A New View of Human Nature

This post continues on from the abstracting of Chapter 7 ‘Emotions as Social Reality’ with Chapter 8 ‘A New View of Human Nature’ from Barrett’s book on emotions. The hugely condensed account below does not do justice to and lacks the historical perspectives of the original text, which I urge you to read. The next installment covers chapters 9 and 10 on how emotions really work, and emotional well-being.

The theory of constructed emotion is an ambassador for a radically different view of what it means to be a human being. Modern neuroscience has provided overwhelming evidence that the classical view of emotion - thousands of years old and embedded in law, medicine, and other critical elements of society - is wrong.

On the whole, the theory of constructed emotion is a biologically informed, psychological explanation of who you are as a human being. It takes into account both evolution and culture. You are born with some brain wiring as determined by your genes, but the environment can turn some genes on and off, allowing your brain to wire itself to your experiences. 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. And you are not the pinnacle of evolution, just a very interesting sort of animal with some unique abilities.

…all varieties of the classical view of emotion 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 functions, 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.” Ekman’s version of the classical view, called basic emotion theory, assumes that essences for happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust are triggered automatically by objects and events in the world.

So why is essentialism so powerful that it can twist the words of great scientists and misdirect the path of scientific discovery? The simplest reason is that essentialism is intuitive. We experience our own emotions as automatic reactions, so it’s easy to believe that they spring forth from ancient, dedicated parts of the brain. We also see emotions in blinks, furrowed brows, and other muscle twitches, and we hear emotions in the pitch and lilt of voices, without any sense of effort or agency. Therefore, it’s also easy to believe that we’ve been engineered by nature to recognize emotional displays and programmed to act on them. That’s a dubious conclusion, however. Millions of people around the world can instantly, effortlessly recognize Kermit the Frog, but that doesn’t mean the human brain is wired for Muppet recognition.

Essentialism may also be a natural consequence of how your brain is wired. The same circuitry that allows you to form concepts and predict with them also makes essentializing easy. Your cortex learns concepts by separating similarities from differences, as you saw in chapter 6. It integrates information across vision, hearing, interoception, and the other sensory domains, compressing them into efficient summaries. Each summary is like a little imaginary essence, invented by your brain to represent that a bunch of instances from your past are similar.

So, essentialism is intuitive, logically impossible to disprove, part of our psychological and neural makeup, and a self-perpetuating scourge in science. It is also the basis for the classical view’s most fundamental idea, that emotions have universal fingerprints. No wonder the classical view has such stamina—it’s powered by a virtually unkillable belief.

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. And as an ideology, the classical view has wasted billions of research dollars and misdirected the course of scientific inquiry for over a hundred years.

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 we’re in a golden age of mind and brain research. Many scientists are now on a path forged by the data, rather than ideology, to understand emotion and ourselves. This new, data-driven understanding leads to innovative ideas about how to live a fulfilling and healthful life. If your brain operates by prediction and construction and rewires itself through experience, then it’s no overstatement to say that if you change your current experiences today, you can change who you become tomorrow. The next few chapters delve into these implications in the areas of emotional intelligence, health, law, and our relationships with other animals.

Emotions as Social Reality

This post is the next installment of my reduction of Barrett’s book, continuing on to Chapter 7 (Emotions as Social Reality) from the summary of chapter 6 (How the Brain Makes Emotions).

If you talk to a chemist, “real” is a molecule, an atom, a proton. To a physicist, “real” is a quark, a Higgs boson, or maybe a collection of little strings vibrating in eleven dimensions. They are supposed to exist in the natural world whether or not humans are present—that is, they are thought to be perceiver-independent categories. If all human life left this planet tomorrow, subatomic particles would still be here.

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.

Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. They are perceiver-dependent categories. Albert Einstein illustrated this point nicely when he wrote, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”

Your muscle movements and bodily changes become functional as instances of emotion only when you categorize them that way, giving them new functions as experiences and perceptions. Without emotion concepts, these new functions don’t exist. There are only moving faces, beating hearts, circulating hormones, and so on, just as without color and sound concepts, “red” and the sound of a falling tree would not exist. There’d be only light and vibrations.

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.

Emotions are social reality. We construct instances of emotion in exactly the same manner as colors, falling trees, and money: using a conceptual system that is realized within the brain’s wiring. We transform sensory inputs from the body and the world, which are perceiver-independent, into an instance of (say) happiness in the context of a concept, “Happiness,” found in many human minds. The concept imposes new functions on these sensations, creating reality where there was none before: an experience or perception of emotion.

Instead of asking, “Are emotions real?” the better question is, “How do emotions become real?” Ideally, the answer lies in building a bridge from the perceiver-independent biology of the brain and body, like interoception, to the everyday folk concepts that we live our lives around, like “Fear” and “Happiness.”

Emotions become real to us through two human capabilities that are prerequisites for social reality. First, you need a group of people to agree that a concept exists, such as “Flower” or “Cash” or “Happiness.” This shared knowledge is called collective intentionality. Most people barely think about collective intentionality, but it nevertheless is a foundation of every society. Even your own name is made real through collective intentionality.

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. No other animals have collective intentionality combined with words….

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.

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.

…a first function of emotion concepts, like all concepts, is to make meaning. Suppose you find yourself breathing rapidly and sweating. Are you excited? Afraid? Physically exhausted?

…a second function is that emotion concepts prescribe action: If you’re breathing rapidly and sweating, what should you do? Should you grin broadly in excitement, run away in fear, or lie down for a nap?

…The third function is related to a concept’s ability to regulate your body budget. Depending how you categorize your sweating, panting state, your body budget may be affected differently. A categorization of excitement might lead to a moderate release of cortisol (say, to raise your arms); a categorization of fear might lead to a greater release of cortisol (as you prepare to run away); whereas napping requires no additional cortisol. Categorization literally gets under your skin. Every instance of emotion involves some body budgeting for the immediate future.

…emotion concepts have two other functions that draw other individuals into your circle of social reality. One function is emotion communication, in which two people categorize with concepts in synchrony. … The other function is social influence. Concepts like “Excitement,” “Fear,” and “Exhaustion” are tools for you to regulate other people’s body budgets, not just your own.

…let me be clear. I am not saying emotions are illusions. They are real, but socially real in the manner of flowers and weeds. I’m not saying that everything is relative. If that were true, civilization would fall apart. I am also not saying that emotions are “just in your head.” That phrase trivializes the power of social reality. Money, reputation, laws, government, friendship, and all of our most fervent beliefs are also “just” in human minds, but people live and die for them. They are real because people agree that they’re real. But they, and emotions, exist only in the presence of human perceivers.

Imagine the feeling of reaching into a bag of potato chips and discovering that the previous chip you ate was the last one. You feel disappointed that the bag is empty, relieved that you won’t be ingesting any more calories, slightly guilty that you ate the entire bag, and yet hungry for another chip. I have just invented an emotion concept, and there is surely no word for it in the English language. And yet, as you read my prolonged description of this complex feeling, you most likely simulated the whole thing, right down to the crinkle of the bag and the cheerless little crumbs at the bottom. You experienced this emotion without a word for it.

