Where Do Feelings Come From?

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In Anthony Doerr's wonderful novel, All the Light We Cannot See, a radio host poses a question to an audience of children. The brain is locked in total darkness, he says. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light? It's not just about light, of course. The world inside our heads is full of sound, movement, and sensation. It is suffused with feelings and emotion. Imagine for a moment that your brain was a person locked inside your head.

Hello.

How does this person create a world so rich, so varied, and so beautiful when she is permanently trapped within the cage of your skull? Most of us have a ready answer. The brain has many messengers that bring it information. Signals stream in from our eyes and ears and skin. The brain takes in all these signals and, like a film editor splicing together a movie, assembles our perceptions of the world. But in recent years, some scientists have come to believe that this is not what actually happens. The light we see and the sounds we hear are not really comprised of signals from the outside world. Instead, they are mostly creations of the mind itself. When I first heard this idea, It made little sense to me. But then I came by some interesting experiments. For example, can you make out what I'm saying here? The novel All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Sounds like gibberish, right? Here's what I said. The novel All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Now let me play you the same clip as before. A novel, Of What We Cannot See, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. If you can now make out the words, it's not because your mind deciphered the audio. You tried doing that, and it sounded like gibberish. You can do it now because your brain knew what was coming. It predicted what it was going to hear. As we will explore today, the brain is doing this in every domain. What you hear, yes, but also what you see, what you touch, what you smell. This week on Hidden Brain, the story of a scientist who has spent years studying how the brain constructs reality and the surprising implications of her ideas for our emotional lives. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Thanks for watching Hidden Brain.

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Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. Lisa Feldman Barrett grew up in Toronto, Canada. It was the late 1960s. Her dad was out of the picture, so her mom raised her. Lisa would spend every weekend with her maternal grandparents. When she was 5, Her mom remarried. Lisa vividly remembers something that happened with her new stepfather on the day of the wedding.

I remember his parents were there, and I remember his parents saying to me— so I think I had met them maybe once or twice. I didn't really know them at all. And I remember his— my step-grandmother saying to me, well, go over to your grandparents and congratulate them on this wedding. Now, she's saying this to a 5-year-old. What does a 5-year-old know? And I remember saying to her, why do I have to do that? I don't have to go congratulate my zayde, or that's what I used to call him. It's the Yiddish word for grandfather. You know, just sort of like, what? Don't tell me what to do.

Lisa's step-grandmother got upset. She smacked Lisa across the face. In time, Lisa would receive other messages that she was responsible for how people felt. Another incident took place a couple of years after the wedding.

It was a Saturday morning. I was probably 7 years old. I was watching cartoons, which is something I used to do on Saturday mornings with my sister. I had probably just finished some kind of sugary cereal, but I never really liked the sugary milk that was left over. So I put the bowl in the sink. And then I went off to my room to do whatever I was going to do. And my mother became very irritated that I had left a bowl in the sink instead of rinsing it out, that I had left it for her. And my stepfather became pretty enraged that I had upset my mother. This was a theme that was, you know, constant in my home, that I was responsible for my mother's emotions. And I had upset her, and he basically grounded me for a month. My grandfather was going to take me to the circus that afternoon, so I was grounded, so I couldn't go to the circus, which I'd been looking forward to for a really long time. And then he hit me with a belt, with the buckle of a belt.

Oh my God.

Which left welts. That was something that he didn't do all the time, but he sometimes did. And it left welts, you know, and marks on my skin that took a long time to heal.

And this is for leaving a bowl of milk in the sink?

Because it upset my— because my mother became irritated.

I mean, you must have burst into tears right then and there.

Absolutely. But you know what? You also learn to control your tears because your tears can make someone feel guilty for their own bad behavior, in which case, If you're being held responsible for their feelings, then you pay the price.

You've said a couple of times that your stepfather held you accountable for your mother's feelings. And you also just said that your stepfather might hold you accountable for his feelings. Talk about that idea for a moment. How did you pick up on the sense that you were responsible for how they felt?

