How Emotions are Made
I spent almost a month finishing this book. It truly transformed my understanding of emotions. After reading it, I realized that I can actually make things happen by changing my thoughts, which in turn affects the brain’s predictions and ultimately changes reality. It also helped me navigate difficult times when strong emotions arise. By changing my interpretation of these feelings, I can help myself feel better. This book is truly amazing and a must-read.
My Notes
Introduction
The author claimed that emotions are made, not triggered. When something happens, our brain predicts what our body should do to cope with the situation, and then we interpret this response as an “emotion” based on what we have learned from our culture.
1. The Search for Emotion’s Fingerprints
In the beginning of her research, the author sought to identify distinct “fingerprints” of emotions through facial expressions, adhering to the mainstream view she was taught. However, her experiments revealed that there is no consistent facial or bodily fingerprint for any single emotion. This led her to adopt a mindset of population thinking and shift her focus to the brain. Although the amygdala was traditionally seen as the “center of fear,” her research team discovered that its activity increases with any novel face, not just those that induce fear. After two decades of research, she concluded that no brain region contains a unique fingerprint for any single emotion. Variation is the norm; the idea of emotion fingerprints is a myth. The author believes that we need a new theory to understand what emotions are and where they come from.
2. Emotions are constructed
When I first looked at the initial page of this chapter, I saw only black blobs. However, after seeing the original picture in the appendix, which revealed a bee, I could no longer view the blobs without thinking of the bee, even though there is no bee in the blob picture. This experience illustrates how our past experiences give meaning to our present sensations. The process of shifting from the unknown to the known is invisible to us, and it is so habitual that we can’t observe ourselves experiencing it. This is called simulation. Simulations are our brain’s guesses about what is happening in the world. They allow our brain to impose meaning on the noise, selecting what is relevant and ignoring the rest. The same neural construction process can be applied to emotions. The author provides an example where she misinterpreted a fluttering stomach and a flushing face as signs of attraction to someone, but it turned out to be the flu.
This leads to 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 emotions. This theory tosses away the most basic assumptions of the classical view: there are no “fingerprints” of emotion categories, no “ancient emotion circuits,” and emotions are neither inborn nor universal.
3. The myth of universal emotions
The author and her research team explained that there are no universal emotions, based on research conducted in villages far from Western culture. Moreover, the basic emotion method has influenced testers through improperly designed tests, leading to misleading results. Since many experiments are based on this method, both scientists and the public misunderstand “emotional expressions” and “emotion recognition.” The author proposed that emotions are constructed, not innate, and will explain why emotions are constructed in the next four chapters.
4. The origin of feeling
Simple pleasant and unpleasant feelings come from an ongoing process inside us called interoception. Interoception is our brain’s representation of all sensations in our body. This interoceptive activity produces the spectrum of basic feelings from pleasant to unpleasant, from calm to jittery, and even completely neutral. Interoception is one of the core ingredients of emotion. The traditional stimulus-response view of our brain is misguided. The intrinsic brain activity always continues, and it is structured by collections of neurons, called intrinsic networks. (They work like football teams, each game has different team players on play.) Our brain is entombed in a dark, silent box, so with inputs and only past experiences as a guide, our brain makes predictions, which are its best guesses of what’s going on in the world around us, and how to deal with it to keep us alive and well. Through prediction, our brain constructs the world we experience. Our brain performs a prediction loop every moment – predict, simulate, compare, and resolve errors. When prediction errors occur, our brain can change the prediction or filter the sensory input so it’s consistent with the prediction (lying to us!). Our brain is always predicting, and its most important mission is predicting our body’s energy needs. Some regions of our brain form an interoceptive network that issues predictions about our body and updates our brain’s model of our body in the world. We can consider the network in two general parts. The body-budgeting regions send predictions to the body to control its internal environment; the primary interoceptive cortex represents sensations inside our body. The two parts participate in a prediction loop. Each time the body-budgeting regions predict a motor change, like speeding up the heart, they also predict the sensory consequences of that change, like a pounding feeling in our chest. These sensory predictions are called interoceptive predictions, and they flow to our primary interoceptive cortex to be simulated. The primary interoceptive cortex also receives sensory inputs