Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Most Replayed Moment: Anxiety Is Just A Prediction! Rewrite Old Stories and Build Emotional Safety About this episode Lisa Feldman Barrett is a Canadian-American neuroscientist renowned for her pioneering work on how the brain constructs emotion through prediction. In this Moments episode, she explains how the brain doesn’t simply react to the world but continually anticipates it, drawing on past experience to shape what we feel, perceive and fear. She reveals why anxiety is often a replay of old predictions - and how to rewire meaning and ease the learned patterns that keep us stuck.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Steven Bartlett? The predictive brain is this idea that I only pretty much know from you. I'd never heard it before. When we say the predictive brain, what does that mean? And what does it not mean?
0:14 Speaker 01 So when you are living your everyday life.
0:19 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, like right now.
0:20 Speaker 01 Like right now. So right now, I'm guessing that I'm saying things to you and you're perceiving what I'm saying and then you're reacting to it. That's how it feels to you, right?
0:31 Steven Bartlett? Yes.
0:32 Speaker 01 Okay. And that's how it feels to me, too. So we sense and then we react. That's the way most people experience themselves in the world. That's not actually what's happening under the hood. Really, what's happening is that the brain, your brain is not reacting. It's predicting. And what that means is if we were to stop time right now, just freeze time, your brain would be in a state and it would be remembering past experiences that are similar to this state
1:12 Speaker 01 as a way of predicting what to do next, like literally in the next moment. Should your eyes move? Should your heart rate go up? Should your breathing change? Should your blood vessels dilate or should they constrict? Should you prepare to stand? Right, movements. And these movements, the preparation for movement, literal copies of those signals become predictions for what you will see and hear and smell and taste and think and feel. So under the hood, your brain is predicting what movements it should engage in next and as a consequence,
1:57 Speaker 01 what you will experience because of those movements. So you act first and then you sense. You don't sense and then react. You predict action and then you sense.
2:14 Steven Bartlett? So give me a example which brings this to light of how my brain is predicting and then taking action.
2:22 Speaker 01 Okay, so right now you and I are having a conversation and I'm speaking and you're listening. And what's really happening in your brain is that based on many gazillion repetitions of listening to language, your brain is predicting, literally predicting, every single word that will come out of my...
2:53 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, okay.
2:57 Speaker 01 And how surprising would it have been if I didn't say mouth, I said some other orifice of my body that words were coming out of? That would have been pretty surprising. Because your brain is predicting that. Your brain is always predicting and it's correcting those predictions when they're incorrect. And you know, I have this video that I often show when I'm giving a talk to scientists or to civilians, giving a talk, and it creates a situation where they can predict something
3:37 Speaker 01 and they can feel that a prediction is not just this abstract kind of thought, it's your brain is literally changing the firing of its own sensory neurons to anticipate incoming sensations. So you start to feel these sensations before the signals actually arrive for you to perceive them. You start to have the experience before the world gives you those signals.
4:05 Steven Bartlett? I've read, I think it was in your book, but it might have been elsewhere, about the example of being thirsty.
4:11 Speaker 01 Yes, so when you drink, so say you're super thirsty and you drank a big glass of water, when do you stop being thirsty? Almost immediately. But actually, it takes 20 minutes for that water to be absorbed into your bloodstream and make its way to the brain to tell the brain that you are no longer in need of fluid. Because across millions of opportunities, you have learned that certain movements now and certain sensory signals now will result in that mental state. Or here's another example.
4:55 Speaker 01 So right now, keep your eyes on me, you're looking right at me, and in your mind's eye, I want you to imagine a Macintosh apple, like a, not a computer, but like an actual piece of fruit.
5:08 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
5:09 Speaker 01 Can you do it?
5:10 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
5:10 Speaker 01 Can you see it?
5:11 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
5:11 Speaker 01 What color is it?
5:13 Steven Bartlett? Green.
5:14 Speaker 01 Okay, does it have any red?
5:16 Steven Bartlett? No.
5:17 Speaker 01 Okay, so it's a Granny Smith apple.
5:19 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
5:19 Speaker 01 Okay, what does it taste like? Like, imagine, imagine grabbing it.
5:24 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
5:25 Speaker 01 Biting into it, hearing the crunch of the apple. What does it taste like?
5:30 Steven Bartlett? It's like sweet.
5:32 Speaker 01 Like a little tart, maybe?
5:33 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah.
5:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, is it juicy?
5:35 Steven Bartlett? It's very juicy.
5:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay, so if I were imaging your brain right now, what I would see is, I would see changes in the signal that is related to neural activity in your visual cortex, even though there is no apple in front of you. And I would see a change in activity in your auditory cortex, even though you didn't really hear the crunch.