Your brain accomplished this feat by combining instances of concepts you already know, such as “Bag,” “Chips,” “Disappointment,” “Relief,” “Guilt,” and “Hunger.” This powerful ability of your brain’s conceptual system, which we called conceptual combination in chapter 5, creates your very first instance of this new chip-related category of emotion, ready for simulation. Now if I name my new creation “Chiplessness” and teach it to our fellow citizens, it becomes every bit as real an emotion concept as “Happiness” and “Sadness.” People can predict with it, categorize with it, regulate their body budgets with it, and construct diverse instances of “Chiplessness” in different situations.

This brings us to one of the most challenging ideas in this book: you need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. It’s a requirement. Without a concept for “Fear,” you cannot experience fear. Without a concept for “Sadness,” you cannot perceive sadness in another person. You could learn the necessary concept, or you could construct it in the moment through conceptual combination, but your brain must be able to make that concept and predict with it. Otherwise, you will be experientially blind to that emotion.

I realize I’m saying something provocative: that each of us needs an emotion concept before we can experience or perceive that emotion. This definitely doesn’t match common sense or everyday experience; emotions feel so built-in. But if emotions are constructed by prediction, and you can predict only with the concepts you possess, well ...there you have it.

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The emotions that you experience so effortlessly, and which feel built-in, most likely were also known in your parents’ generation, and their parents’ as well. The classical view explains this progression by proposing that emotions—separate from emotion concepts—are built into the nervous system through evolution. I have an evolutionary story to tell as well, but it’s about social reality, and it doesn’t require emotion fingerprints in the nervous system.

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.

All humans who live in groups must solve common problems, so it’s not surprising to find some concepts that are similar across cultures. Most human societies, for example, have myths about supernatural beings…In the same manner, “Fear” exists in many cultures (but not all, such as the !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert) by virtue of having important functions. As far as I know, no emotion concept is universal, but even if one were, universality itself does not automatically imply a perceiver-independent reality.

Emotion concepts are also cultural tools. They come with a rich set of rules, all in the service of regulating your body budget or influencing someone else’s. These rules can be specific to a culture, stipulating when it’s acceptable to construct a given emotion in a given situation… “happy,” “sad,” “fearful,” “angry,” “disgusted,” and “surprised” are just words made up by people. Invented words are the very definition of social reality. Would you say that your local currency is real money and the currencies of other cultures are just made up?

…some cherished Western emotion concepts are completely absent in other cultures. Utka Eskimos have no concept of “Anger.” The Tahitians have no concept of “Sadness.” This last item is very difficult for Westerners to accept . . . When Tahitians are in a situation that a Westerner would describe as sad, they feel ill, troubled, fatigued, or unenthusiastic, all of which are covered by their broader term pe’ape’a.

Beyond individual emotion concepts, different cultures don’t even agree on what “emotion” is. Westerners think of emotion as an experience inside an individual, in the body. Many other cultures, however, characterize emotions as interpersonal events that require two or more people.

Most scientific research on emotion is conducted in English, using American concepts and American emotion words (and their translations). According to noted linguist Anna Wierzbicka, English has been a conceptual prison for the science of emotion. “English terms of emotion constitute a folk taxonomy, not an objective, culture-free analytic framework, so obviously we cannot assume that English words such as disgust, fear, or shame are clues to universal human concepts, or to basic psychological realities.” To make matters even more imperialistic, these emotion words are from twentieth-century English, and there’s evidence that some are fairly modern. 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.

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In this book, I am trying to acculturate you into a new way of thinking about emotions…Perhaps you began this book with classical view concepts such as “Emotional Reaction” and “Facial Expression” and “Emotion Circuit in the Brain.” If so, I’ve been slowly replacing them with a new set, including “Interoception,” “Prediction,” “Body Budget,” and “Social Reality.” In a sense, I am attempting to draw you into a new culture called the theory of constructed emotion.

The theory of constructed emotion explains how you experience and perceive emotion in the absence of any consistent, biological fingerprints in the face, body, or brain. Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them. These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept. The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the winner that becomes your experience, and if it’s an instance of an emotion concept, then you experience emotion. This whole process occurs, with the help of your control network, in the service of regulating your body budget to keep you alive and healthy. In the process, you impact the body budgets of those around you, to help you survive to propagate your genes into the next generation. This is how brains and bodies create social reality. This is also how emotions become real.

Yes, that’s a mouthful. And some details are still reasoned speculation, like the exact mechanisms of the concept cascade. But we can say confidently that the theory of constructed emotion is a viable way to think about how emotions are made. The theory accounts for all of the phenomena of the classical view, plus its anomalies such as the huge variability in emotional experiences, in emotion concepts, and in physical changes during emotion. It dissolves useless nature/nurture debates (e.g., what is hardwired versus what is learned) by using a single framework to understand both physical reality and social reality, moving us one step closer to a scientific bridge between the social and natural worlds. And this bridge, like all bridges, will lead us to a new place, as you’ll see in the next chapter: a modern origin story of what it means to be human.

How the Brain Makes Emotions

This post continues on from the summary of chapter 5 (Concepts, Goals, and Words) in Barrett’s book "How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" to chapter 6 (How the Brain Makes Emotions). The next installment of this series continues on to chapter 7, "Emotions as Social Reality":

When your brain “constructs an instance of a concept,” such as an instance of “Happiness,” that is equivalent to saying your brain “issues a prediction” of happiness...I separated the ideas of predictions and concepts earlier to simplify some explanations. I could have used the word “prediction” throughout the book and never mentioned the word “concept,” or vice versa, but information transmission is easier to understand in terms of predictions flying across the brain, whereas knowledge is more readily understood in terms of concepts. Now that we’re discussing how concepts work in the brain, we must acknowledge that concepts are predictions.

Early in life, you build up concepts from detailed sensory input (as prediction error) from your body and the world. Your brain efficiently compresses the sensory input it receives, just like YouTube compresses video, extracting similarities out of differences, eventually creating an efficient, multisensory summary. Once your brain has learned a concept in this manner, it can run this process in reverse, expanding the similarities into differences to construct an instance of the concept, much as your computer or phone expands the incoming YouTube video for display. This is a prediction. Think of prediction as “applying” a concept, modifying the activity in your primary sensory and motor regions, and correcting or refining as needed.

Each time you categorize with concepts, your brain creates many competing predictions while being bombarded by sensory input. Which predictions should be the winners? Which sensory input is important, and which is just noise? Your brain has a network to help resolve these uncertainties, known as your control network. This is the same network that transforms an infant’s “lantern” of attention into the adult “spotlight” you have now.

Your control network assists in efficiently constructing and selecting among the candidate instances so your brain can pick a winner. It helps neurons to participate in certain constructions rather than others, and keeps some concept instances alive while suppressing others. The result is akin to natural selection, in which the instances most suitable to the current environment survive to shape your perception and action.

The name “control network” is unfortunate because it implies a central position of authority, as if the network were making decisions and conducting the process. This is not the case. Your control network is more of an optimizer. It constantly tinkers with the information flow among neurons, ramping up the firing rate of some neurons and slowing down others, which moves sensory input in and out of your attentional spotlight, making some predictions fit while others become irrelevant. It’s like a car-racing team that constantly optimizes the engine and body to make a car slightly faster and safer. This tinkering ultimately helps your brain simultaneously to regulate your body budget, produce a stable perception, and launch an action.