from the body and compares them with the simulation, computing prediction error, completing the loop, and ultimately creating interoceptive sensations. Whenever our brain predicts a movement, our body-budgeting regions adjust the budget. In this manner, any event that significantly impacts our body budget becomes personally meaningful. The simple feeling mentioned at the start of this chapter is called affect. Affect is the general sense of feeling that we experience throughout each day. Affect is always some combination of valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (calm to agitated). Interoception regulates our body budget, not to manufacture affect; affect is a simple summary of our budgetary state. When our budget is unbalanced, our affect doesn’t instruct us how to act; it prompts our brain to search for explanations. Our brains predict which objects and events will impact our body budget, and they are collectively called our affective niche. Affect leads us to believe that objects and people in the world are inherently negative or positive. The phrase “an unpleasant image” is really shorthand for “an image that impacts my body budget, producing sensations that I experience as unpleasant.” People like to say that seeing is believing, but affective realism demonstrates that believing is seeing. A bad feeling doesn’t mean something is wrong, it just means we’re taxing our body budget. Our body-budgeting regions are like a mostly deaf scientist: they make predictions but have a hard time listening to the incoming evidence. This means the sensations we feel from our body don’t always reflect the actual state. In short, we feel what our brain believes. Affect primarily comes from prediction. The bottom line is this: our brain is structured so that no decision or action can be free of interoception and affect. Our bodily feeling right now will influence what we will feel and do in the future. The next chapter will explain how interoceptive sensations become emotions and why we experience them in such diverse ways.
5. Concepts, goals, and words
Although the rainbow is a continuous spectrum of light, we see discrete stripes of color. Our brain uses our mental concepts for colors to group wavelengths in certain ranges of the spectrum, categorizing them as same color.
Concepts linked to everything we do and perceive, and they all linked to our body budget. The winning instance guides us to regulate our body budget appropriately. The concept of a “thing” is not like definitions in dictionaries, they are shaped by our goal in a given situation. When we categorize, we are not finding similarites in the world but creating them. Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts. For example, instances of happiness are highly variable. However, your physical changes are equivalent for some goal, like to feel accepted, feel pleasure, achieve an ambition, etc. In a particular context, some instances of concepts are more effective to achieve a particular goal, they compete and the most suitable instances outlive all rivals to fit our goal in the moment. This is categorization.
Infants have the ablilty to learn patterns and statistical regulataries. Words give infants access to information that can’t be found by observing the world and only resides our mind, namely, mental similarities: goals, intentions, preferences. Words allow infants to begin grow goal-based concepts, including emotion concepts. As we mentioned before “variation is the norm” in emotion, the most visible commonality of an emotion share is that they are called same. Successful communication requires that you and your friend are using synchronized concepts.
We aquired the collective knowledge from people interact with us to create our social world. Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are our constructions of the world.
The author gives an example. In the situation “I saw a snake. I screamed and fled”, I didn’t see a snake and categorize it. I didn’t feel the urge to run and categorize it. I didn’t feel my heart pounding and categorize it. I categorized sensations in order to see the snake, to feel my heart pounding, and to run. I correctly predicted these sensations, and in doing so, explained them with an instance of the concept “Fear”. This is how emotions are made.
6. How the brain makes emotions
Our brain learns patterns from the world. We want our brain to cost less when learning, so it must transfer information efficiently by passing it to as few neurons as possible. To achieve this, we have a cortex that represents concepts so that similarities are separated from differences. For example, if we have two sets of neurons firing to represent crossed lines, a third group of neurons could summarize the relationship between the two lines as an “angle”. The concept of “angle” is itself part of other concepts. We distill widely dispersed firing patterns for individual senses into one multisensory summary, representing the information in a minimal, efficient form for future use.
Concepts and predictions are actually the same. When our brain “constructs an instance of an emotion concept”, that is equivalent to saying our brain “issues a prediction” of the emotion. Think of prediction as “applying” a concept, modifying the activity in our primary sensory and motor regions, and correcting or refining as needed. We build concepts by compressing and extracting sensory input to create an efficient, multisensory summary; and we predict by unpacking the summary of all sensory input into a gigantic cascade of more detailed predictions.