5:59 Steven Bartlett? My mouth was watering as well.
6:00 Speaker 01 And your mouth is watering. And in fact, every time you sit down for a meal, your brain directs your
6:08 Speaker 01 Saliva glands to produce more saliva to prepare you to eat and digest the food. So that usually happens in advance of even sitting down to a meal. That is all prediction. That's all of that is your brain preparing itself for what's coming. Because predicting and correcting is a much more efficient way to run a nervous system, really any system, than reacting to the world. Here's another example. Do you drink coffee?
6:41 Steven Bartlett? Yes.
6:41 Speaker 01 Okay. Do you drink coffee every day at the same time?
6:45 Steven Bartlett? Usually, yeah.
6:46 Speaker 01 Okay. And are you one of these people that if you miss having coffee at that time, you get a headache?
6:52 Steven Bartlett? I mean, it's happened before, yes.
6:55 Speaker 01 Well, I used to be a person who drank a lot of coffee. And I love coffee, but I don't drink it anymore. But I loved it and I drank it always at the same time every day. And if I didn't drink it, I would get, at that time of day, I would get a massive headache. And the reason why, and this is true really of every medicine you take, everything which, anything which affects your physiology, if you do it on a regular basis, your brain will come to expect it. And what that means, come to expect it, is that coffee has chemicals in it that will constrict your blood vessels everywhere.
7:36 Speaker 01 But in the brain, the brain is attempting to keep its, to keep the blood flow pretty constant and even. And so if every day at eight o'clock in the morning, you're drinking something that's going to constrict your blood vessels, then at seven fifty-five approximately, I don't know the exact timing, but a little bit before, you know, eight, your brain will dilate the blood vessels in preparation for that constriction so they remain constant. And if you don't drink that substance, then you have this big dilation and you get a very, very bad headache.
8:16 Steven Bartlett? I was just wondering then about, as you were talking, I thought you were going to talk about how sometimes when I set an alarm, I seem to wake up like five minutes before the alarm.
8:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure, that's an example. Here's another example, exercise, okay? If you wanna, if you wanna play tennis better, if you wanna run a faster mile, what do you do?
8:36 Steven Bartlett? Train.
8:37 Speaker 01 Train, and you do the same thing over and over and over and over again, and you get better and faster, and you burn fewer calories, you get more efficient. Why? Because your brain's predicting really well. That's what muscle memory is. It's not literally a memory in your muscles, it's a memory in your brain. Your brain is controlling your muscles, and so if you practice the same set of movements over and over and over again, you just get really efficient at them because your brain is able to predict better.
9:07 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
9:08 Speaker 01 Now, if you're somebody who's exercising because you wanna become healthier, or you wanna lose weight, or you, right? You don't wanna practice the same exercise over and over and over again because you will be burning fewer calories because you're being efficient. That's the goal, right? So instead, you do interval training, right? If somebody's calling out to you every 30 seconds a different set of movements and you can't predict what they are, then your, your brain will make a prediction, it'll be wrong, you'll have to adjust, and so you end up burning more calories and you end up throwing yourself out of balance, which we call allostasis. So you become dysregulated and then your, your brain has to work to get itself back
9:52 Speaker 01 in again, and so that's a different kind of workout. These two different kinds of workouts are completely predicated on the fact that sometimes you wanna be able to predict better, sometimes you wanna be able to disrupt yourself and get back into the pocket quickly, right? So basically, you're learning how to take in prediction error, things, signals you didn't predict, and adjust to them.
10:20 Steven Bartlett? What does this say about the nature of trauma and other mental health illnesses like depression, anxiety, et cetera? Because is this a misfiring of my predictions? I say this because predictions reliant on something happening in the past and forming a pattern, like a pattern recognition system. So if I grew up and there were certain patterns that are now not the case. So if I grew up and every time a man walked into the room, he hit me. And now when a man walks into the room and I'm 35 years old, I'm getting that same sort of prediction in my brain. So I've got a fear of men, for example. Is this, does this somewhat explain childhood trauma and why it's so hard to shake and why as adults we can sometimes have dysfunctional lives?
11:05 Speaker 01 I would say is a general principle, yes. There are a lot of, you know, the devil is in the details, right? But yeah, sure. So trauma is not something that happens in the world to you. Everything you experience is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. So there could be an adverse event that occurs. You're in an earthquake. Someone dies who's close to you. Something bad happens to you. Someone hurts you in some way. There could be an adverse event that is not traumatic to you because you're not, you're
11:44 Speaker 01 not using past experiences to make sense of it as a trauma. On the other hand, something that is, could be like an everyday experience to somebody else, to you, it links to a set of memories that are very traumatic, were very traumatic. Those events were very traumatic. And so to you, it is a trauma. So trauma is not an objective thing in the world. It's also not all in your head. It's a, the trauma is a property of the relation between what has happened to you in the past and what is occurring in the present. So here's an example.