Your control network helps select between emotion and non-emotion concepts (is this anxiety or indigestion?), between different emotion concepts (is this excitement or fear?), between different goals for an emotion concept (in fear, should I escape or attack?), and between different instances (when running to escape, should I scream or not?). When you’re watching a movie, your control network might favor your visual and auditory systems, transporting you into the story. At other times it might background the traditional five senses in favor of more intense affect, resulting in an experience of emotion. Much of this tinkering happens outside your awareness.

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.”

Your control network and interoceptive network are critical for constructing emotion. Moreover, these two core networks together contain most of the major hubs for communication throughout the entire brain. Think about the world’s largest airports that serve multiple airlines. A traveler in JFK International Airport in New York can switch between American Airlines and British Airways because the two airlines overlap there. Likewise, information can pass efficiently between different networks in your brain via the major hubs in the interoceptive and control networks.

These major hubs help to synchronize so much of your brain’s information flow that they might even be a prerequisite for consciousness. If any of these hubs become damaged, your brain is in big trouble: depression, panic disorder, schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia, chronic pain, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are all associated with hub damage.

The major hubs in your interoceptive and control networks make possible what I describe in chapter 4, that your everyday decisions are driven by your body-budgeting regions—your inner, loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses. You see, your brain’s body-budgeting regions are major hubs. Through their massive connections, they broadcast predictions that alter what you see, hear, and otherwise perceive and do. That’s why, at the level of brain circuitry, no decision can be free of affect.

Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. The brain systems that implement concepts, such as the interoceptive network and the control network, are the biology of meaning-making.

So, now you know how emotions are made in the brain. We predict and categorize. We regulate our body budgets, as any animal does, but wrap this regulation in purely mental concepts like “Happiness” and “Fear,” that we construct in the moment. We share these purely mental concepts with other adults, and we teach them to our children. We make a new kind of reality and live in it every day, mostly unaware that we are doing so.

Concepts, Goals, and Words

I now proceed on from a previous post on ‘The Origin of Feeling’ , chapter 4 of Barrett’s book on emotions, to an idiosyncratic selection of edited chunks from Chapter 5 titled ‘Concepts, Goals, and Words.’ It does not begin to do justice to the material presented and leaves out supporting arguments, but I hope does communicate a few of the bottom lines. There is no substitute for reading the original text. The next installment in this series is on Chapter 6 "How the Brain Makes Emotions."

When we look at a rainbow, we see discrete stripes of color, although in nature a rainbow is a continuous spectrum of light with wavelengths ranging from about 400 to 750 nanometers. We see stripes because we have mental concepts for “Red”, “Orange,” and “Yellow,” grouping together certain ranges of the spectrum and categorizing them as the same color. (Concepts of color are influenced by culture and language. Russian has words for seven rather than six colors, blue is divided into light blue and dark blue.)

Human speech is continuous—a stream of sound—yet when you listen to your native language, you hear discrete words. How does that happen? …you use concepts to categorize the continuous input. Beginning in infancy, you learn regularities in the stream of speech that reveal the boundaries between phonemes.

A category is a collection of objects, events, or actions that are grouped together as equivalent for some purpose. A concept is a mental representation of a category. Traditionally, categories are supposed to exist in the world, while concepts exist in your head. (The concept of the color red can be applied to a rose, a bird, an automobile, etc.)

Categorization with concepts constructs every perception, thought, memory, and other mental event that you experience, so of course you construct instances of emotion in the same manner.

…concepts aren’t fixed definitions in your brain, and they’re not prototypes of the most typical or frequent instances. Instead, your brain has many instances—of cars, of dot patterns, of sadness, or anything else—and it imposes similarities between them, in the moment, according to your goal in a given situation. For example, your usual goal for a vehicle is to use it for transportation, so if an object meets that goal for you, then it’s a vehicle, whether it’s a car, a helicopter, or a sheet of plywood with four wheels nailed on.

Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts. Instances of happiness, for example, are highly variable. You can smile in happiness, sob in happiness, scream in happiness, raise your arms in happiness, clench your fists in happiness, jump up and down doling out high fives in happiness, or even be stunned motionless in happiness. Your eyes might be wide or narrowed; your breathing rapid or slow. You can have the heart-pounding, exciting happiness of winning the lottery or the calm, relaxed happiness of lying on a picnic blanket with your lover.

The human brain bootstraps a conceptual system into its wiring with the first year of life…The newborn brain has the ability to learn patterns, a process called statistical learning. The moment that you burst into this strange new world as a baby, you were bombarded with noisy, ambiguous signals from the world and from your body.

Statistical learning in humans was first discovered in studies of language development. Babies have a natural interest in listening to speech, perhaps because the sounds occurred alongside body budgeting from birth, and even in utero. As they hear the sounds streaming along, they gradually infer the boundaries between phonemes, syllables, and words.

…this learning begins very early in life and goes well beyond language. Studies show that babies easily learn statistical regularities in sound and vision, and it’s reasonable to assume the same for the rest of the senses plus interoceptive sensations. What’s more, babies can learn complex regularities that span multiple senses. If you fill a box with blue and yellow balls, and the yellow balls make a squeaking sound while the blue ones are silent, infants can generalize the association between color and sound.

My guiding hypothesis is that emotion words hold the key to understanding how children learn emotion concepts in the absence of biological fingerprints and in the presence of tremendous variation. Not the words in isolation, mind you, but words spoken by other humans in the child’s affective niche who use emotion concepts. These words invite a child to form goal-based concepts for “Happiness,” “Sadness,” “Fear,” and every other emotion concept in the child’s culture.

Concept learning … continues throughout life. Sometimes a new emotion word appears in your primary language, engendering a new concept. For example, schadenfreude, a German emotion word meaning “pleasure from someone else’s misfortune,” has now been incorporated into English. .. Other languages commonly have emotion words whose associated concepts have no equivalent in English. For example, Russian has two distinct concepts for what Americans call “Anger.” German has three distinct “Angers” and Mandarin has five.

In many cultures, you will find people who have hundreds, perhaps thousands of emotion concepts, that is, they exhibit high emotional granularity. …People who exhibit moderate emotional granularity might have dozens of emotion concepts rather than hundreds. …Nothing fancy, but they get the job done.

…as you read these words, your brain is wired with a powerful conceptual system for emotion. It began purely as an information-gaining system, acquiring knowledge about your world through statistical learning. But words allowed your brain to go beyond the physical regularities that you learned, to invent part of your world, in a collective with other brains. You created powerful, purely mental regularities that helped you control your body budget in order to survive. Some of these mental regularities are emotion concepts, and they function as mental explanations for why your heart thumps in your chest, why your face flushes, and why you feel and act the way you do in certain circumstances. 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.” The word invites you to search for the features that the instances have in common, even if those similarities exist only in other people’s minds. Once you have this concept established in your conceptual system, you can construct instances of “Annoyance” in the presence of highly variable sensory input. If the focus of your attention is on yourself during categorization, then you construct an experience of annoyance. If your attention is on another person, you construct a perception of annoyance. And in each case, your concepts regulate your body budget.

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. And later, you transmit your concepts to the brains of the next generation. It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.

The Origin of Feeling

This post continues my cooking down, rewriting, paraphrasing, and excerpting of Barrett’s book on emotions with Chapter 4, “The Origin of Feeling.” A previous post covered Chapters 2 and 3 (Emotions are constructed and are not universal). The next installment covers Chapter 5 "Concepts, Goals, and Words."