The control network helps us decide which sensory input is important and which is noise. It also helps construct instances of emotion. Our interoceptive network launches hundreds of different concepts, and our control network assists in efficiently constructing and selecting among the candidate instances so our brain can pick a winner. These two core networks are critical for constructing emotion and contain most of the major hubs for communication throughout the entire brain.
In every waking moment, our brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide our actions and give our sensations meaning. This is called “categorization”. Categorization bestows new functions on biological signals, not by virtue of their physical nature but by virtue of your knowledge and the context around you in the world.
7. Emotions as social reality
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound? Scientifically, no. A sound is not an event that is detected in the world. It is an experience constructed when it interacts with a body that detects changes in air pressure and a brain that can make those changes meaningful. Are emotions real? Emotions are real, but real in the same manner as the sound of a tree falling. They are all constructed in the brain of a perceiver, and they are real because people agree that they’re real.
No matter if emotions are real in nature or are illusory, emotion concepts have social reality. Color, falling trees, and money also have social reality. How do emotions become real? First, a group of people agree that a concept exists, such as “Flower,” “Cash,” or “Happiness,” which is called collective intentionality. Second, language provides the most efficient shorthand for communicating concepts, especially purely mental concepts.
Emotion concepts, like all concepts, make meaning. Concepts prescribe action. Concepts have the ability to regulate our body budget. These three functions are about us alone, but emotion concepts have two other functions that draw other individuals into our circle of social reality: emotion communication and social influence.
We need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. We can’t experience the emotion concepts from a language we don’t know; we can only experience part of them. This doesn’t match common sense, but if emotions are constructed by prediction, and we can predict with the concepts we possess, well… there we have it. Emotion acculturation is the process of bootstrapping new concepts from a new culture. This taxes the body budget, and we must get by with conceptual combination, which can be effortful and yields only an approximate meaning, or we’ll be awash in prediction error much of the time.
8. A new view of human nature
The theory of constructed emotion gives us a different view of what it means to be a human being. The line between brain and world is permeable, perhaps nonexistent, since interoception enables our brain to construct the environment in which we live. The theory of constructed emotion also leads to a whole new way of thinking about personal responsibility. “Responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change our concepts. Sometimes, responsibility means that we are the only ones who can change things. On the whole, the theory of constructed emotion takes into account both evolution and culture.
The classical idea of emotions was mostly created by misinterpreted thoughts from Darwin and William James. We wasted time, money, and lives searching for fingerprints of emotions, but now we’re in a golden age of mind and brain research. Rather than ideology, the new, data-driven understanding of emotion and ourselves leads to innovative ideas about how to live a fulfilling and healthful life. If our 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.
9. Mastering your emotions
The most basic thing we can do to master our emotions is to keep your body budget in good shape. Modern culture is engineered to screw up our body budget. If our predictions become chronically out of sync with our body’s actual needs, it’s hard to bring them back and we’ll feel chronically miserable. What can we do to keey our predictions calibrated and body budget balanced? Eat healthfully, exercise, and get enough sleep. Next, modify our physical comfort if we can. Try massage – human touch is good for our health. Yoga helps us calm down more quickly and effectively. Try to spend time in spaces with less noise and crowding, and more greenery and natural light. Diving into a compelling novel gives us mental excursions and keep us from ruminating (bad for the budget). Set up regular lunch dates with a friend and take turns treating each other. After attending to our body budget, the next best thing we can do for emotional health is to become more emotionally intelligent. We can improve our emotional granularity by gaining new concepts. Perhaps the easiest way to gain concepts is to learn new words. Next, keep track of our positive experiences each day, writing them are the best, this helps us predict new moments to cultivate posivity. Make feedback specific, especially to children since they learn from you. What can we do to master our feelings in the moment? The simplest approach is to move our body. Another approach is to change your location or situation. The next big thing to try is recategorizing how we feel. For example, if we can categorize our discomfort as helpful, we can cultivate greater stamina.
10. Emotion and illness
Our new view of human nature dissolved the boundaries between the mental and physical, including where illness is concerned. Pain, stress and illnesses are constructed in the same manner as emotion. Some major disorders considered distinct and “mental” are all because of chronically unbalanced body budget and unbridled inflammation.