12:25 Speaker 01 There is an anthropologist who works at Emory University and she studies people in, in a lot of different cultures and she studies trauma in a lot of different cultures. And there was this one girl that she, she wrote about, a case study of a girl named Maria, who was a young adolescent girl.
12:47 Speaker 01 And she lived in a culture where it was more normative for men to physically be very physical with women and and girls. So in our culture, we would say it's physical abuse. But in her culture, this is just what men did. She didn't experience, so her stepfather would would slap her around. And she didn't like it, but she didn't show any sign of trauma. The way she made sense of it was that men are just assholes. It was very much a, this
13:26 Speaker 01 is not about me. This is about them. It's not pleasant, but she slept okay. Her grades were okay in school. She had friends. She didn't have any signs of trauma at all. Then she watched Oprah. And she heard all of these women talk about having been the subject of physical abuse from their boyfriends, or their fathers, or, you know, their husbands. And she recognized the similarity in the physical circumstances of these women's descriptions
14:10 Speaker 01 and and her physical circumstances. And she also observed them experiencing trump, like, you know, symptoms of trauma. And all of a sudden, she started to have difficulty sleeping. And she, her grades dropped, and she had trouble concentrating, and she became socially withdrawn. Her way of making meaning, her way of, if you think about physical movements as actions, she made different meaning of those actions, and she experienced trauma.
14:53 Speaker 01 Where she didn't before. Now, if you're somebody who believes that there is an objective world out there where, you know.
15:02 Steven Bartlett? Cause and effect.
15:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, that that really there was some kind of latent trauma in her and she didn't experience it before, but then it was like triggered and then she'd be, you could tell a whole story like that and people do tell whole stories like that. But that's not what the best scientific evidence suggests is happening. What's happening is that the physical movements were the same. The psychological experience of those movements was different because experience is a combination of the sensory present, the physical present and the remembered past. And you need both in order to have a particular kind of experience.
15:48 Speaker 01 So the way to describe what happened to Maria's trajectory was that she experienced something as an unfortunate aspect of like physical life. And then it became about her. It became something, not, not this person was doing something bad, but this person was doing something bad to her because of who she is.
16:14 Steven Bartlett? And she was also shown how she should be responding to that by watching Oprah's show and watching these other individuals responding in a certain way.
16:21 Speaker 01 Right, so it became about her as a person, not just about, you know, her stepfather was an asshole. And if you think about it, what we do in this culture, when, when people go into therapy for trauma, right, is we're attempting to, to actually reverse the narrative. So we try to teach people that it's not, when something traumatic happens to them, it's, and I want to be really clear what I'm saying, right? I'm not saying that when people experience trauma, it's their fault. I'm not in any way saying they're culpable for what's happened to them. But sometimes in life.
17:02 Speaker 01 You are responsible for changing something, not because you're to blame, but because you're the only person who can. The responsibility falls to you. And so in this culture, we try to teach people who've experienced trauma that they can experience those physical events that happened to them in the past in some other way. And when they do, they no longer feel traumatized anymore.
17:34 Steven Bartlett? My mind's a little bit blown for a number of different reasons, because it's a real paradigm shift to think that we are giving meaning to the thing that happened in our past. And sometimes that meaning is coming from watching other people give it meaning. And we're inheriting that meaning that...
17:47 Speaker 01 Oh, yes, that's called cultural inheritance.
17:50 Steven Bartlett? It's like a cultural, it's like a contagion.
17:53 Speaker 01 So it turns out that, you know, there's, there's one kind of old evolutionary theory, right? This is called the modern synthesis, where inheritance is really your genes. You inherit, whatever you inherit, you inherit by your genes. And then natural selection, you know, chooses some gene patterns and not others. And that's really how inheritance works across generations. Most evolutionary biologists don't, don't hold to that view anymore because, for the most part, there are many, many ways to inherit things. And a lot of what we think of as inheritance is really more what's called epigenetic, meaning it doesn't really involve DNA very much.
18:39 Speaker 01 And I would say, the way I like to say it is that we have the kinds of nature that requires a nurture. We have the kind of genes that require experience before anything is wired into our brains. And most of our characteristics work that way. Very few characteristics work just by genes alone.