The classical view of a quiet brain that is simply ‘reactive’ to input, and on being stimulated makes a response, is misguided. The brain’s billions of neurons are always stimulating each other, millions at a time. These huge cascades of stimulation, known as intrinsic brain activity, continue from birth until death. It’s like breathing, a process that requires no external catalyst...intrinsic brain activity is the origin of the dreams, daydreams, imagination, mind wandering, and reveries collectively called simulations in chapter 2. It also ultimately produces every sensation you experience, including your interoceptive sensations, which are the origins of your most basic pleasant, unpleasant, calm, and jittery feelings.

With past experiences as a guide, your brain makes predictions. Predictions not only anticipate sensory input from outside the skull but explain it…Your brain also uses prediction to initiate your body’s movements, like reaching your arm out to pick up an apple or dashing away from a snake. These predictions occur before you have any conscious awareness or intent about moving your body… Your brain issues motor predictions to move your body well before you become aware of your intent to move.

Right now, as you read these words and understand what they mean, each word barely perturbs your massive intrinsic activity, like a small stone skipping on a rolling ocean wave...You might think that your perceptions of the world are driven by events in the world, but really they are anchored in your predictions, which are then tested against those little skipping stones of incoming sensory input.

In a sense, your brain is wired for delusion: through continual prediction, you experience a world of your own creation that is held in check by the sensory world. Once your predictions are correct enough, they not only create your perception and action but also explain the meaning of your sensations.

Simple pleasant and unpleasant feelings come from ‘interoception’ - an ongoing internal process that is your brain’s representation of all sensations from internal organs and tissues, hormones in the blood, and the immune system. Interoception is one of the core ingredients of emotion, but feelings coming from interoception are much simpler than full-blown emotional experiences like joy and sadness.

From your brain’s point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain. Your pumping heart, your expanding lungs, and your changing temperature and metabolism send sensory input to your brain that is noisy and ambiguous. A single interoceptive cue, such as a dull ache in your abdomen, could mean a stomachache, hunger, tension, an overly tight belt, or a hundred other causes. Your brain must explain bodily sensations to make them meaningful, and its major tool for doing so is prediction. So, your brain models the world from the perspective of someone with your body. Just as your brain predicts the sights, smells, sounds, touches, and tastes from the world in relation to the movements of your head and limbs, it also predicts the sensory consequences of movements inside your body.

My lab has discovered that these regions form an interoceptive network that is intrinsic in your brain, analogous to your networks for vision, hearing, and other senses. The interoceptive network issues predictions about your body, tests the resulting simulations against sensory input from your body, and updates your brain’s model of your body in the world. To simplify our discussion drastically, I’ll describe this network as having two general parts with distinct roles. One part is a set of brain regions that send predictions to the body to control its internal environment: speed up the heart, slow down breathing, release more cortisol, metabolize more glucose, and so on. We’ll call them your body-budgeting regions. The second part is a region that represents sensations inside your body, called your primary interoceptive cortex.

Your body-budgeting regions make predictions to estimate the resources to keep you alive and flourishing, using past experience as a guide. Why is this relevant to emotion? Because every brain region that’s claimed to be a home of emotion in humans is a body-budgeting region within the interoceptive network. These regions, however, don’t react in emotion. They don’t react at all. They predict, intrinsically, to regulate your body budget. They issue predictions for sights, sounds, thoughts, memories, imagination, and, yes, emotions. The idea of an emotional brain region is an illusion caused by the outdated belief in a reactive brain. Neuroscientists understand this today, but the message hasn’t trickled down to many psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, economists, and others who study emotion.

Affect, which depends on interoception, is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence…The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal.

When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world. Experiencing supposed facts about the world that are created in part by our feelings is called affective realism. For example, people report more happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, but only when they are not explicitly asked about the weather.

Take a moment and consider what this means for your day-to-day life. You’ve just learned that the sensations you feel from your body don’t always reflect the actual state of your body. That’s because familiar sensations like your heart beating in your chest, your lungs filling with air, and, most of all, the general pleasant, unpleasant, aroused, and quiescent sensations of affect are not really coming from inside your body. They are driven by simulations in your interoceptive network… In short, you feel what your brain believes. Affect primarily comes from prediction.

...you see what your brain believes—that’s affective realism. 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.

Let me show you what this means. You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: that what you feel alters your sight and hearing. Interoception in the moment is more influential to perception, and how you act, than the outside world is.

You might believe that you are a rational creature, weighing the pros and cons before deciding how to act, but the structure of your cortex makes this an implausible fiction. Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver’s seat and rationality is a passenger. It doesn’t matter whether you’re choosing between two snacks, two job offers, two investments, or two heart surgeons—your everyday decisions are driven by a loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses.

The human brain is anatomically structured so that no decision or action can be free of interoception and affect, no matter what fiction people tell themselves about how rational they are. Your bodily feeling right now will project forward to influence what you will feel and do in the future. It is an elegantly orchestrated, self-fulfilling prophecy, embodied within the architecture of your brain.

If the idea of the rational human mind is so toxic to the economy, and it’s not backed up by neuroscience, why does it persist? Because we humans have long believed that rationality makes us special in the animal kingdom. This origin myth reflects one of the most cherished narratives in Western thought, that the human mind is a battlefield where cognition and emotion struggle for control of behavior. Even the adjective we use to describe ourselves as insensitive or stupid in the heat of the moment—“thoughtless”—connotes a lack of cognitive control, of failing to channel our inner Mr. Spock. This origin myth is so strongly held that scientists even created a model of the brain based on it. The model begins with ancient subcortical circuits for basic survival, which we allegedly inherited from reptiles. Sitting atop those circuits is an alleged emotion system, known as the “limbic system,” that we supposedly inherited from early mammals. And wrapped around the so-called limbic system, like icing on an already-baked cake, is our allegedly rational and uniquely human cortex. This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain,” remains one of the most successful misconceptions in human biology.

The bottom line is this: the human brain is anatomically structured so that no decision or action can be free of interoception and affect, no matter what fiction people tell themselves about how rational they are. Your bodily feeling right now will project forward to influence what you will feel and do in the future. It is an elegantly orchestrated, self-fulfilling prophecy, embodied within the architecture of your brain.

Your interceptive predictions, which produce your feelings of affect, determine what you care about in the moment—your affective niche. From the perspective of your brain, anything in your affective niche could potentially influence your body budget, and nothing else in the universe matters. That means, in effect, that you construct the environment in which you live. You might think about your environment as existing in the outside world, separate from yourself, but that’s a myth. You (and other creatures) do not simply find yourself in an environment and either adapt or die. You construct your environment—your reality—by virtue of what sensory input from the physical environment your brain selects; it admits some as information and ignores some as noise. And this selection is intimately linked to interoception. Your brain expands its predictive repertoire to include anything that might impact your body budget, in order to meet your body’s metabolic demands. This is why affect is a property of consciousness.

Interoception, as a fundamental part of the predictive process, is a key ingredient of emotion. However, interoception alone cannot explain emotion. An emotion category like anger or sadness is far more complex than a simple feeling of unpleasantness and arousal.