Well, he would say it. He would say, you made your mother feel embarrassed. You made your mother— you embarrassed your mother. You made your mother angry. You made your mother sad. For example, when I was 12, you know, I lived in a Jewish area. My family is Jewish. Everyone was having bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. I personally wasn't because I didn't go to Hebrew school. We couldn't afford that. But everyone was going to bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. And it's not crazy like it is now where people are spending, you know, like $100,000 or whatever on these like Massive parties. But, you know, there was still a party that you had to go to and a present that you had to give, and you had to wear a dress and you needed shoes. And I didn't have dresses and I didn't have shoes. I had one pair of shoes and they weren't party shoes. And I remember I wrote a little note to my mother on a piece of paper and I decorated it with, you know, because I like to draw. So I decorated it with like All sorts of flowers and balloons and like party things. And I said, can I have a pair of party shoes? I slipped it under the door when she was in the bathroom. I honestly don't think that my mother would say to my stepfather, she made me feel this way. I think she would say, probably, I'm guessing, but knowing my mother the way that I do, I would expect that she would say, I feel bad that we don't have the money to buy her a pair of shoes.

Hmm.

And so, well, let's just say that I didn't go to any bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs for like a month, which made me very unpopular because I had already RSVP'd that I was going to these parties. And then at the last minute sort of had to cancel because I was grounded.

Wait, so your stepfather grounded you because you sent this note to your mother?

Yeah, like I slipped it under the door asking, can I please have a pair of party shoes? Yeah. The response was, you know, probably came like a day later. And it was swift and intense.

As you can tell, Lisa had a strained relationship with her stepfather. She was also something of an outlier in her family. She was the first to go to college and then to graduate school. But our story today is not about parent-child relationships, Or even about the particulars of Lisa's own childhood. The reason these stories are relevant to our episode today is because they illustrate an idea that is ubiquitous in all of our lives. You've probably had times in your own life when someone told you that you made them feel sad or angry or happy, that you were the cause of their emotions, that you were responsible for how they feel. You have surely felt this way about others, Someone cuts you off in traffic, and you say that the other driver made you upset. A friend brings over some food when you are sick, and you say your friend has comforted you. We say that a winning sports team has cheered us up and that a losing sports team has brought us down. It certainly feels as though our minds are taking in signals from the outside world and assembling our internal world. that our emotions are caused by the things that happen to us. But as Lisa went on to become a psychologist and neuroscientist, she was to discover that our feelings are not, in fact, responses to the world. They are really predictions about the world. She began to ask herself a question: What happens if we change those predictions? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When high school students start to learn to conduct experiments, their teachers usually tell them to start by repeating, or replicating, famous experiments from the past. The physicist Isaac Newton, for example, discovered a long time ago that heavier objects do not fall faster than lighter objects. All objects on Earth experience gravity, and this gravitational force is constant regardless of whether the object is heavy or light. When I was in high school, I remember teachers showing us how to replicate Newton's experiment using 2 balls of different weight that roll down an incline. When Lisa Feldman Barrett started working on her PhD, she decided to replicate some famous experiments. She was planning to become a clinician and help people suffering with anxiety and depression, but she also enjoyed doing research.

The theory that I was working with was something called self-discrepancy theory. there were a set of very simple experiments that had been published where people were just asked to list the attributes or properties of who they thought they were. I'm a nice person, I'm an honest person, I'm a complex person, I'm a whatever. And then the features of their ideal self. And then you can compute the similarity or dissimilarity, and then you can also— Ask people how they feel.

The idea was that if there were mismatches between how people described themselves and who they wanted to be, this would make people sad. As part of the experiment, Lisa had to ask people how they felt and carefully distinguish emotions like sadness from emotions like anxiety.

That's what I did in the first couple of studies, where I was asking people in different ways, or I was attempting to measure emotion in different ways. But I never— I was never able to replicate those experiments.