19:00 Speaker 01 What always happens in a neurotypical brain is that you're born with your brain incomplete. Right? An adult brain has, has a, we say that it's wired to its world. That world includes its own, your own body. But a baby is not a, baby's brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world and from its own body. So your brain is wired for you to see out of eyes that are the exact distance of your eyes from each other. If somehow, you know, magically, we could transplant your brain into somebody else's skull, you would not be able to see out of that skull.
19:44 Speaker 01 You would not be able to see out of those eyes because they're not in the right place. You hear with ears. Your, your ability to hear comes from signals that are shaped by the shape of your ear. So your brain is wired to hear out of these ears, not any ears, these ears. Similarly, you, as a baby, you are taught the meanings of physical signals. You're taught how to make sense of these things. That's called cultural inheritance. Many things that we think of as hardwired into the brain are actually culturally inherited across generations.
20:26 Speaker 01 That's how people survive in a particular environment. You know, so like in the 1800s and 1900s, when explorers would go off and they would go off to Antarctica or here or there, and they would very quickly die. The Inuit lived there, they lived perfectly fine. Well, because they had culturally inherited knowledge. We're always transmitting.
20:51 Speaker 01 Knowledge to each other. And that knowledge becomes fodder for our own predictions. So your predictions don't just come from your personal experience. They also come from you watching television, you talking to guests, you reading books, watching movies. Also, your brain, like most human brains, can do something really fantastic, which is you can take bits and pieces of past experience and put them together in a brand-new way so that you can use the past to experience something new that you've never experienced before.
21:34 Steven Bartlett? You talked a second ago about therapists trying to make you think about the past differently, but I do think there's an underlying belief in our culture and society and on social media that if something happened to you, almost like this Freudian approach of if this happened to you, this is who you become. And I was reading that book, The Courage to be Disliked, over Christmas, and it kind of, it changed my view on this quite profoundly in an important way because it helped me to understand. I think it basically says that what happens to us doesn't create who we are. We use what happened to us and we apply meaning to it, which then determines the behavior we have. And really interestingly in that, it means that many of the beliefs I have about myself,
22:15 Steven Bartlett? who I say I am, my identity, and therefore the ways that I behave every day, whether they're productive or unproductive, are actually just choices I've made to apply meaning to the past. Does that make sense?
22:30 Speaker 01 It completely makes sense.
22:32 Steven Bartlett? And this is really, this is such like a profound, I don't know if whoever's listening now understands what I'm saying here, but we said at the start of this conversation, you go through life thinking you're a puppet and you're being controlled by what happened to you, who you are, your identity. But actually, your identity is just this, this construction of...
22:51 Steven Bartlett? Meaning that you've given to the past.
22:54 Speaker 01 So.
22:54 Steven Bartlett? To serve your purpose now, as it says in the book.
22:56 Speaker 01 Yes, I would say it slightly differently, but the message is the same. I think there are, in the sensory present, right? There are sights, there are sounds, there are smells, some stuff's going on inside your own body, right? And these signals are going to your brain. They have no inherent psychological meaning. They have no inherent emotional meaning. They have no inherent mental meaning. What gives them meaning is the, are your memories from the past. You are creating, you are a meaning maker. Meaning isn't a set of features like a dictionary definition.
23:40 Speaker 01 So, meaning, the meaning of this cup isn't that it's made of metal and that, I mean, we certainly can talk about those features, but the meaning of this cup in this moment is what I do with it. So it could be a vessel for drinking. It could be a weapon. It could be, you know, a flower holder. It could be a measuring cup. The meaning of the vessel is what I do with it in the moment. That's its meaning. And so, the meaning of the vessel isn't in the vessel. And it's also not only in my head. The meaning is the transaction.
24:24 Speaker 01 It's the relationship between this, the features of this vessel, this object, and the signals in my brain, which are creating my actions. In fact, even the fact that this is a solid object, the property of solidity is not in the object. It's because I have a body of a certain type with certain features that makes.
24:53 Speaker 01 Me experience this as solid. The solidity isn't in me and it's not in the object. It's in the relationship between the two. That means everything, everything you experience is partly of your own making. You don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically. It's happening automatically now as we're talking. It's happening faster than you can blink your eyes. But it's still happening. And that means if you are partly, even if you, even though you don't have a sense of agency,
25:31 Speaker 01 you are partly in control and also therefore responsible for the meaning that is being made. And when I said at the outset of our conversation that my goal was to try to, you know, as a science communicator, was to try to explain to people that they have more control over their lives. They have more control over who they are in any given moment than they think they do, to give them more agency in their lives. This is, this is exactly what I mean.
