Lisa Feldman Barrett Quotes

Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.

An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.

It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.

Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.

Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions

The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don't load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it.

Instead think, “We have a disagreement,” and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.

The word “smile” doesn’t even exist in Latin or Ancient Greek. Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages, and broad, toothy-mouthed smiles (with crinkling at the eyes, named the Duchenne smile by Ekman) became popular only in the eighteenth century as dentistry became more accessible and affordable.

Sometimes we're responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them.

But one thing is certain: every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view. To believe otherwise is a fiction that is not supported by the architecture of the brain.

You are continually cultivating your past as a means of controlling your future

Our words allow us to enter each other’s affective niches, even at extremely long distances. You can regulate your friend’s body budget (and he yours) even if you are an ocean apart—by phone or email or even just by thinking about one another.

Your brain is not more evolved than a rat or lizard brain, just differently evolved.

Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It’s a huge, ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act.

Brains of higher complexity can remember more. A brain doesn’t store memories like files in a computer​—​it reconstructs them on demand with electricity and swirling chemicals. We call this process remembering but it’s really assembling.

Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.

The triune brain idea is one of the most successful and widespread errors in all of science.

One illusory stripe of a rainbow contains an infinite number of frequencies, but your concepts for “Red,” “Blue,” and other colors cause your brain to ignore the variability.

Your body-budgeting regions can therefore trick your brain into believing that there is tissue damage, regardless of what is happening in your body. So, when you’re feeling unpleasant, your joints and muscles might hurt more, or you could develop a stomachache. When your body budget’s not in shape, meaning your interoceptive predictions are miscalibrated, your back might hurt more, or your headache might pound harder—not because you have tissue damage but because your nerves are talking back and forth. This is not imaginary pain. It is real.

I’ve said several times that the brain acts like a scientist. It forms hypotheses through prediction and tests them against the “data” of sensory input. It corrects its predictions by way of prediction error, like a scientist adjusts his or her hypotheses in the face of contrary evidence. When the brain’s predictions match the sensory input, this constitutes a model of the world in that instant, just like a scientist judges that a correct hypothesis is the path to scientific certainty.

But evolution has provided the human mind with the ability to create another kind of real, one that is completely dependent on human observers. From changes in air pressure, we construct sounds. From wavelengths of light, we construct colors. From baked goods, we construct cupcakes and muffins that are indistinguishable except by name (chapter 2). Just get a couple of people to agree that something is real and give it a name, and they create reality. All humans with a normally functioning brain have the potential for this little bit of magic, and we use it all the time.

The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human. This situation leads us to a fundamental dilemma of the human condition.

When you categorize something as “Not About Me,” it exits your affective niche and has less impact on your body budget. Similarly, when you are successful and feel proud, honored, or gratified, take a step back and remember that these pleasant emotions are entirely the result of social reality, reinforcing your fictional self. Celebrate your achievements but don’t let them become golden handcuffs. A little composure goes a long way.

Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your

Think of the last time you were thirsty and drank a glass of water. Within seconds after draining the last drops, you probably felt less thirsty. This event might seem ordinary, but water actually takes about twenty minutes to reach your bloodstream. Water can't possibly quench your thirst in a few seconds. So what relieved your thirst? Prediction.

variation is the norm. Emotion fingerprints are a myth.

The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, tells a story that doesn’t match your daily life—your brain invisibly constructs everything you experience, including emotions.

Affect is your brain’s best guess about the state of your body budget.

In short, your brain’s most important job is not thinking. It’s running a little worm body that has become very, very complicated.

Social reality is an incredible gift. You can simply make stuff up, like a meme or a tradition or a law, and if other people treat it as real, it becomes real. Our social world is a buffer we build around the physical world. The author Lynda Barry writes, “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.

The Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman called your experiences “the remembered present.” Today, thanks to advances in neuroscience, we can see that Edelman was correct. An instance of a concept, as an entire brain state, is an anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and what your sensations mean.12

You can challenge the beliefs that you were swaddled in as a child. You can change your own niche. Your actions today become your brain’s predictions for tomorrow, and those predictions automatically drive your future actions. Therefore, you have some freedom to hone your predictions in new directions, and you have some responsibility for the results.

As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in her book How Emotions Are Made, “You may think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” People who are scared take in a scene differently. Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech. Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision. A feeling of happiness, by contrast, widens our peripheral vision. A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place.