Lisa's volunteers seemed to have a hard time accurately classifying how they felt. As a graduate student, Lisa figured she had not run the experiment properly. She tried again and again and again.

Well, I thought, well, I must be doing something wrong. Maybe I'm not sampling properly, or maybe I'm sampling people at the wrong time of the semester.

After she failed for the 8th time, Lisa said, okay, I am clearly missing something here. What am I not getting?

I went back and I looked at the 8 experiments that had failed, and I realized, oh, actually, the reason why What they're failing was that when people are reporting how they feel— how much sadness do you feel? How hopeless do you feel? How depressed do you feel?— you're basically giving them a set of words, and you're asking them to describe their feelings. And you can do the same thing with anxiety. How anxious do you feel? How jittery do you feel? How fearful do you feel? And so on and so forth. And what I noticed was that when people were reporting that they were feeling intense sadness, they were also reporting that they were feeling intense anxiety. When people reported that they were feeling calm, they were also reporting that they were feeling happy. So what was happening here in these 8 studies is that people were reporting that they felt both— Sad and anxious, or that they felt neither of those emotions, that they felt calm and happy. Basically, people were using sadness and anxiety as synonyms for, I feel like crap. And this was happening across 8 different studies. And so I thought, well, that's the problem. The problem is that people are not reporting— accurately how they're feeling.

This was why the results of the studies were muddled. If people reported feeling sad when they really should have said they were feeling anxious, or vice versa, the researchers wouldn't be able to tell how mismatches between people's ideal selves and actual selves produce sadness.

If I want to measure emotion, I've got to find a way to measure how they actually feel, Then I'll be able to properly test the hypothesis of the self-discrepancy hypothesis. And maybe I might also figure out why is it that people are having trouble separating anxiety and sadness? Because everyone knows that anxiety and depression, sadness and fear, that these are different emotion categories. And I became just captivated and intrigued by this new problem that I had encountered.

In her 3rd year of graduate school, Lisa experienced something in her personal life that matched the experience of her volunteers.

There was someone at the university who, you know, kept asking me, Out for coffee or for dinner, I just didn't find this person very appealing, I guess. And I just wasn't really that interested. And I just ignored his his advances, so to speak, his interest. But he was persistent, you know. And so finally I thought, all right, well, I'm just gonna go out with him for coffee. We'll just have coffee and then. I'll tell him I don't wanna start a relationship. So we went out for coffee and we went to this place very close by the university that all the graduate students used to go to. And we're sitting there having coffee in this wonderful little Mediterranean restaurant. And I start to notice that like my cheeks are flushed, like I'm flushing and I'm a little warm and my heart was pounding a little harder than usual. And I was having a little trouble concentrating. And I thought, am I like attracted to this guy? Have I been wrong all this time? Maybe he is more interesting than I thought. Maybe I'm— I guess he's not that bad looking. And I guess he's sort of more interesting than I thought before. And gee, maybe I was wrong. And, you know, so by the end of the conversation, we're there for like 2 hours. And, you know, he asked like, can we see each other again? Can we have dinner? And I'm like, yeah, sure, let's have dinner. You know, for sure. Let's do it. Let's— and I start to walk back to the place where I'm living, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, so maybe there's something here. And, you know, you shouldn't believe your first impressions. I fumble for my keys, as I always do. I unlock the door, and then a wave of intense nausea just flares up. I drop my stuff on the floor. Slam the door, run to the bathroom, and let's just say spend some time, you know, what do they say, praying to the porcelain god, and then was in bed for a week with the flu.

What Lisa had thought was romantic attraction was not, in fact, romantic attraction. She had just been falling sick. How could anyone mix up these 2 very different things? If anything, this was an extreme form of what Lisa's volunteers had been doing in her 8 failed experiments. They had been mixing up anxiety and depression, or calmness and happiness. She was mixing up the signals of a viral infection and romantic attraction. But Lisa failed to draw the right implications from what had happened. She was still certain that people felt happy or sad or anxious or angry. They just had a hard time articulating what they felt. Her job as a scientist was to find an objective way to identify emotions. It took Lisa a long time, and well after she had graduated, to realize her data had been telling her a different story for a very long time.

