Lisa Feldman Barrett

It’s hard to top the opening paragraph in this short primer about the current scientific understanding of our brains: “Once upon a time, the Earth was ruled by creatures without brains. This is not a political statement, just a biological one.” In fact, Lisa Barrett, eminent neuroscientist and University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, evidently enjoys slyly sprinkling her account with pertinent political examples affording her plausible deniability. On the human show more construction of social reality: “We could have a leader who says terrible things on video, and then news outlets could agree that the words were never said. That’s what happens in a totalitarian society. Social reality may be one of our greatest achievements but it’s also a weapon we can wield against each other.” The book may cover complex material, but the author delivers it with a sense of fun and humor.

While Barrett is at the forefront of neuroscience research, her book also demonstrates her ability to translate complex and technical material into clear and concise communications, easily absorbed by the reader. Extensive references and expanded details are available on an associated website.

She dispenses with well-intended fallacies about the brain, substituting instead cogent explanation with minimal jargon. Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain reads like a synthesis of the last decade or two of the thinking in brain science. She has performed an invaluable service by distilling this emerging understanding into a set of bite-sized narratives that summarize how neuroscientists think about their subject.

I particularly appreciate her attention to metaphors. People have long put forward their ideas about the brain, often seemingly oblivious to their metaphorical and often misleading consequences. For example, one hears the distorted claim that the left side of the brain is linguistic and logical, while the right is intuitive and creative. That one was especially in vogue when I was a neuroscience student in the late ‘70s. People use phrases like “the storage of memories”, as if the brain handles files like a computer and places them in an ordered location for later retrieval. And no, your brain doesn’t have an ancient reptilian layer dedicated to instinct and survival. To her credit, she devotes time to warning about the lure of simplification, wherein metaphor can substitute for explanation, and alerts the reader to examples of her own use of metaphor, along with her reasons and intentions.

While this slim volume doesn’t require even more compression here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something about one of her central teaching points about the brain. This is no substitute for Barrett’s careful and clear narrative. The brain uses the sensory data it’s receiving to help you survive. It does it’s best job at this essential task not by waiting patiently for clarity about the meaning of the information it’s receiving. One cannot afford to confirm that a charging tiger is in fact about to sink its teeth into your throat. Instead, the brain anticipates, utilizes memories of past similar experiences and brain states, and uses these to make predictions about what is likely to happen next. We are not aware of this process, but the neural conversation about predictions results in one winning prediction and, to quote Barrett “…the winning prediction becomes your action and your sensory experience.” So in an essential sense, your brain is a prediction device which accelerates your responses, efficiently acting to help you survive. In fact, we couldn’t do something as simple as bouncing a ball were it not for our brain’s ability to accurately predict the behavior of bouncing balls and the body’s interaction with them.

I’ve left out most of the actual lessons in favor of offering the flavor of the book. I’d highly recommend Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain for anyone interested in a mini-exposition of current neuroscience thinking. Or for anyone like me who could benefit from an update! show less