Perceptions of emotion are guesses, and they’re “correct” only when they match the other person’s experience; that is, both people agree on which concept to apply. Anytime you think you know how someone else feels, your confidence has nothing to do with actual knowledge. You’re just having a moment of affective realism.

If you want to gain mastery at perceiving other people’s emotional experiences, you must let go of this essentialist assumption.

Due process was about avoiding procedural errors in rendering a decision of guilt or innocence, not about the validity of the decision itself.

Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts.

A brain network is not a metaphor, as I mentioned earlier; it’s the best scientific description of a brain today.

An organization called Seeds of Peace tries to change predictions by bringing together young people from cultures that are in serious conflict,

Every experience you construct is an investment, so invest wisely. Cultivate the experiences you want to construct again in the future.

So, what’s happening in your brain when you categorize? You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them.

Let’s just say that one thing you’re born with is a fundamental ability to learn from regularities and probabilities around you.

We have more control over reality than we might think. We also have more responsibility for reality than we might realize.

A superpower works best when you know you have it.

Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. They are perceiver-dependent categories.

By the 1990s, experts had completely rejected the idea of a three-layered brain. It simply didn’t hold up when they analyzed neurons with more sophisticated tools.

Just get a couple of people to agree that something is real and give it a name, and they create reality

But when you try, really try, to embody someone else’s point of view, you can change your future predictions about the people who hold those different views.

Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.

This is another basis for my frequent claim, “You are an architect of your experience.” You are indeed partly responsible for your actions, even so-called emotional reactions that you experience as out of your control. It is your responsibility to learn concepts that, through prediction, steer you away from harmful actions. You also bear some responsibility for others, because your actions shape other people’s concepts and behaviors, creating the environment that turns genes on and off to wire their brains, including the brains of the next generation. Social reality implies that we are all partly responsible for one another’s behavior, not in a fluffy, let’s-all-blame-society sort of way, but a very real brain-wiring way.

The concept of “Emotion” itself is an invention of the seventeenth century. Before that, scholars wrote about passions, sentiments, and other concepts that had somewhat different meanings.

When I say responsibility, I'm not saying that people are to blame for the tragedies in their lives or the hardships they experience as a result. I'm also not saying that people with depression, anxiety, or other serious illnesses are to blame for their suffering. I'm saying something else: Sometimes we're responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them.

Western culture has some common wisdom associated with these ideas. Don’t be materialistic. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Sticks and stones. But I am asking you to take this one step further. When you are suffering from some ill or insult that has befallen you, ask yourself: Are you really in jeopardy here? Or is this so-called injury merely threatening the social reality of your self ? The answer will help you recategorize your pounding heartbeat, the knot in the pit of your stomach, and your sweaty brow as purely physical sensations, leaving your worry, anger, and dejection to dissolve like an antacid tablet in water.40

Perhaps the easiest way to gain concepts is to learn new words. You’ve probably never thought about learning words as a path to greater emotional health, but it follows directly from the neuroscience of construction.

It is actually a policy issue relevant to the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to free speech. The First Amendment was founded on the notion that free speech produces a war of ideas, allowing truth to prevail. However, its authors did not know that culture wires the brain. Ideas get under your skin, simply by sticking around for long enough. Once an idea is hardwired, you might not be in a position to easily reject it.

Today, many of us feel like we live in a highly polarized world, where people with opposing opinions cannot even be civil to each other. If you want things to be different, I offer you a challenge. Pick a controversial political issue that you feel strongly about. […] Spend five minutes per day deliberately considering the issue from the perspective of those you disagree with, not to have an argument with them in your head, but to understand how someone who’s just as smart as you can believe the opposite of what you do. I’m not asking you to change your mind. I’m also not saying this challenge is easy. It requires a withdrawal from your body budget, and it might feel pretty unpleasant or even pointless. But when you try, really try, to embody someone else’s point of view, you can change your future predictions about the people who hold those different views. If you can honestly say, “I absolutely disagree with those people, but I can understand why they believe what they do”, you’re one step closer to a less polarized world. That is not magical liberal academic rubbish. It’s a strategy that comes from basic science about your predicting brain.

growing number of cognitive neuroscientists, social psychologists, and neurologists speculate that the default mode network has a general function: it allows you to simulate how the world might be different from the way it is right now.

implies that your place in society is shaped by your genes. Therefore, if you are smarter, faster, or more powerful than others, you can justifiably succeed where others cannot. People get what they deserve and they deserve what they get.