It took me probably systematically about 10 years, maybe more, To come to the conclusion that there are no indicators, objective indicators for an emotion. An emotion word like anger isn't a thing. Anger isn't a thing. It's actually a category of highly variable instances. Sometimes when you're angry, you shout. Sometimes when you're angry, you laugh. Sometimes when you're angry, you cry. Sometimes when you're angry, you sit silently and plot the demise of your enemy. You know, sometimes you scowl. About half the time when people scowl, they're not angry. That's significant compared to chance, but it also means that 50% of the time, if you assume that when someone is scowling, they're angry, you're gonna be wrong. Anger or sadness or fear, whatever, when we refer to an emotion, we're really referring to an instance of a category. That's the first thing to understand. So when you look at someone and they're scowling, it could be that the person is angry. It could be that somebody just told them a really bad joke. It could be that they're concentrating really hard. It could be that they're experiencing, you know, a bad bout of gas. Any of those things, and also other states, could have produced that scowl on their face. And you have to make a guess based on your past experiences, about, you know, what that scowl means in this context.

Lisa ran an experiment that showed our ability to read emotions is heavily dependent on the context. Just like that garbled sentence at the top of the episode that made sense once you knew what I was saying, it is the context that helps us predict the emotions of others. In the study, Lisa and her colleagues had an actor portray the emotion in various scenarios. One scenario asked people to imagine that a coworker had caught them stealing and was going to tell the boss. The actor tried to depict the facial expression of someone trapped in that difficult situation. Lisa then brought in volunteers and showed them the photos of the actor. She asked the volunteers to guess what emotion the actor was portraying. For another group of volunteers, She provided the scenario the actor was trying to portray and asked the volunteers to guess the emotions of people caught up in that scenario. A third group of volunteers got both the scenario and the photos of the actor.

We compare people who rate the face alone to the people who rated the face in the context, right, to people who rate the context alone. So we can ask the question, what is driving people's perceptions? Is it the expression on the face? Is it the context, or is it some combination? And the answer is, it's mostly the context. The context always trumps the actual facial movements when you're asking the question about how is a perceiver experiencing a person's face. There's no inherent meaning in the face. The signals in the face are not inherently meaningful as emotion. The context is creating the meaning, basically, for what those facial movements mean.

Lisa had an epiphany. If the context is what helps us read the emotions of others, is it possible that it is the context that also shapes how we read our own emotions? She thought back to the story of her bad date. When she thought about it again, she realized that the interpretation of her emotion completely depended on the context.

The more accurate way that I would describe what happened is that my brain made sense of those physical signals coming from the body as attraction. You know, your brain is trapped inside a dark, silent box called your skull, and it's receiving signals from your body. You have sensory surfaces all over your body, in your retina, in each eye, the cochlea in each ear, your skin. You have sensory surfaces inside your body for glucose, for temperature. Your brain is constantly receiving sensory signals from the sensory surfaces of your body. That inform the brain of the changes in the body and in the world, but the brain doesn't know the causes. It only knows the signals themselves, which are the outcomes. And this is what philosophers call an inverse problem. So your brain is constantly having to solve an inverse problem. It has to guess at the meaning of the causes of those signals. And even when your brain guesses wrong, Those guesses become your experience, basically. So what my brain did during that coffee was take these sensory signals, which were being caused by a pathogen, biologically speaking, in my body, but my brain didn't know about that pathogen. It just knew the outcomes of the pathogen, which were the signals. So I think authentically I felt romantic attraction in that moment. It's just that the biological cause was different than what it might've been at other times. That's how I would understand what happened now.

