this way of thinking about things, I was thinking about, like, well, what do people usually do when they feel like shit? Well, the first thing they look around, they figure, they ask themselves, who am I mad at? Who did something to me? Am I worried about what's gonna happen? They're looking at the world and figuring to ask, like, why do I feel this way? Is there something wrong out there that I have to deal with? And if there isn't, then they look to themselves. You know, am I a bad person? Am I feeling guilty about something? They look to the world or they look to themselves. But the third possibility is that there's just something physical going on and that it doesn't have to be there's something wrong with you or the world.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  It could just be that you're tired. At the end of the day, when you've had a really stressful day and you really feel like the world is ending because you've just, it's just been a day, it really feels like something is wrong with the world. Or that it really feels like there's something wrong with you. You just feel that way. And you have to set it aside. You have to trust that maybe it's just that you need to get some sleep and get up and start again tomorrow. Maybe you just, you know, you need to give yourself a moment of grace because you're just really tired. And right now, in the light of day, that just seems eminently sensible.

• 46:30Heather Berlin?

  And but also, just to say, you know, there are also things that specifically happen, like you get fired, you know, you get broken up with. You have a reaction, and then people can ruminate and that it feels like it just continues the emotion.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Sometimes there really is something wrong in the world. And sometimes there really is some, you know, maybe you have done something that you regret. A lot of the time, it really, in everyday life, it really isn't that. A lot of suffering in everyday life isn't about those things.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  It's optional in one sense.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  It's optional.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  You can reframe it.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Even in the case where, as long as someone doesn't control your outcomes, that is, isn't your boss, somebody else's opinion of you is just electrical activity inside their head. It actually doesn't have to mean anything for you.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  It's a great insight for therapeutic benefit.

• 47:24Heather Berlin?

  I want to thank Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett for joining us today. And if you would like to learn more about your own perception box, spend some time this week answering the same perception box questions that we asked our guests. And check out other questions on our website at unlikelycollaborators.com. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts. This has been Science of Perception Box, created by Unlikely Collaborators in collaboration with Podpeople. I'm Dr. Heather Berlin.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  And I'm your co-host, Dr. Kristof Koff.