26:12 Speaker 01 You, you don't have an enduring identity. You are who you are in the moment of your action. And actions are a combination of the remembered past. So stuff your brain is using to predict. That's how it's, that your brain's assembling super automatically. And the sensory present, right? So if you want to change who you are, you want to change what you feel, you want to change what your impact is on someone else.
26:46 Speaker 01 You have a couple of choices. You can try to go back into the past and change the meaning of what's happened before. So that you'll remember differently, you'll predict differently in the future. That's what psychotherapy is. That's what heartfelt conversations at two o'clock in the morning are with your friends or whatever. That's really hard shit. Doesn't always work so well. The other thing that you can do, though, is if you realize that whatever you experience now becomes the seeds for predictions later, then you can invest in creating new experiences quite deliberately for yourself now. You can expose yourself to new ideas.
27:30 Speaker 01 You can expose yourself to people who are different than you. You can practice cultivating particular experiences like you would practice any skill. And that will, any new concepts you learn, new experiences you have, in the moment, if you practice them, they become automatic predictions in the future.
27:55 Steven Bartlett? So let me take that and try and apply it to this example of this silver cup in my hand. So psychotherapy would try and go back into the past and explain to me why this actually isn't something I should drink out of, and that it could be other things. Whereas what you're saying is another approach is if I go and get some flowers right now and I put them in there, I'm creating a new prediction for the future because I've created a new pattern in the present of this actually being a vase for flowers. And I can start to create a new pattern that silver cups like this one aren't just for drinking out of, they are also vases for flowers.
28:32 Speaker 01 Exactly.
28:33 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so I can either go back in the past and try and convince myself that a cup isn't a cup, or I can, in the present moment, create a new pattern, which will mean that in the future, my brain will predict, next time it sees a silver cup, it won't just think, "Drink out of it, Steve," it'll think, "Pop some flowers in it."
28:47 Speaker 01 Right, and remember, it's actually, the thinking comes after the action, right? So what will happen is, the next time that you are approaching a table where a silver cup might be, your brain will already be starting to prepare the actions to go get the flowers.
29:02 Steven Bartlett? Right.
29:02 Speaker 01 And then you will think. Oh, right. I can use this as a, oh, look, there's a great vase. Right? So in your brain, it's action, at first, your brain is controlling, it's preparing the actions of the viscera, what we call visceral motor. So does your heart rate need to change? Do your blood vessels need to dilate? Do you need to breathe differently? It's basically anticipating the needs of the body and attempting to meet those needs before they arise. That supports your physical movements, right? So if you're gonna, if you're walking over somewhere to pick up some flowers and cut the stems and whatever, those are all physical movements that require glucose and oxygen and shit like. So all
29:45 Speaker 01 of that has to get prepared in advance, milliseconds before the actions start to be prepared. So it's not what you think determines what you feel. It's what you prepare to do determines your thoughts and your feelings and the sights and sounds and smells and sensations. That's how it really works under the hood. So meaning is in terms of what you do. And then as a consequence of that, if meaning is a consequence, it becomes what you feel and what you think and so on.
30:18 Steven Bartlett? So let me give you some specific examples then. So if I'm scared of spiders, how would I go about overcoming that fear of spiders using route number two that you described there?
30:30 Speaker 01 So one of the ways that you change, to change predictions, you can't just will yourself to change a prediction. I am really afraid of bees. I had a traumatic experience when I was five. I'm afraid of bees. I know a lot about bees. I'm actually a gardener. And I, I, and I know a lot about the evolutionary biology of bees. But when I am outside, if a bee comes around, my first reaction is to either run or to freeze, right? I'm afraid of bees.
31:07 Speaker 01 I could talk to myself until the cows come home. It won't matter. I can't, right? So what I have to do is dose myself with prediction error. Meaning I have to interact with bees in a way that changes my actions, which will change my lived experience. And I can't just do it all at once. It's not like a good idea would not be for me to say, would not have been for me to go to like somebody who has beehives and, you know, put on a suit and go work. I mean, that would be like overwhelming, right? So instead, maybe I don't run. Maybe I stand and watch. Maybe I get closer to a bee.
31:51 Speaker 01 Maybe I plant bushes and flowers that bees like a lot to bring bees to me so that I can sit and just be around them while they're buzzing and doing their thing. Maybe I deliberately let myself get stung at some point, which I did. But, you know, you're dosing yourself with, your brain is making a set of predictions. Those predictions, there are a set of predictions. That means your brain isn't preparing one action. It's preparing multiple actions.
32:27 Steven Bartlett? So you need to prove to your brain that those predictions are wrong.
32:32 Speaker 01 Yes, so exactly. You need, you are setting up circumstances so you can prove to yourself that your predictions are wrong.
32:41 Steven Bartlett? What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.
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