Am I missing something or is Lisa Feldman- Barrett trying to overturn the entire current thinking about emotion. Seems to me she is working very hard to introduce a totally new paradigm. (though, as she mentions late in the book a lot of relevant esearch to her project was done in the 1920's that somehow got overturned and forgotten). I've just copied a lot of the critical gems from the book in the following passages....with an occasional comment from me.
"The time-honored story of emotion show more goes something like this: We all have emotions built-in from birth. They are distinct, recognizable phenomena inside us. When something happens in the world, whether it's a gunshot or a flirtatious glance, our emotions come on quickly and automatically, as if someone has flipped a switch. We broadcast emotions on our faces by way of smiles, frowns, scowls, and other characteristic expressions that anyone can easily recognize. Our voices reveal our emotions through laughter, shouts, and cries. Our body posture betrays our feelings with every gesture and slouch".
"Our emotions, according to the classical view, are artifacts of evolution, having long ago been advantageous for survival, and are now a fixed component of our biological nature. As such, they are universal: people of every age, in every culture, in every part of the world should experience sadness more or less as you do.......This view of emotions has been around for millennia in various forms.......Plato believed a version of it. So did Hippocrates, Aristotle, the Buddha, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin. Today, prominent thinkers such as Steven Pinker, Paul Ekman, and the Dalai Lama also offer up descriptions of emotions rooted in the classical view. The classical view is found in virtually every introductory college textbook on psychology."
"And yet ... despite the distinguished intellectual pedigree of the classical view of emotion, and despite its immense influence in our culture and society, there is abundant scientific evidence that this view cannot possibly be true. Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion".
Lisa goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate/prove that the classical way of distinguishing emotions by looking at the facial expressions is just plain wrong....even when you measure muscle movements, instead of just looking at the face or pictures of the face there is no consistent, predictable marker for angry, sad, or fearful. And the same thing applies to bodily measurements such as finger temperature or heartbeat. I found this really interesting because all (or most of) the stuff that I've read about emotion claims that facial expressions are universal and people everywhere make the same expressions when fearful etc. And I recall reading Darwin's work making the same claims. And other work that cited consistent expressions of distaste by rats who they tasted something bitter. But, I'm more or less convinced by her data and claims that emotions don't have reliable bodily "fingerprints".
"So what are they, really? When scientists set aside the classical view and just look at the data, a radically different explanation for emotion comes to light. In short, we find that your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture.........They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment".......This view, which I [Feldman] calls the theory of constructed emotion, offers a very different interpretation".
"I learned long ago that "sadness" is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss. Using bits and pieces of past experience, such as my knowledge of shootings and my previous sadness about them, my brain rapidly predicted what my body should do to cope with such tragedy. Its predictions caused my thumping heart, my flushed face, and the knots in my stomach......In this manner, my brain constructed my experience of emotion. My particular movements and sensations were not a fingerprint for sadness. With different predictions, my skin would cool rather than flush and my stomach would remain unknotted, yet my brain could still transform the resulting sensations into sadness".
"We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain - a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves".
She relates a personal anecdote, which I found very convincing (and amusing). "Back when I was in graduate school, a guy in my psychology program asked me out on a date. I didn't know him very well and was reluctant to go be-cause, honestly, I wasn't particularly attracted to him, but I had been cooped up too long in the lab that day, so I agreed. As we sat together in a coffee shop, to my surprise, I felt my face flush several times as we spoke. My stomach fluttered and I started having trouble concentrating. Okay, I realized,! was wrong. I am clearly attracted to him. We parted an hour later - after I agreed to go out with him again - and I headed home, intrigued. I walked into my apartment, dropped my keys on the floor, threw up, and spent the next seven days in bed with the flu"..........My experience in the coffee shop, where I felt attraction when I had the flu, would be called an error or misattribution in the classical view, but it's no more a mistake than seeing a bee in a bunch of blobs. An influenza virus in my blood contributed to fever and flushing, and my brain made meaning from the sensations in the context of a lunch date, constructing a genuine feeling of attraction, in the normal way that the brain constructs any other mental state. If I'd had exactly the same bodily sensations while at home in bed with a thermometer, my brain might have constructed an instance of "Feeling Sick" using the same manufacturing process. (The classical view, in contrast, would require feelings of attraction and malaise to have different bodily fingerprints triggered by different brain circuitry.)"
"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".
On the concept of the triune brain which has taken on a life of its own she is quite adamant: "This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the "triune brain" remains one of the most successful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his bestseller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don't have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows"............"Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly."
"When we share those abstractions with each other, by synchronizing our concepts during categorization, we can perceive each other's emotions and communicate........That, in a nutshell, is the theory of constructed emotion - an explanation for how you experience and perceive emotion effortlessly without the need for emotion fingerprints. The seeds of emotion are planted in infancy, as you hear an emotion word (say, "annoyed?) over and over in highly varied situations. The word "annoyed" holds this population of diverse instances together as a concept, "Annoyance"..............Your genes gave you a brain that can wire itself to its physical and social environment. The people around you, in your culture, maintain that environment with their concepts and help you live in that environment by transmitting those concepts from their brains to yours".
"Emotion categories, in my view, are made real through collective intentionality. To communicate to someone else that you feel angry both of you need a shared understanding of "Anger." If people agree that a particular constellation of facial actions and cardiovascular changes is anger in a given context, then it is so. You needn't be explicitly aware of this agreement."
"Humans are unique, however, because our collective intentionality involves mental concepts. We can look at a hammer, a chainsaw, and an ice pick and categorize them all as "Tools" then change our minds and categorize them all as "Murder Weapons" We can impose functions that would not otherwise exist, thereby inventing reality. We can work this magic because we have the second prerequisite for social reality: language.........emotion concepts are most easily learned with emotion words,.........From childhood we hear people say "fear" and "surprise" in particular contexts. The sound of each word (or, later in life, the written form of each word) creates enough statistical regularity within each category, and statistical differences between them, to get us started."
"Classical view theorists debate endlessly about how many emotions there are. Is love an emotion? How about awe? Curiosity? Hunger? Do synonyms like happy, cheerful, and delighted refer to different emotions? What about lust, desire, and passion: are they distinct? Are they emotions at all? From the standpoint of social reality, these debates are nonissues. Love (or curiosity, hunger, etc.) is an emotion as long as people agree that its instances serve the functions of an emotion".
"These latter two functions [emotion communication, social influence] require that other people - the ones you are communicating with or influencing agree that certain body states or physical actions serve particular functions in certain contexts".
"Likewise, all varieties of the classical view consider emotions like sadness and fear to have distinct essences. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, for example, writes that an emotion's essence is a circuit in the subcortical regions of your brain. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker writes that emotions are like mental organs, analogous to body organs for specialized func-tions, and that an emotion's essence is a set of genes. The evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides and the psychologist Paul Ekman assume that each emotion has an innate, unobservable essence, which they refer to as a metaphorical "program.""
"Essentialism is the culprit that has made the classical view supremely difficult to set aside. It encourages people to believe that their senses reveal objective boundaries in nature. Happiness and sadness look and feel different, the argument goes, so they must have different essences in the brain. People are almost always unaware that they essentialize;......Essentialism is also remarkably difficult to disprove. Since an essence can be an unobservable property, people are free to believe in essences even when they cannot be found. It's easy to come up with reasons why an experiment did not detect an essence: "we haven't looked everywhere yet,......words invite you to believe in an essence, and that process is conceivably the psychological origin of essentialism........So, essentialism is intuitive, logically impossible to disprove, part of our psychological and neural makeup, and a self-perpetuating scourge in science".
"Psychologists often recount stories of behaviorism in the same chilling tones as a ghost story around a campfire. It declared that thoughts, feelings, and the rest of the mind were unimportant to behavior or might not even exist. During this "dark ages" of emotion research, which lasted for several decades, nothing worthwhile was discovered on human emotion (suppos-edly)........Ultimately, most scientists reiected behaviorism because it ignores a basic fact: that each of has a mind."
"It's hard to give up the classical view when it represents deeply held beliefs about what it means to be human. Nevertheless, the facts remain that no one has found even a single reliable, broadly replicable, objectively measurable essence of emotion. When mountains of contrary data don't force people to give up their ideas, then they are no longer following the scientific method. They are following an ideology........The human brain, you see. is wired to mistake its perceptions for reality. Today, powerful tools have yielded a more evidence-based explanation that's almost impossible to ignore... yet some people still manage."
"The good news is that were in a golden age of mind and brain research".
Feldman starts to diverge from her subject a bit here to my way of thinking and delves into the interaction between emotions and health: "several notable and serious disorders may all be related to your immune system, which links your mental and physical health within your predicting brain. When bad predictions go unchecked, they may lead to a chronically unbalanced body budget, which contributes to inflammation in the brain and corrupts your interceptive predictions even further in a vicious cycle. In this manner, the same systems that construct emotion also can contribute to illness".
Likewise, maybe slightly off-theme she delves into the consequences of a wrongly held view of emotion in the legal system: "Jurors and judges are charged with an almost impossible task: to be a mind reader, or if you'd rather, a lie detector. They must decide if a person intended to cause harm.......But in a predicting brain, a judgment about someone else's intent is always a guess you construct based on the defendant's actions, not a fact you detect; and just as with emotions, there is no objective, perceiver-independent criterion of intent"
I must say, that I've found her arguments persuasive (and I've read a bit about concepts of emotion ....especially emotion and valuing....and, of course Hume'/s views on the "passion's role in decision making). I think this is an important work. Will she get a Nobel prize? I'll have to wait and see....but maybe not as she clearly didn't invent the concepts. Definitely worth five starts from me. show less