When you went on that date with your fellow graduate student, you'd had previously experiences of what it's like to have coffee with someone you were attracted to. You sort of knew what your face being flushed could mean, and you knew what a flutter in your heart could mean. And in some ways, as you're sitting there having coffee with this other person, your brain in some ways is saying, where have these things happened to me before? What is the context that makes sense here? And your brain is trying to make sense of what these signals coming in are actually telling you.

Yes, exactly. That's exactly right. And each guess, each prediction, isn't weighed equally, right? There's a prior probability. There's some increased chance that one predictive context, one story, is going to be more likely than another, and so your brain is weighing those.

Yeah, and if you hadn't gone on the date that day, if your face had just felt flushed, and your heart felt like it was fluttering, and your and you felt a little uncomfortable, and you just happened to be in your lab, you wouldn't have drawn the conclusion, oh, I'm attracted to someone. You might well have drawn the conclusion, something's wrong. I think I might be feeling ill.

Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly right. If I had been out for a run, and I was feeling flushed, I would experience it as fatigue, and that I need to have a glass of water, or a chocolate muffin. I don't know. But there were other stories that my brain could have told. I would say that to me, what the evidence suggests is the following: that emotions aren't built into your brain, they're built by your brain in the moment as needed, and the specificity or granularity with which an emotion is built depends on what past experiences your brain is bringing to bear. to predict and make sense of the incoming sensory signals from the body and from the world.

Our feelings turn out to be predictions about the world, not reactions to it. They are ways our brains prepare us for action. When you hear footsteps coming up quickly behind you in a dark alley, Your brain is making a prediction that you might need to run away, and you feel fear. When your child cuddles up next to you on the couch, your brain predicts it will experience warmth and love, and you reach out to give your child a hug. Most of the time, of course, our emotions don't feel like predictions. But there are times when we can actually see the predictive machinery in action.

So, Let's say you hear a loud bang. What could that loud bang be?

It could be a firecracker, it could be a car backfiring, it could be a gunshot, it could be any number of different things.

Exactly. And what do you do when it's a firecracker versus a car backfiring versus a gunshot? You do very different things.

Right.

So when a brain asks a question, it's a question of, what do I need to do next? To keep myself alive? That's the question that the brain is always asking. What do I have to do? But the interesting thing here is that for the most part, brains are not reacting to the world. The brain doesn't hear a sound and then say, what is that? What the brain is doing is predicting. It's predicting all the time what actions will be required in the next instance, And what sensory signals will be arriving in the next instant, and then it compares those predictions to the incoming sense data. So the sensory signals from the body, from your eyes and your ears and your skin and your nose and all the surfaces inside your body, are not stimuli. They're signals that either confirm predictions— Or that change them.

You know, I was in Orlando, Florida some time ago, and I was sitting in my hotel room in the evening, and I heard some booms, you know, loud noises. And for a minute, I was like, what are those noises? What could they be? And then I remembered, of course, that I was at a resort in Disney World. I was there giving a talk. And I said, it's Disney World. So it's evening. And every day at the end of the day, Disney World celebrates the end of the day with a fireworks display. So I rushed to the window, threw open the blinds, and got to watch the fireworks for a little while. But this process where you hear the booms, you're trying to figure out what it is. You're trying to make sense. I'm taking into account the fact that I'm in Orlando. I'm at Disney World. That changes the meaning of the booms that I'm hearing. And my brain essentially has made a prediction of saying— these booms are probably not someone opening fire on you. These booms are fireworks, and you should rush to the window to get a glimpse of them.

Exactly. And in fact, if you read reports of people who have actually been in situations where there is gunfire, at first, they don't know what's happening. They can't tell necessarily that what they're hearing is a gun, and then When they realize it's a gun, they can't tell necessarily if it's friend or foe. It's not a situation that we're in frequently because most of the time we're not sitting around wondering, what is that flash of light? What is that chemical change? What is that? You know, most of the time our brains are predicting pretty well. But there are these moments where, you know, a brain makes itself aware of having to guess.