As our society makes decisions about health care, the law, public policy, and education, we can ignore our socially dependent nervous systems, or we can take them seriously. These discussions may be difficult, but avoiding them is worse. Our biology won’t just go away.

Some scientists refer to the control network as an “emotion regulation” network. They assume that emotion regulation is a cognitive process that exists separately from emotion itself, say, when you’re pissed off at your boss but refrain from punching him. From the brain’s perspective, however, regulation is just categorization. When you have an experience that feels like your so-called rational side is tempering your emotional side—a mythical arrangement that you’ve learned is not respected by brain wiring—you are constructing an instance of the concept “Emotion Regulation.”19

that adds 104 calories to the meal. If this happens daily, that’s eleven pounds gained per year! Not only that, but if you eat healthful, saturated fats, such as those found in nuts, within one day of being stressed, your body metabolizes these foods as if they were filled with bad fats. I’m

A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.

Next, I called neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made. She told me that our bodies have a limited number of metabolic resources. We need a certain amount of sleep and water and nourishment in order to think, to learn new things, to produce the correct hormones. If we don’t get all of those things, our bodies are “running at a deficit.” But we don’t often understand what deficits we’re running at. We are not like The Sims, where we can see our hunger and rest and boredom levels represented as little progress bars at the bottom of the screenBarrett said that when we’re dehydrated, we don’t feel thirsty—we feel exhausted. When we have something odd happening in our stomach, our body doesn’t quite know if we have a menstrual cramp or a stomachache or if we need to poop. We might not even be aware for a long period of time that our stomach hurts. And this isn’t unique to people with PTSD. It’s normal, everyday bodily dissociation that we all suffer from. If we find ourselves in a shitty mood, we might not necessarily be mad about a certain trigger. We could just be running at a metabolic deficit. Our body might be screaming “I NEED FUNYUNS,” while we project our hangriness on, say, this poor sweaty schmuck who’s breathing too loud in the elevator.

Social reality is not just about words—it gets under your skin. If you perceive the same baked good as a decadent “cupcake” or a healthful “muffin,” research suggests that your body metabolizes it differently. Likewise, the words and concepts of your culture help to shape your brain wiring and your physical changes during emotion.24

So you don’t have an inner lizard or an emotional beast-brain. There is no such thing as a limbic system dedicated to emotions. And your misnamed neocortex is not a new part; many other vertebrates grow the same neurons that, in some animals, organize into a cerebral cortex if key stages run for long enough. Anything you read or hear that proclaims the human neocortex, cerebral cortex, or prefrontal cortex to be the root of rationality, or says that the frontal lobe regulates so-called emotional brain areas to keep irrational behavior in check, is simply outdated or woefully incomplete. The triune brain idea and its epic battle between emotion, instinct, and rationality is a modern myth.

I developed an awe-inspired concept of being enveloped within nature and feeling like a tiny speck. This concept helps me change my body budget whenever I want. I can notice a tiny weed forcing its way through a crack in the sidewalk, proving yet again that nature cannot be tamed by civilization, and employ the same concept to take comfort in my insignificance.

We already have intriguing evidence that some types of chronic pain work by prediction. Animals who have stress or injury early in life become more likely to develop persistent pain. Human infants who have surgery are more likely to have heightened pain in later childhood. (Incredibly, infants prior to the 1980s were routinely not anesthetized during major surgery, on the belief that they couldn’t feel pain!)

When you are suffering from some ill or insult that has befallen you, ask yourself: Are you really in jeopardy here? Or is this so-called injury merely threatening the social reality of your self ? The answer will help you recategorize your pounding heartbeat, the knot in the pit of your stomach, and your sweaty brow as purely physical sensations, leaving your worry, anger, and dejection to dissolve like an antacid tablet in water.40

Spend five minutes per day deliberately considering the issue from the perspective of those you disagree with, not to have an argument with them in your head, but to understand how someone who’s just as smart as you can believe the opposite of what you do. I’m not asking you to change your mind. I’m also not saying this challenge is easy. It requires a withdrawal from your body budget, and it might feel pretty unpleasant or even pointless. But when you try, really try, to embody someone else’s point of view, you can change your future predictions about the people who hold those different views. If you can honestly say, “I absolutely disagree with those people, but I can understand why they believe what they do,” you’re one step closer to a less polarized world. This is not magical liberal academic rubbish. It’s a strategy that comes from basic science about your predicting brain.