Affect alone also doesn’t explain how we construct our own experiences of sadness, nor how one instance of sadness differs from another. Nor does affect tell you what sensations mean or what to do about them. That’s why people eat when they are tired or find a defendant guilty when they are hungry. You must make the affect meaningful so your brain can execute a more specific action. One way to make meaning is to construct an instance of emotion.

So, how do interoceptive sensations become emotions? And why do we experience these sensations (really predictions) in such diverse ways: as physical symptoms, as perceptions of the world, as simple affective feeling, and sometimes as emotion? That is the subject of the next chapter, chapter 5, “Concepts, Goals, and Words”

Emotions are constructed, and are not universal.

This post continues with clips, paraphrase, and editing of Barrett’s book "How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" - material from chapter 2, and very briefly noted, Chapter 3.  The summary of chapter 1 is here.  The next installment, on Chapter 4 "The Origin of Feeling", is here.

Chapter 2 - Emotions are Constructed

The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience. What we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. .. Simulation is the default mode for all mental activity. It also holds a key to unlocking the mystery of how the brain creates emotions. 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. (Chapter 2 starts with a demonstration of this, by showing the cure for a case of experiential blindness. A pattern of meaningless blobs is transformed into a bee on a flower once the photograph from which the blobs were taken - and stored as a prediction by the brain - is seen.)

Every moment that you are alive, your brain uses concepts to simulate the outside world. Without concepts, you are experientially blind. With concepts, your brain simulates so invisibly and automatically that vision, hearing, and your other senses seem like reflexes rather than constructions.

…your brain uses this same process to make meaning of the sensations from inside your body—the commotion arising from your heartbeat, breathing, and other internal movements? From your brain’s perspective, your body is just another source of sensory input - sensations from your heart and lungs, your metabolism, your changing temperature, and so on. These purely physical sensations inside your body have no objective psychological meaning. Once your concepts enter the picture, however, those sensations may take on additional meaning… From an aching stomach, your brain can construct an instance of hunger, nausea, or mistrust…an instance of emotion.

..the theory of constructed emotion: In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion…With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.

The theory of constructed emotion and the classical view of emotion tell vastly different stories of how we experience the world. The classical view is intuitive—events in the world trigger emotional reactions inside of us. Its story features familiar characters like thoughts and feelings that live in distinct brain areas. 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. Its story features unfamiliar characters like simulation and concepts and degeneracy, and it takes place throughout the whole brain at once.

Construction is based on a very old set of ideas that date back to Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Heraclitus famously wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” because only a mind perceives an ever-changing river as a distinct body of water. Today, constructionism spans many topics including memory, perception, mental illness, and, of course, emotion.

A constructionist approach to emotion has a couple of core ideas. One idea is that an emotion category such as anger or disgust does not have a fingerprint. One instance of anger need not look or feel like another, nor will it be caused by the same neurons. Variation is the norm.

Another core idea is that the emotions you experience and perceive are not an inevitable consequence of your genes. What’s inevitable is that you’ll have some kinds of concepts for making sense of sensory input from your body in the world because…your brain has wiring for this purpose. ..particular concepts like “Anger” and “Disgust” are not genetically predetermined. Your familiar emotion concepts are built-in only because you grew up in a particular social context where those emotion concepts are meaningful and useful, and your brain applies them outside your awareness to construct your experiences. Heart rate changes are inevitable; their emotional meaning is not. Other cultures can and do make other kinds of meaning from the same sensory input.

Social constructionist theories…are primarily concerned with social circumstances in the world outside you, without considering how those circumstances affect the brain’s wiring.

Another flavor of construction, known as psychological construction, turns this focus inward. It proposes that your perceptions, thoughts, and feelings are themselves constructed from more basic parts. … In the 1960s, the psychologists Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer famously injected test subjects with adrenaline—without the subjects’ knowledge—and saw them experience this mysterious arousal as anger or euphoria, depending on the context surrounding them. In all these views, an instance of anger or elation does not reveal its causal mechanisms—a marked contrast to the classical view, where each emotion has a dedicated mechanism in the brain, and the same word (e.g., “sadness”) names the mechanism and its product. In recent years, a new generation of scientists has been crafting psychological construction-based theories for understanding emotions and how they work.

Neuroconstruction and plasticity - Your genes turn on and off in different contexts, including the genes that shape your brain’s wiring. That means some of your synapses literally come into existence because other people talked to you or treated you in a certain way. In other words, construction extends all the way down to the cellular level. The macro structure of your brain is largely predetermined, but the microwiring is not. As a consequence, past experience helps determine your future experiences and perceptions. Neuroconstruction explains how human infants are born without the ability to recognize a face but can develop that capacity within the first few days after birth.

The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of all three flavors of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And from neuroconstruction, it adopts the idea that experience wires the brain.

The theory of constructed emotion tosses away the most basic assumptions of the classical view. For instance, the classical view assumes that happiness, anger, and other emotion categories each have a distinctive bodily fingerprint. In the theory of constructed emotion, variation is the norm.

The theory of constructed emotion dispenses with fingerprints not only in the body but also in the brain. It avoids questions that imply a neural fingerprint exists, like “Where are the neurons that trigger fear?” The word “where” has a built-in assumption that a particular set of neurons activates every time you and everyone else on the planet feel afraid. …The more neutral question, “How does the brain create an instance of fear?” does not presume a neural fingerprint behind the scenes, only that experiences and perceptions of fear are real and worthy of study. ..construction. Instances of two different emotion categories, such as fear and anger, can be made from similar ingredients, just as cookies and bread both contain flour. This phenomenon is degeneracy at work: different instances of fear are constructed by different combinations of the core systems throughout the brain. We can describe the instances of fear together by a pattern of brain activity, but this pattern is a statistical summary and need not describe any actual instance of fear.

Construction incorporates the latest scientific findings about Darwinian natural selection and population thinking. For example, the many-to-one principle of degeneracy—many different sets of neurons can produce the same outcome—brings about greater robustness for survival. The one-to-many principle—any single neuron can contribute to more than one outcome—is metabolically efficient and increases the computational power of the brain. This kind of brain creates a flexible mind without fingerprints.

The final major assumption of the classical view is that certain emotions are inborn and universal: all healthy people around the world are supposed to display and recognize them. The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, proposes that emotions are not inborn, and if they are universal, it’s due to shared concepts. What’s universal is the ability to form concepts that make our physical sensations meaningful, from the Western concept “Sadness” to the Dutch concept Gezellig (a specific experience of comfort with friends), which has no exact English translation.

Emotions do not shine forth from the face nor from the maelstrom of your body’s inner core. They don’t issue from a specific part of the brain. No scientific innovation will miraculously reveal a biological fingerprint of any emotion. That’s because our emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed. They are made. By us. We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions, on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems. 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.

Ch 3 The Myth of Universal Emotions

Barrett does a critique of Ekman’s basic facial emotions categories, showing that data on foreign cultures is tainted: priming by the experimenters expectations, forced choices from an unintentional cheat sheet, etc.….. The Himba tribe in Namibia shows no evidence of universal emotion perception…Romans did not smile spontaneously when they were happy. The word “smile” doesn’t even exist in Latin…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.

Emotion concepts are the secret ingredient behind the success of the basic emotion method. These concepts make certain facial configurations appear universally recognizable as emotional expressions when, in fact, they’re not. Instead, we all construct perceptions of each other’s emotions. We perceive others as happy, sad, or angry by applying our own emotion concepts to their moving faces and bodies. We likewise apply emotion concepts to voices and construct the experience of hearing emotional sounds. We simulate with such speed that emotion concepts work in stealth, and it seems to us as if emotions are broadcast from the face, voice, or any other body part, and we merely detect them.