Most of the time, our predictions don't feel like predictions. When I reach for the mug on the desk in front of me, it feels as though I am looking at the mug and directing my fingers to grasp the handle. But what is really happening is that I have reached for my mug so many hundreds of times that my brain can precisely predict the size, weight, and location of the mug. It can predict how I will raise the mug to my lips and what my tea is going to taste like. It still uses visual signals from my eyes, tactile signals from my fingers, and the taste signals from my tongue, but only to fine-tune its predictions. If I have forgotten to add sugar to my tea, my taste buds will inform my brain that its prediction of the taste of the tea was off. It will make me add some sugar. Why do all this predicting instead of simply painting a picture of the world from the signals coming into the brain? Since most of what most of us do most of the time involves things we have done before, Lisa says it would be metabolically inefficient to process everything as if it were happening for the first time.

The most effective way to run a system is to predict the state of the system and correct when necessary. It's not to wait and react to things. Reaction is more expensive metabolically than prediction, and a major selection pressure on a species, but also on an individual, like an individual's ability, for example, to remain healthy and to be able to reproduce, pass its genes on to the next generation, is metabolic fitness, metabolic efficiency. This is a— You know, in psychology, we don't experience every hug we give, every emotion we experience, every thought we have, you know, every insult we bear. We don't experience these things in metabolic terms. We experience them in psychological terms, but there's always a metabolic cost because there's always electrical and chemical signaling going on underneath the hood. And it turns out that the metabolic cost of signaling is a major, major concern that any organism system has to deal with.

When I'm in the hotel room and I hear a loud bang, my brain quickly asks itself a few questions. Are these booms taking place in a war zone or a holiday resort? Second, it asks, where have I seen or heard this before? Third, and perhaps most important, It asks, what do I need to do?

So the brain is basically creating prediction signals that are fundamentally, fundamentally, they start not as your experience of the world, but as your actions in the world. So every prediction signal starts as a plan for regulating the body. And then the signals come in that either confirm those predictions or change them if there's anything that's unexpected, and in psychology we have a fancy name for that. We call it learning. That's what learning is, and the goal from this predictive perspective, the goal is to predict better and more efficiently the next time, right? Because The bottom line is no matter what kind of goals we sort of think about that the brain creates for itself that are psychological, the metabolic goal is metabolic efficiency.

Lisa has run many scientific experiments to spot the brain's predilection for prediction. But many years ago, she got a chance to see it in her personal life when she threw her daughter an unorthodox birthday party.

When my daughter was 12, we threw her a disgust party. We had a bunch of activities that would make the children kind of exuberantly and joyfully disgusted.

Mm-hmm.

You know, I made pizza and I put green food coloring on the Parmesan cheese and I made it look fuzzy like mold. And I made vomit Jell-O. So I took peach-colored Jell-O and I put little bits of vegetables in it. And I'm actually— my stomach is roiling just even talking about it. And we took white grape juice and we put it in urine cups.

Oh my God.

And the goal here was to get the kids simulating predicting, if you will, disgust, things that are very distasteful, but that they would find it really fun to do this. And they did. I mean, they were shrieking in pleasure. It was a joy to behold.

Mm-hmm.

First of all, it demonstrates that prediction signals are not these abstract They are the brain changing the firing of its own neurons to begin to construct an experience before all the information is in from the environment. I mean, I have to tell you that I knew what I was doing, and as I was pouring the grape juice into the urine cups, I'm telling you, it smelled like pee. Like, it just— there was a whiff of pee that I could smell. And Basically, your brain is predicting, and those predictions are real signals that construct sensory experience.