The thing is, a bad feeling doesn’t always mean something is wrong. It just means you’re taxing your body budget. When people exercise to the point of labored breathing, for example, they feel tired and crappy well before they run out of energy. When people solve math problems and perform difficult feats of memory, they can feel hopeless and miserable, even when they are performing well. Any graduate student of mine who never feels distress is clearly doing something wrong.

You’ve already learned that you see what your brain believes—that’s affective realism. Now you know the same is true for most feelings you’ve experienced in your life. Even the feeling of the pulse in your wrist is a simulation, constructed in sensory regions of your brain and corrected by sensory input (your actual pulse). Everything you feel is based on prediction from your knowledge and past experience. You are truly an architect of your experience. Believing is feeling.

Diving into a compelling novel is also healthful for your body budget. This is more than mere escapism; when you get involved in someone else’s story, you aren’t as involved in your own. Such mental excursions engage part of your interoceptive network, known as the default mode network, and keep you from ruminating (which would be bad for the budget). If you are not a reader, see a compelling film. If the story is sad, have a good cry, which is also beneficial to the budget.8

Your brain is shaped by the realities of the world that you find yourself in, including the social world made by agreement among people. Your mind is a grand collaboration that you have no awareness of. Through construction, you perceive the world not in any objectively accurate sense but through the lens of your own needs, goals, and prior experience (as you did with the blobby bee). And you are not the pinnacle of evolution, just a very interesting sort of animal with some unique abilities.

I can notice a tiny weed forcing its way through a crack in the sidewalk, proving yet again that nature cannot be tamed by civilization, and employ the same concept to take comfort in my insignificance.43 You can experience similar awe when hearing ocean waves crash against rocks on a beach, gazing at the stars, walking under storm clouds in the middle of the day, hiking deep into uncharted territory, or taking part in spiritual ceremonies. People who report feeling awe more frequently also have the lowest levels of those nasty cytokines that cause inflammation (though nobody has proved cause and effect).44 Whether you cultivate awe, meditate, or find other ways to deconstruct your experience into physical sensations, recategorization is a critical tool for mastering your emotions in the moment. When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus, rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal. Your feelings might just be noise. You might just need some sleep.

That’s what the history books say . . . but history books are written by the victors. The official history of emotion research, from Darwin to James to behaviorism to salvation, is a byproduct of the classical view. In reality, the alleged dark ages included an outpouring of research demonstrating that emotion essences don’t exist. Yes, the same kind of counterevidence that we saw in chapter 1 was discovered seventy years earlier . . . and then forgotten. As a result, massive amounts of time and money are being wasted today in a redundant search for fingerprints of emotion.

My point is that bias is not advertised by a glowing sign worn around jurors’ necks; we are all guilty of it, because the brain is wired for us to see what we believe, and it usually happens outside of everyone’s awareness. Affective realism decimates the ideal of the impartial juror. Want to increase the likelihood of a conviction in a murder trial? Show the jury some gruesome photographic evidence. Tip their body budgets out of balance and chances are they’ll attribute their unpleasant affect to the defendant: “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.” Or permit family members of the deceased to describe how the crime has hurt them, a practice known as a victim impact statement, and the jury will tend to recommend more severe punishments. Crank up the emotional impact of a victim impact statement by recording it professionally on video and adding music and narration like a dramatic film, and you’ve got the makings of a jury-swaying masterpiece.45 Affective realism intertwines with the law outside the courtroom as well. Imagine that you are enjoying a quiet evening at home when suddenly you hear loud banging outside. You look out the window and see an African American man attempting to force open the door of a nearby house. Being a dutiful citizen, you call 911, and the police arrive and arrest the perpetrator. Congratulations, you have just brought about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as it happened on July 16, 2009. Gates was trying to force open the front door of his own home, which had become stuck while he was traveling. Affective realism strikes again. The real-life eyewitness in this incident had an affective feeling, presumably based on her concepts about crime and skin color, and made a mental inference that the man outside the window had intent to commit a crime.