Emotions do not have distinctive brain and body ‘fingerprints’

This post, following an introduction in last Friday’s post, is a series of clips and paraphrases from Ch. 1 of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book “How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.”, roughly a 10-fold condensation of the material. And, here is the next installment on Chapters 2 and 3, "Emotions are constructed, and are not universal"

According to the classical view of emotion, our faces hold the key to assessing emotions objectively and accurately (Darwin, Tomkins, Izard, Ekman)..As it turns out in study after study, facial muscle movements do not reliably indicate when someone is angry, sad, or fearful; they don’t form predictable fingerprints for each emotion…An emotion like “Fear” does not have a single expression but a diverse population of facial movements that vary from one situation to the next…Likewise, happiness, sadness, anger, and every other emotion you know is a diverse category, with widely varying facial movements.

With respect to emotions and the autonomic nervous system (controlling heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, etc.) .. None of four significant meta-analyses, the largest of which covered more than 220 physiology studies and nearly 22,000 test subjects, found consistent and specific emotion fingerprints in the body. .. On different occasions, in different contexts, in different studies, within the same individual and across different individuals, the same emotion category involves different bodily responses. Any emotion category has tremendous variety, and variation, not uniformity, is the norm. This requires population thinking. A category such as anger can only be described as a collection of instances with no distinctive fingerprint at their core. There is far more variation than the classical view of emotion predicts or can explain. The category can be described at the group level only in abstract, statistical terms.

If not in facial expressions or autonomic nervous system changes, can fingerprints of emotions such as fear be found in the brain? Brain lesion studies undermine the idea that the amygdala contains the circuit for fear. They point instead to the idea that the brain must have multiple ways of creating fear, and therefore the emotion category “Fear” cannot be necessarily localized to a specific region. Results for other emotion categories have been similarly variable. Brain regions like the amygdala are routinely important to emotion, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion. Many combinations of neurons can produce the same emotional category - this degeneracy is a humbling reality check.

The brain contains core systems that participate in creating a wide variety of mental states. A single core system can play a role in thinking, remembering, decision-making, seeing, hearing, and experiencing and perceiving diverse emotions. A core system is “one to many”: a single brain area or network contributes to many different mental states. The classical view of emotion, in contrast, considers particular brain areas to have dedicated psychological functions, that is, they are “one to one.” Core systems are therefore the antithesis of neural fingerprints. Most neurons are multipurpose, playing more than one part, much as flour and eggs in your kitchen can participate in many recipes.

A meta-analysis covering every usable published neuroimaging study on anger, disgust, happiness, fear, and sadness, (nearly 100 published studies involving nearly 1,300 test subjects across almost 20 years) found that no brain region contained the fingerprint for any single emotion. Fingerprints are also absent if you consider multiple connected regions at once (a brain network), or stimulate individual neurons with electricity. The same results hold in experiments with other animals that allegedly have emotion circuits, such as monkeys and rats. Emotions arise from firing neurons, but no neurons are exclusively dedicated to emotion. These findings are the final, definitive nail in the coffin for localizing emotions to individual parts of the brain.

Brain circuitry operates by the many-to-one principle of degeneracy: instances of a single emotion category, such as fear, are handled by different brain patterns at different times and in different people. Conversely, the same neurons can participate in creating different mental states (one-to-many). …variation is the norm. Emotion fingerprints are a myth. If we want to truly understand emotions, we must start taking that variation seriously. We must consider that an emotion word, like “anger,” does not refer to a specific response with a unique physical fingerprint but to a group of highly variable instances that are tied to specific situations. 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. .. instances of “Anger” vary in their physical manifestations (facial movements, heart rate, hormones, vocal acoustics, neural activity, and so on), and this variation might is related to their environment or context.

A unified view of reasons and emotions.

As indicated in my Nov. 18 post, I have been taking a mini-sabbitical from grinding out daily MindBlog posts to sort out my understanding of what emotions are. The catalyst for this pause has been my careful reading of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book “How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.” I have dutifully abstracted text clips (and dived into some primary reference sources) to line up core points in each chapter. I will proceed, as I have with books by Metzinger, Harari, Pinker, Sapolsky, Graziano, Gilbert and others, to do a series of posts on the chapters. I have decided to cut to the chase, and present the bottom lines I agree with urging you to read the book to find the sometimes massive amounts of evidence presented. Barretts’ presentation is a bit more folksy, rambling, and disorganized that suits my taste, but her style does make the material more friendly and palatable to a general readership. 

What we are now seeing is a new view of what emotions are, fueled by data from improving brain imaging techniques that started to appear in the 1990’s. Here is my paraphrase and editing of Barrett’s introduction:

The classical view of ancient Greek philosophers up through prominent modern thinkers is that we have many evolved universal emotion circuits in our brains (for fear, sadness, rage, etc), each with a distinctive fingerprint, brute reflexes often at war with our rationality. Embedded in our social institutions and legal systems is the assumption that emotions are part of our inherent animal nature, needing control by rational thoughts.

In fact they are not universal, varying from culture to culture, with a century of effort failing to reveal a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion (for example in facial expressions, heart rate, blood pressure, or brain activity patterns).

The classical view of emotion remains compelling, despite evidence against it, because it’s intuitive. It provides reassuring answers to deep questions like where we come from, evolutionarily speaking, whether we are responsible for our actions when we get emotional.

Barrett’s ‘theory of constructed emotion’ takes the data to show that

…emotions are not built in, but made from more basic parts. They are not triggered but emerge as you create them from a combination of the physical properties of your body and a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever physical and cultural environment it develops in. Emotions are real in same sense that money is real - a product of human agreement.

A core distinction is between: 

-essentialism, which posits evolved hard wired modules of behavior such as a universal set of basic emotions signaled by stereotypes brain, facial and visceral changes, or a layered triune brain generating evolutionarily older and newer behaviors. 

versus 

-constructionism, which describes virtually all behaviors as being instances of construction transiently executed on the fly to deal with affect (feelings) registered along axes of valence (pleasant/unpleasant) and intensity (calm vs. arousal) using a basic toolkit of evolved brain hubs. (An analogy would be the many kinds of bakery products that can be made from the same simple set of ingredients such as flour, water, eggs, fat, etc,). 

The ultimate referent is suggested to be interoceptive sensing of allostatic (achieving stability) well being. The interoceptive sensory cortex of the brain’s insula appears to be central to generating our feelings (affect) of comfort/discomfort, pleasant/unpleasant, calm/arousal - the valence and degrees of arousal that inform actions such as the four F’s (fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fornicating), our emotions, and our feelings - all in the service of maintaining general well being. 

 *******

Subsequent posts will deal with material in chapters 1-13 of Barrett’s book. Here is the next installment, on Ch. 1.

Your brain is not for thinking.

Lisa Feldman Barrett,the author whose book has prompted me to take a mini-sabbitical from MindBlog to do a period of study, has an Op-Ed piece in today's NYTimes that I suggest you read. A few clips to whet your appetite:

Much of your brain’s activity happens outside your awareness. In every moment, your brain must figure out your body’s needs for the next moment and execute a plan to fill those needs in advance...Your brain runs your body using something like a budget... The budget for your body tracks resources like water, salt and glucose as you gain and lose them. Each action that spends resources, such as standing up, running, and learning, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits.