When we come back, how Lisa's research can help all of us take back control of our emotions. You're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, because scaling your business model isn't a set-it-and-forget-it thing. You want to test, iterate, and launch new pricing plans constantly. With Stripe Billing, you can easily experiment with new subscriptions and launch new usage-based and hybrid pricing models so your revenue model can change as fast as your product and market fit evolve. Reach new customers, expand globally, and keep revenue operations ready for whatever comes next. Stripe Billing powers any business model. It's built to support you no matter how much you scale, with a network powering more than 1.6% of global GDP, And the partner of choice for 86% of Forbes AI50 companies that have monetized to date. Learn how you can power any business model at stripe.com/billing. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from U.S. Bank. With a U.S. Bank Smartly Visa Signature Card, you earn an unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. No quarterly activations, no categories to track, just unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. Visit usbank.com/smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions may apply. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett is the author of the book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. In it, she makes the case that emotions are constructed by the brain as it sits inside the cage of the skull and tries to guess the meaning of the electrical signals flooding in from the eyes and ears and skin. But if emotions are predictions that are designed to guide our behavior, Lisa says we can exercise more control over those predictions than we realize. When Lisa's daughter was a toddler, she would throw tantrums. Lisa decided to help her daughter see that bad moods were really predictions and that she could choose to make different predictions. When it came to fighting a tantrum, that involved making a new prediction about a cranky fairy.

I wanted to give her other options for how to experience this mood. So I invented the cranky fairy. When she would start to feel cranky or crabby, it meant that the cranky fairy was coming to visit. And then whenever she would feel the cranky fairy preparing to make a visit, we gave her a special chair, an Elmo chair, a chair that was like, was like a little Elmo character from Sesame Street, and that she could go to and sit in the chair when the cranky fairy was visiting and sort of vanquish the cranky fairy from her life for that day. And over time, what happened was she would actually march herself to the chair when she felt like she was going to lose control and have a tantrum, and she would sit in that chair And, you know, she might look at a book or she might play with some plastic animals or she might— but basically she was teaching herself how to regulate her own behavior. And so these stories wove together to, you know, give her options, other options than just making emotions, negative emotions out of the sensations that she was experiencing.

But there's a larger lesson in this for all of us, not just for 2-year-olds, which is that when we experience emotions, those emotions in some ways, as you're pointing out, are predictions about what the world is like, what we should be feeling, how we should be responding. But those are predictions. And in exactly the same way that you taught your daughter to, in some ways, create a different social reality, we have some control over our emotions in ways that many of us might not realize.

Exactly. And, you know, none of us have as much control as we would like, and gaining control is a little harder than anyone might want. But if a 3-year-old can do it, then anybody can do it.

Mm-hmm.

And the point here is that we created a context for her to rewire her brain in a sense, right? She, she could take advantage of the situation to give herself new experiences That the brain would learn so that her brain would predict later in a different way. So at first, she would sit in the chair after she had a tantrum, and then she would sit in the chair, you know, right before she was having a tantrum. And then she might go sit in the chair, you know, even when, you know, the situation might in 10 or 15 minutes prompt a tantrum. She was able to practice this skill. And it was hard at first, but it's just like driving, basically. It's hard at first. It takes a lot of energy. It's an investment in being a better you in the future.

There's another important insight that you are raising here, Lisa, which is that when we experience emotions, if we start to see them as predictions about the world, one thing we might do is instead of simply following our emotions, we might actually be curious about them. What is causing me to feel this way? What are the factors that might be driving this? So in other words, you're sitting across someone at a coffee shop, and your face feels flushed. Instead of automatically saying, I'm attracted to this person, you could say, what might be the different reasons my face is flushed?

Exactly. And curiosity is really, I think, underrated and undervalued in our culture, particularly at this particular moment in time. So this is something that works when you are really, even in the throes of great difficulty, you can become curious instead of becoming confident that you know what the cause is of a set of sensations. So a perfect example of this was when my daughter was 12, she was testing for her black belt in karate. She was barely 5 feet tall and she was going to have to spar, that is fight, with these 6-foot hulking adolescent boys in order to get her black belt. Her sensei, who was this 10th-degree black belt, this guy could break a board by looking at it, sort of saunters up to her and he crosses his arms and he says, Get your butterflies flying in formation. And I thought, that is brilliant, because he's not saying be calm, because she needs that arousal in order to perform, in order to do the test. But he gave her a different meaning for it, and therefore, she had a different set of actions that were available to her.