The distinction between “real in nature” versus “illusory” is a false dichotomy. Fear and anger are real to a group of people who agree that certain changes in the body, on the face, and so on, are meaningful as emotions. In other words, emotion concepts have social reality. They exist in your human mind that is conjured in your human brain, which is part of nature. The biological processes of categorization, which are rooted in physical reality and are observable in the brain and body, create socially real categories. Folk concepts like “fear” and “anger” are not mere words to be discarded from scientific thought but play a critical role in the story of how the brain creates emotion.

Judges infer all sorts of negative personality characteristics in angry female rape victims that they tend not to attribute to angry male crime victims. When a woman has been raped, for instance, judges (and juries and the police) expect to see her express grief on the witness stand, which tends to bring the rapist a heavier sentence. When a female victim expresses anger, judges evaluate her negatively. These judges are falling prey to another version of the “angry bitch” phenomenon. When people perceive emotion in a man, they usually attribute it to his situation, but when they perceive emotion in a woman, they connect it to her personality. She’s a bitch, but he’s just having a bad day.

To make meaning is to go beyond the information given. A fast-beating heart has a physical function, such as getting enough oxygen to your limbs so you can run, but categorization allows it to become an emotional experience such as happiness or fear, giving it additional meaning and functions understood within your culture. When you experience affect with unpleasant valence and high arousal, you make meaning from it depending on how you categorize: Is it an emotional instance of fear? A physical instance of too much caffeine? A perception that the guy talking to you is a jerk? Categorization bestows new functions on biological signals, not by virtue of their physical nature but by virtue of your knowledge and the context

A similar bout of affective realism gave birth to Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law. This law permits the use of deadly force in self-defense if you reasonably believe you’re in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm. A real-life incident was the catalyst for the law, but not in the way that you might think. Here’s how the story is usually told: In 2004, an elderly couple was asleep in their trailer home in Florida. An intruder tried to break in, so the husband, James Workman, grabbed a gun and shot him. Now here’s the true, tragic backstory: Workman’s trailer was in a hurricane-damaged area, and the man he shot was an employee of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The victim, Rodney Cox, was African American; Workman is white. Workman, mostly likely under the influence of affective realism, perceived that Cox meant him harm and opened fire on an innocent man. Nevertheless, the inaccurate first story became a primary justification for Florida’s law.47

When you create social reality but fail to realize it, the result is a mess. Many psychologists, for example, do not realize that every psychological concept is social reality. We debate the differences between “will power” and “tenacity” and “grit” as if they were each distinct in nature, rather than constructions shared through collective intentionality. We separate “emotion,” “emotion regulation,” “self-regulation,” “memory,” “imagination,” “perception,” and scores of other mental categories, all of which can be explained as emerging from interoception and sensory input from the world, made meaningful by categorization, with assistance from the control network. These concepts are clearly social reality because not all cultures have them, whereas the brain is the brain is the brain. So, as a field, psychology keeps rediscovering the same phenomena and giving them new names and searching for them in new places in the brain. That’s why we have a hundred concepts for “the self.” Even brain networks themselves go by multiple names. The default mode network, which is part of the interoceptive network, has more aliases than Sherlock Holmes.

Anger is stereotypically normal for men because they are supposed to be aggressors. Women are supposed to be victims, and good victims shouldn’t become angry; they’re supposed to be afraid. Women are punished for expressing anger—they lose respect, pay, and perhaps even their jobs. Whenever I see a savvy male politician play the “angry bitch card” against a female opponent, I take it as an ironic sign that she must be really competent and powerful. (I have yet to meet a successful woman who hasn’t paid her dues as a “bitch” before she was accepted as a leader.)20 In courtrooms, angry women like Ms. Norman lose their liberty. In fact, in domestic violence cases, men who kill get shorter and lighter sentences, and are charged with less serious crimes, than are women who kill their intimate partners. A murderous husband is just acting like a stereotypical husband, but wives who kill are not acting like typical wives, and therefore they are rarely exonerated.21 Emotion stereotyping is even worse when the female victim of domestic violence is African American. The archetypal victim in American culture is fearful, passive, and helpless, but in African American communities, women sometimes violate this stereotype by defending themselves vigorously against their alleged batterers.