This is short (125 pages, plus notes) for a book about an organ which has upwards of 120 billion neurons); but then, the author does state quite clearly at the outset that, “I wrote this book of short, informal essays to intrigue and entertain you. It’s not a full tutorial on brains.” So fair enough.
    The general idea is to correct some popular misunderstandings, and it covers: what the brain does, its main job (and that’s not, primarily, thinking); its overall structure and how show more it is organised; how the brain of a newborn differs from, and eventually becomes, that of an adult; how the brain works, very broadly speaking, by making predictions about the world; the brain as a social entity; the extent to which minds can vary (particularly from one culture to another); and finally, how brains create our day-to-day experience.
    A lot to cover maybe, but Seven and a Half… is worth the read and sets straight a number of misconceptions, “facts” which are either out of date or just plain wrong. Such as: the “triune brain” idea (i.e. instincts, then emotions, then rationality) which is not just out of date, but decades out of date; or that the mind is continually “at war with itself” (instinct + emotion versus rationality): also nonsense. Then there’s the so-called “limbic system”, supposedly the source of the emotions: it doesn’t exist. Then there’s “left-hemisphere (logical, analytical) versus right-hemisphere (intuitive, holistic)”: pure rubbish. Or that it’s “nature versus nurture” in the development of infant brains: a pointless distinction. And what about the idea that there’s something fundamental called “human nature” which all of us, everywhere, share? There isn’t.
    Overall? This is well-written, and for anyone new to brain science who is reading their very first book on the subject, I reckon 7½… would be a good one to read second—just to set straight any lingering popular myths still being perpetuated by the first one. show less