Our body budget tilts out of balance when our brain estimates badly. The effects of chronic misbudgeting summon our body’s “debt collectors”, which causes inflammation and releasing cortisol more often, and a vicious cycle can ensue. When we feel fatigued due to inflammation, in order to conserve (our brain mistakenly belives to be) energy, we start eating and sleeping poorly and neglect exercise, and we start feel seriously like crap and enhances our problems. Inflammation in our brain is very bad. It interferes with neural connections and make it harder for us to pay attention and remember things.
Stress is a concept, just like “Happiness” or “Fear”, that we apply to construct experiences from an imbalanced body budget. The mechanisms we construct “Stress” is as same as emotion. What differs is the end result, whether our brain categorizes our sensations as stressful or emotional. If our body budget is unbalanced for a long time, we may experience chronic stress and it is dangerous to our physical health. On the positive side, if we can effectively categorize our interoceptive sensations as emotion (improve emotional intelligent!), we might be better protected against chronic imflammatory processes that lead to poor health.
Pain is an experience that occurs not only from physical damage but also when our brain predicts damage is imminent. Pain, like emotion and stress, appears to be a whole-brain constuction. We simulate pain and therefore feel it. Distinguishing between pain, stress, and emotion is a form of emotional granularity. When our body budget’s not in shape, meaning our interoceptive predictions are miscalibrated, we may hurt more. When people experience ongoing pain without any damate to their body tissue, it’s called chronic pain. Scientists now consider chronic pain to be a brain disease with its roots in inflammation, and it seems to be a tragic case of predicting poorly and receiving misleading data from our body.
Depression is also a concept. The author thinks that depression occues when our brain cannot properly correct its predictions based on actual sensory information from our body. Our momentary experience would be constructed from the past but not corrected by the present. Our feelings drive our next thought , as well as our perceptions, as predictions. So a depressed brain keeps making withdrawals from the budget, basing its predictions on similar withdrawals from the past. This means constantly reliving difficult, unplesant events. We wind up in a cycle of budgeting imbalances and uncorrected predictions. How can we break the cycle of misbudgeting? Change interoceptive predictions to be more in line with what’s going on around us. To mention, no treatment works for everyone.
Anxiety seems very different from chronic pain and depression. However, the author speculates that an anxious brain is the opposite of a depressed brain. In depression, prediction is dialed way up and prediction error way down, so we’re locked into the past. In anxiety, the metaphorical dial is stuck on allowing too much prediction error from the world, and too many predictions are unsuccessful. With insuffcient prediction, we don’t know what’s coming around the next corner, and that’s classic anxiety.
Many phenonema thet were once considered purely mental (depression, anxiety, stress, chronic pain) can, in fact, be explained in biological terms; other phenonema that were believed to be purely physical (pain), are also mental concepts. To be an effective architect of our experience, we need to dintinguish physical reality from social reality, and never mistake one for the other, while still understanding that the two are irrevocably entwined.
11. Emotion and the law
The ultimate rules for emotion in any society are set by its legal system. The law is a social contract that exists in a social world. We are responsible for our actions. Other people are not responsible for our actions. We detect a defendant’s feeling by detecting his or her emotions in expressions. We make a just, moral decision by setting our emotions aside. Physical harm is worse than emotional harm. All of these assumptions are baked into the law at its deepest levels, even as neuroscience has been quietly debunking them as myths. The author claims that some people are punished undeservedly, and others escape punishment, based on an outdated theory of the mind that is rooted in belief rather than science.
According to U.S. law, rational killing is considered worse than emotional killing. The U.S. legal system assumes that emotions are part of our supposed animal nature and causes us to perform foolish and even violent acts, unless we control them with our rational thoughts. For example, heat-of-passion defense is saying that anger makes people conform their actions to the law, and so partially mitigates a person’s responsibility for his actions. Also, the legal system assumes that “cognitive control” in the brain is synonymous with rational thought, deliberate actions, and free will.