It may seem less natural to view your mental life as a series of deposits and withdrawals. But your own experience is rarely a guide to your brain’s inner workings. Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe you experience, every kindness you extend and every insult you bear or sling is part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs.

There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body. This is one reason physical actions like taking a deep breath, or getting more sleep, can be surprisingly helpful in addressing problems we traditionally view as psychological.

We’re all living in challenging times, and we’re all at high risk for disrupted body budgets. If you feel weary from the pandemic and you’re battling a lack of motivation, consider your situation from a body-budgeting perspective. Your burden may feel lighter if you understand your discomfort as something physical. When an unpleasant thought pops into your head, like “I can’t take this craziness anymore,” ask yourself body-budgeting questions. “Did I get enough sleep last night? Am I dehydrated? Should I take a walk? Call a friend? Because I could use a deposit or two in my body budget.”

I’m not saying you can snap your fingers and dissolve deep misery, or sweep away depression with a change of perspective. I’m suggesting that it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it. Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times.

We have been wrong about what emotions are - MindBlog is taking a study mini-sabbitical

I have been doing a careful reading of Barrett's book "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" - hence the decreased frequency of MindBlog posts. Much of the material in the book references research that MindBlog has dutifully reported, showing that our brains are prediction machines working with statistical probabilities, how what we see is what we expect to see, etc. But MindBlog has been seriously remiss in not pointing out the conflicts with, and continuing to use, concepts and categories that we now know to be flawed, such as the triune brain model, emotional categories and facial expressions that are erroneously claimed to be universal across cultures, etc. When I have finished my reading and abstracting of Barrett's book, I hope to pass on a synopsis of the main points, trying to be cautious about the new constructionist models replacing older essential assumptions about evolutionarily hard wired circuits dedicated to specific emotional categories. I want to be sure I'm not tossing out the baby with the bathwater, as far as our older essentialist explanations are concerned. Anyway, as this post's title indicates, I'm diverting time away from the scanning of journals' tables of contents that I use to find interesting material to post. 

Here is the first installment in the series of posts on Barrett's book.  

Nature's lessons for a more kind society.

I recently came across this 2009 MindBlog post... relevant to our times. Here is a re-post (this link to the original post takes you to some comments.)

Blog reader Gary Olson has pointed me to his review of Franz De Waal's new book "The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons For A Kinder Society." From that review:

de Waal provides compelling support for the proposition that humans are “preprogrammed to reach out.” From dolphins ferrying injured companions to safety and grieving elephants, baboons and cats (yes, even cats) to commiserating mice and hydrophobic chimps risking death to save a drowning companion, this is a major contribution to understanding the biological genesis of our inborn capacity for empathy, hence morality. In seven crisply written and wholly accessible chapters de Waal methodically demolishes the rationale behind Gordon Gekko’s admonition in the film "Wall Street" that greed “captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”...De Waal objects to an unrestrained market system, not capitalism itself. He prefers that the economic system be mitigated by more attention to empathy in order to soften its rough edges...Nevertheless, de Waal seriously underestimates certain capitalist imperatives and the role played by elites in cultivating callousness, thereby undermining social solidarity, reciprocity and empathy. Capitalist culture devalues an empathic disposition, and, as Erich Fromm argued some fifty years ago, there is a basic incompatibility between the underlying principles of capitalism and the lived expression of an ethos of empathy.

The complexity model of societal collapse

Continuing in the thread of the previous MindBlog post describing Turchin's historical model, I want to point to Ben Ehrenreich's piece that also describes Joseph Tainter's model for the collapse of complex societies (PDF here). Some slightly edited clips:

Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems...large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all...a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which itself requires ever more complex structures, which become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they pile up.

His second proposal is based on an idea borrowed from the classical economists of the 18th century. Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits. “It’s a classic ‘Alice in Wonderland’ situation,” Tainter says. You’re “running faster and faster to stay in the same place.” Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.

Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse. We go about our lives, addressing problems as they arise. Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture. The result is a “rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.” In human terms, that means central governments disintegrating and empires fracturing into “small, petty states,” often in conflict with one another. Trade routes seize up, and cities are abandoned. Literacy falls off, technological knowledge is lost and populations decline sharply. “The world,” Tainter writes, “perceptibly shrinks, and over the horizon lies the unknown.”

“The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”...The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.

If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability. Perhaps our ability to band together, to respond creatively to new and difficult circumstances is not some tragic secret snare, as Tainter has it, a story that always ends in sclerotic complexity and collapse. Perhaps it is what we do best. When one way doesn’t work, we try another. When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.

These few clips do not to justice to Ehrenreich's article, which notes the ideas of other thinkers, and contemporary research initiatives. I recommend you read the whole thing.

Our looming civil unrest is predicted by Turchin's historical model.

I recommend you have a look at Graeme Wood's article on the writing and thoughts of Peter Turchin, who has developed a model based on the past 10,000 years of human history that in 2010 predicted that an "age of discord" worse than most Americans have experienced would get serious around 2020. Here are some clips:

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari.

“You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said....Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-­Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

So, if these clips whet your appetite, you should read the whole article,

The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights

The Nov. 10 issue of PNAS has a open source perspective article authored by an all star cast of prominent thinkers (including Steven Pinker, Same Harris, Paul Bloom, David Buss, David Sloan Wilson....and others). Here is the abstract, a list of the 10 insights and the scientific they suggest, and the article's conclusion.

Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic—across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine has radically changed the structure of our lives, with devastating social and economic consequences that are likely to unfold for years. An evolutionary perspective can help us understand the progression and consequences of the pandemic. Here, a diverse group of scientists, with expertise from evolutionary medicine to cultural evolution, provide insights about the pandemic and its aftermath. At the most granular level, we consider how viruses might affect social behavior, and how quarantine, ironically, could make us susceptible to other maladies, due to a lack of microbial exposure. At the psychological level, we describe the ways in which the pandemic can affect mating behavior, cooperation (or the lack thereof), and gender norms, and how we can use disgust to better activate native “behavioral immunity” to combat disease spread. At the cultural level, we describe shifting cultural norms and how we might harness them to better combat disease and the negative social consequences of the pandemic. These insights can be used to craft solutions to problems produced by the pandemic and to lay the groundwork for a scientific agenda to capture and understand what has become, in effect, a worldwide social experiment.

Insight 1: The Virus Might Alter Host Sociability

 Insight 2: “Generation Quarantine” May Lack Critical Microbial Exposures

 Insight 3: Activating Disgust Can Help Combat Disease Spread

 Insight 4: The Mating Landscape Is Changing, and There Will Be Economic Consequences from a Decrease in Birth Rates

 Insight 5: Gender Norms Are Backsliding, and Gender Inequality Is Increasing

 Insight 6: An Increase in Empathy and Compassion Is Not Guaranteed

 Insight 7: We Have Not Evolved to Seek the Truth

 Insight 8: Combating the Pandemic Requires Its Own Evolutionary Process

 Insight 9: Cultural Evolutionary Forces Impact COVID-19 Severity

 Insight 10: Human Progress Continues

Conclusion

COVID-19 has brought radical change, through deaths, stress of extended quarantine, confusion that slowed adequate responding, social unrest at a massive scale, and a long and uncertain social and economic aftermath. This radical change is global—no human, anywhere, is unaffected by COVID-19.