A friend recommended a podcast episode featuring this author during a chat about feelings, so I went straight to the source and read the whole book. As such, I was reading this from the perspective of self-help: I wanted to better understand feelings and emotions in a framework that makes sense to me. From that perspective, this was a perfect read. I'm an atheist and a skeptic and pretty intellectually-driven as a person. I'm very familiar with the idea of being "more in touch with your show more feelings", but I feel like this is the first time I've seen someone try to explain what that might mean in a way that is comprehensible to someone who is not very in touch with their feelings. It's like in yoga classes when they tell you to "release" this or "extend through" that and fundamentally I don't know what they're talking about. That contrasts with doing Feldenkrais and small-group Pilates where it isn't assumed that you already have the knowledge the class is supposedly teaching and so I'm learning to get in touch with my body, rather than just learning that I'm not as in touch with my body as the yoga instructor.

Probably the key lesson for me in this book was that we construct our emotions on the basis of our feelings (as well as our perceptions, history and context) and our feelings are based in our physical body. It's not possible to feel rage without a pounding heart, not because we feel angry and then our heart starts pounding, but because a pounding heart is one of the signs that the brain uses to determine whether or not we're angry. "Interoception" is the perception of sensations within the body and it is fundamental to emotion. In fact, it's fundamental to pretty much everything. How we interpret the world is radically changed by how we feel inside. Being more in touch with feelings can make us better at understanding emotions, but also make us better able to care for ourselves and to give us a clearer perception of the world around us.

As well as the things listed above, I'm a pluralist, and so although this book is quite polemical for a work of popular science, I take all of its claims with a pinch of salt. I'm not a neuroscientist or psychologist, so I don't have to decide how true this stuff is in relation to other theories. It's enough to know there is truth here and I find it a helpful way to think about feelings. As a result, I skipped through some of the later chapters, because unless I'm 100% on board with a theory, I find it a bid dull to read applications of it. Nevertheless, the chapter on practical things to do was good, if not exactly revolutionary, and I feel this book has made me not just better able to understand myself, but has given me extra motivation to take care of myself in fundamental ways. show less