Bullies intend to cause suffering, but is the intent to cause harm? We cannot know for sure, but in most cases I doubt it. Most kids are unaware that the mental anguish they inflict can translate into physical illness, atrophied brain tissue, reduced IQ, and shortened telomeres. Kids will be kids, we say. But bullying is a national epidemic. In one study, over 50 percent of children nationwide reported being verbally or socially bullied at school, or having participated in bullying another child at school, at least once in two months. Over 20 percent reported being the victim or perpetrator of physical bullying, and over 13 percent reported involvement with electronic bullying. Bullying is considered a serious enough childhood risk, with potential lifelong health consequences, that at press time, the U.S. Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice are producing a comprehensive report on its biological and psychological ramifications.64 If you suffer mental anguish in the moment, whether from bullying or another cause, should your suffering count as harm, and should the perpetrators be punished?

No other animals have collective intentionality combined with words. A few other animal species do have symbolic communication of a sort. Elephants appear to communicate through low-frequency vocal rumblings that can travel over a mile. Certain great apes appear to use sign language in a limited way, on the order of a two-year-old human, usually linked in some way to securing a reward. But only human animals have both language and collective intentionality. The two abilities build on one another in complex ways, allowing a human infant to bootstrap a conceptual system into her brain, changing its wiring in the process. The combination also allows people to categorize cooperatively, which is the basis of communication and social influence.12

Studies led by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett and her team suggest that people who are more skilled in figuring out what they’re feeling are likelier to use strategies to reduce negative emotions and increase positive ones than people less able to distinguish their emotions.

Interoception is also one of the most important ingredients in what you experience as reality.

What we colloquially call emotions, such as anger, fear, and happiness, are better thought of as emotion categories, because each is a collection of diverse instances.

Every day, soldiers must make quick decisions about other people, whether they are embedded in a unit during wartime, on a peacekeeping mission, negotiating in a cross-cultural setting, or collaborating with unit members on a stateside base. These quick judgments are extremely difficult to negotiate, especially in such high-stakes, high-arousal settings where errors are often made at the expense of someone’s life.48

When it comes to emotion, a face doesn’t speak for itself.

The best defense against affective realism is curiosity. I tell my students to be particularly mindful when you love or hate something you read. These feelings probably mean that the ideas you've read are firmly in your affective niche, so keep an open mind about them. Your affect is not evidence that the science is good or bad. The biologist Stuart Firesteip in his lovely book Ignorance encourages curiosity as a way to learn about the world. Try to become comfortable with uncertainty, he suggests, finding pleasure in mystery, and being mindful enough to cultivate doubt.

Holding hands with loved ones, or even keeping their photo on your desk at work, reduces activation in your body-budgeting regions and makes you less bothered by pain. If you’re standing at the bottom of a hill with friends, it will appear less steep and easier to climb than if you are alone.

Partly it’s because those experts need a better public relations department. But mostly it’s because the triune brain is a story that comes with its own cheering section. With our unique capacity for rational thought, the story goes, we triumphed over our animal nature and now rule the planet. To believe in the triune brain is to award ourselves a first prize trophy for Best Species.

Changes in air pressure and wavelengths of light exist in the world, but to us, they are sounds and colors.

But evolution has provided the human mind with the ability to create another kind of real, one that is completely dependent on human observers.

Nothing in the natural world indicates whether a plant is definitively a flower or a weed.

Common sense leads us to believe that emotions are real in nature and exist independent of any observer, in the same manner as Higgs bosons and plants.

Emotions are real, but real in the same manner of the sound of a tree falling, the experience of red, and the distinctions between flowers and weeds. They are all constructed in the brain of a perceiver.

The distinction between “real in nature” versus “illusory” is a false dichotomy

Here’s a remarkable insight: We can understand a child’s level of sturdiness or vulnerability by tracking what’s called allostasis, the process by which we maintain stability in our bodies. But you don’t have to remember that scientific word! The neuroscientist and researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett has another word for this continuous balancing of energy and resources: body budgeting. Just as a financial budget keeps track of money, she says, bodies track “resources like water, salt, and glucose as you gain and lose them.” Although we are not always aware of our body’s metabolic budget, everything we experience, including our feelings and actions, becomes deposits or withdrawals in our body budget. A hug, a good night’s sleep, playing with friends, and a healthy meal: All of these are deposits. Then there are withdrawals: things like forgetting to eat meals or drink enough fluids, being deprived of deep sleep, or being isolated or ignored.

The highly complex human brain isn’t a pinnacle of evolution, remember; it’s just well adapted to the environments we inhabit.