The legal system, with its essentialized view of the mind and brain, mixes up volition (our brain controlling our behavior) and awareness of volition (we experience having a choice). However, our brain’s sensory and motor neurons communicate through intermediaries, called association neurons. When an association neuron receives a signal from a sensory neuron, it has not one possible action but two: it can stimulate or inhibit a motor neuron. This is the biological basis of choice. Our brain’s control network is composed of association neurons, and is always engaged, actively selecting our actions; we just don’t always feel in control. In other words, our experience of being in control is just that – an experience. The law defines free will as whether we feel in control, it fails to distinguish between our ability to choose and our subjective experience of choice. The two are not the same in the brain. Emotions are not temporary deviations from rationality, they are our contructions of the world.
The legal system has a standard called the reasonable person who represents the norms of society, that is, the social reality within our culture. For example, people believe men are angrier. Women are supposed to be victims, and good victims shouldn’t become angry; they’re supposed to be afraid. This stereotype causes men who kill get shorter and lighter sentences then women. There is no scientific justification for the law’s view of men’s and women’s emotions. They are merely beliefs that come from an outdated view of human nature.
Jurors and judges are charged with an almost impossible task: to be a mind reader and lie detector. They must decide if a person intended to cause harm. However, they infer intent, usually in line with their own beliefs, stereotypes, and current body states. Affective realism decimated the ideal of the impartial juror. Memories are also simulations, created by the same core networks that construct experiences and perceptions of emotion. The boundaries between mental and physical are porous and emotional harm can shorten our life (stress causes telomeres to get smaller), but the law considers emotional damage to be less serious than physical damage.
To address above problems, the author proposed an affective science manifesto for the legal system – expressions of emotion, reality, self-control, beware “my brain made me do it” defense, and be mindful of essentialism. Moreover, the author thinks it is time to reevaluate trial by jury as the bases for determining guilt and innocence.
The law usually considers responsibility in two parts: actions caused by you (more responsibility) and actions caused by the situation (less responsibility). In a consturction view of human nature, every human action involves three types of responsibility, not two. The first is traditional: our behavior in the moment (actus reus, the harmful action). The second involves our specific predictions that brought about the unlawful act (mens rea, the guilty mind). The third relates to the content within our conceptual system. Sometimes it’s trivialized as “society is to blame”, but we are ultimately responsible for the concepts that we accept and reject.
12. Is a growling dog angry?
The author claims that rats, monkeys, apes, dogs regulates their body budgets by interoception, just like us. They also have affect. However, they probably cannot create goal-based concepts and categorize actions and make them meaningful as emotion concepts. Only we can create and share purely mental concepts using words. Social reality is a human superpower.
We have the feeling of animals have emotions is becauese of mental inference fallacy. We apply our emotional concepts, construct perceptions of the emotion, and attribute the emotion to the target animal.
13. From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier
The kind of mind is nost likely to emerge from the kind of brain we’ve talked through the book. Our mind is a product of evolution, but it is not sculpted by genes alone. Our mind is not a battleground between passion and reason. Rather, our mind is a computational moment with our constantly brain. The discoveries reveal a crucial insight: our brain evolved to create more than one kind of mind. Complexity, not rationality, allow us, and others, to remodel our brain and therefore our mind.
Affective realism, concepts, and social reality are inevitable common ingredients of the mind. Affective realism, the phenomenon that we experience what we believe, is inevitable because of our wiring. We can’t escape, but we can recognize. The best defense against affective realism is curiosity. Try to become comfortable with uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and being mindful enough to cultivate doubt. Concepts in our brain are a model of the world that keeps we alive, serves to meet our body’s energy needs, and ultimately determines how well we propagate our genes. Concepts are vital to human survival, bue we must also be careful with them because concepts open the door to essentialism. They encourage us to see things that aren’t present and not to see things that are present. Social reality is the human superpower, we learn from the environment and that social world becomes real to us as well, but we often misconstrue the social as the physical, or vice versa.
From these three inevitabilities of the mind, we see that construction teaches us to be skeptical. Our experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, our brain is wired to model our world, driven by what is relevant for our body budget, and then we experience that model as reality. What we experience as “certainty” – the feeling of knowing what is true about ourselves, each other, and the world around us – is an illusion that the brain manufactures to help us make it through each day. Giving up a bit of that certainty now and then is a good idea. Uncertainty menas that things can be other than they appear. This realization brings hope in difficult times and can prompt gratitude in good times.