To understand the virus and our response to it, we need to understand how viruses and humans evolve. We know that there is a long history of the coevolution of viruses and humans. Viruses evolve to exploit their hosts to encourage their own replication, but they also depend on hosts to survive. Humans can tolerate some manipulation by viruses, but we have also evolved to combat them. This delicate coevolutionary dance is why we often seem to be running as fast as we can, just to stay in the same place (90).

However, humans also possess the tool of scientific insight that gives us a broader view than what the virus can see. Perhaps this can help us stay one step ahead. By understanding the nature of viral strategies, we can better anticipate the spread of COVID-19 and try to block it. Likewise, by understanding human nature, we can try to activate evolved motivational systems that will help fight the virus, such as providing cues that trigger our behavioral immune system. Understanding human nature will also enhance our ability to address the aftermath of COVID-19, as it has disrupted so many of our fundamental human activities, such as mating, parenting, and simply maintaining social contact.

Herein, we have described 10 insights offered by a broad range of evolutionary thinkers, with expertise ranging from evolutionary medicine to broadscale cultural evolution. These insights offer possibilities for guiding science to address the spread of COVID-19 and its inevitable aftermath. However, these insights represent only a limited snapshot of this historic moment, and a selection of topics, although important, that an evolutionary perspective on the pandemic can provide.

The objective in providing these insights is to help make sense of the vast confusion that mars this pandemic and to illuminate paths for research. In addition to insights that can produce immediate action, the pandemic has provided us with unique opportunities to witness human nature as it unfolds, from changes in patterns of reproduction, shifting social norms, and curiosities of cognition that can warp our recognition of threat. This paper is a call to action in science—both in the application of existing knowledge about viral and human nature and also as an opportunity to make discoveries that would not be possible except when a global social experiment is underway.

Increasing acceptance of psychotropic drugs reflected by US Election results

Several landmark drug reform measures were passed in the recent election. Four states legalized recreational marijuana, one state decriminalizing natural psychedelics, and Oregon decriminalizing all drugs and legalizing psilocybin psychotherapy. Andrew Sullivan comments on The Psychedelic Election. New York is getting its first psychedelic-medicine center, with the help of a startup called MindMed, which develops hallucinogens to treat mental illness and addiction. Several studies are showing psilocybin to be effective for treatment-resistant depression.

Oxytocin can increase or decrease anxiety-related behaviors.

Duque-Wilckens et al. report experiments in mice showing that oxytocin, usually regarding as reducing anxious behaviors, enables stress-induced social anxiety behaviors if it is produced outside of its normal source in the hypothalmus.  

Significance

The neuropeptide oxytocin is an important regulator of social behavior and is widely considered to reduce anxiety-related behaviors. However, growing evidence suggests that sometimes oxytocin increases anxiety. How can the same molecule have such different effects on behavior? Here we provide evidence that oxytocin produced outside of the hypothalamus is necessary and sufficient for stress-induced social anxiety behaviors. This suggests that the diverse effects of oxytocin on anxiety-related behaviors are mediated by circuit-specific oxytocin action.

Abstract

Oxytocin increases the salience of both positive and negative social contexts and it is thought that these diverse actions on behavior are mediated in part through circuit-specific action. This hypothesis is based primarily on manipulations of oxytocin receptor function, leaving open the question of whether different populations of oxytocin neurons mediate different effects on behavior. Here we inhibited oxytocin synthesis in a stress-sensitive population of oxytocin neurons specifically within the medioventral bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNSTmv). Oxytocin knockdown prevented social stress-induced increases in social vigilance and decreases in social approach. Viral tracing of BNSTmv oxytocin neurons revealed fibers in regions controlling defensive behaviors, including lateral hypothalamus, anterior hypothalamus, and anteromedial BNST (BNSTam). Oxytocin infusion into BNSTam in stress naïve mice increased social vigilance and reduced social approach. These results show that a population of extrahypothalamic oxytocin neurons plays a key role in controlling stress-induced social anxiety behaviors.

Power to the people (on climate change policy)

Cathleen O'Grady points to a good model for the United States - countries using citizens' assemblies to address longer term problems that politicians - focused mainly on their next election - fail to address. Motivated readers can obtain the full text by emailing me.

Summary

A growing number of countries are turning to citizens' assemblies—randomly selected groups of ordinary citizens—to offer suggestions on thorny policy matters, including climate change. The U.K. Climate Assembly produced its final policy recommendations last month, following a French assembly that recommended including climate goals in the French constitution, and an Irish assembly that led to a government plan to quadruple its carbon tax. Advocates of the method say random selection can cut through the polarization that emerges when politics listens only to the loudest voices, and that citizens can engage in longer term thinking than elected politicians, producing more ambitious proposals and bolstering political will. Scotland, Denmark, and Spain have announced their own climate assemblies, joining the worldwide surge of experiments in deliberative democracy.

Learned hopefulness

My son Jon pointed me to an irreverent 'Life Advice' column by Mark Manson whose Nov. 2 installment had an interesting piece describing Marin Seligman's updating of the interpretation of his classical 'learned helplessness' experiments.  I urge you to read the first of the three ideas ("Natural helplessness, learned hopefulness") presented in the Nov. 2 newsletter.  Jon had previously mentioned the free weekly column to me, but, as a sign of my age, I was so turned off by its title, "Mindf*ck Monday" and the gratuitous vulgarity of Manson's prose that I wrote it off. No longer...after looking at Manson's website I've signed on for a free subscription to his weekly letter. I have to get used to the language that our 40-something future leaders use to communicate. 

 

 

Healing the partisan partisan divide - is there a vital center?

A recent NYTimes OpEd by David Brooks notes that Biden has been taking steps towards healing political polarization and divisiveness. Andrew Sullivan echoes this theme in his Weekly Dish article "Healing From The Center Out". A clip from Sullivan:

Biden ran a campaign, in stark contrast to Clinton’s, focused not on rallying the base around identity grievances, but on persuading the other side with argument and engagement. If you believe in liberal democracy — in persuasion, dialogue, and civility — and want to resist tribalism, Biden may be our unexpected but real last chance. And in this campaign, he has walked the walk.

His core message, which has been remarkably consistent, is not a divisive or partisan one. It is neither angry nor bitter. Despite mockery and scorn from some understandably embittered partisans, he has a hand still held out if Republicans want to cooperate. In this speech at Warm Springs, where Biden invoked the legacy of FDR, you can feel the Obama vibe, so alien to the woke: “Red states, blue states, Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, and Liberals. I believe from the bottom of my heart, we can do it. People ask me, why are you so confident Joe? Because we are the United States of America.”

Reading these pieces has made me want to pass on this link to a youtube video of a Braver Angels public forum I attended recently titled "A Vital Center in the Age of Trump and Wokeness?," where Braver Angel's Luke Nathan Phillips hosted a conversation between Geoffrey Kabaservice, Director of Political Studies at the Niskanen Center, and Shadi Hamid, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, on the future of the political center in our polarized age.  Like the Braver Angels organization, The National Institute for Civil Discourse also sponsors programs aimed at engaging differences constructively.