Hmm. You make the point in the book that one of the things the brain does is that it is very carefully calibrating how much energy it's using And making predictions about how much energy it needs. And many of our mood states, in fact, are the brain's predictions about what is coming and how much it has by way of stored energy. What are the implications here for ordinary people, Lisa, with this idea, especially when it comes to things like food and exercise and sleep? You know, when we think about our well-being, what does your science say about those things that everyone struggles with?

Evolution tells us very clearly that the brain's most important job is coordinating and regulating the body in the most metabolically efficient way. And you put it beautifully, that the brain is always attempting to predict what its energy needs will be in the next moment, because that's the most efficient way to run a body. Brains regulate the body, the energetic needs of the body, by anticipating those needs and attempting to meet those needs before they arise. The metaphor that I often use for the brain's regulation of the body is that the brain is running a budget for the body. So the technical term for the predictive regulation of the body is allostasis, but the metaphor is body budgeting. Your brain is running a budget for your body. It's not budgeting money, it's budgeting glucose and salt and oxygen and so on. Depression is like a bankrupt body budget. It's basically your brain is attempting to reduce its costs, and in doing this, it will create fatigue, which will lead you to move less. So that's a reduction in cost. The brain is like, trapped in it, in its predictions. It's not going to update. It's not going to learn from prediction error because learning is metabolically expensive. So even if there are pleasant things, like things in the world that could lead you to experience pleasure, you won't pay attention to them and you won't learn about them. You won't take advantage of them because it's just too expensive. So basically, the brain is trapped in these predictions that will lead to more unpleasant or continuing unpleasant mood. So when you feel stressed, it's because your brain has predicted that a big metabolic outlay is going to be necessary in the next moment. So like when you're being criticized by someone, or when someone is bullying you, or when you're having conflicts with people, and so on. And then if you add to that, maybe not getting enough sleep, or maybe not eating healthfully, or not exercising on a regular basis, what happens is that your brain becomes less and less and less able to efficiently regulate the body, And that, you will experience that as negative mood. You will experience that as fatigue or distress. And typically, we have psychological explanations. You know, when you feel bad, you look to the world to figure out what's wrong with the world. And if you can't figure out what's wrong with the world, you assume there's something wrong with you. Actually, it could just be that there is a metabolic answer to your negative mood.

Do you feel like you have used these ideas? I mean, the ideas that you have about the brain as a prediction machine, do you feel like you use these ideas yourself, Lisa, in your life? Do you feel like you stop yourself sometimes when you've jumped to a conclusion about something and sort of say, is this really how the world is, or is it just a prediction I'm making?

Every day, all the time. I didn't come to these scientific insights for the purpose of using them in my own life, but I absolutely do. And here are 2 that I find really useful. One is from my husband, actually, which is, other people's opinions of you are merely electrical activity in their brains.

I love that.

Yeah, it's really useful in faculty meetings. The other one is, this is from Buddhist philosophy, which is anger is a form of ignorance. It prompts you to be curious about why someone is doing something that you might not like and that you might find even offensive, but they have a reason for doing it. And if you try to take their perspective for a minute, you still might not like it, but you won't be angry. It just turns down the dial on the intensity of your discomfort in, in a way that I find to be really productive.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist at Northeastern University. She's the author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and 7½ Lessons About the Brain. Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoy the show and want more of our work, please join Hidden Brain Plus, our podcast subscription on Apple Podcasts. Hidden Brain Plus is a great way to support the show and get access to exclusive conversations you won't hear anywhere else. You can find it by searching for Hidden Brain on the Apple Podcasts app or by going to apple.com/hiddenbrainplus. Thanks for listening.

That's right. That's right.

And you can find out more at nebula.co/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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