Via text or video or post it to our facebook page. Facebook. Com book, on twitter, book tv0 email us book tv chan cspan. Org. Lisa felledman barrett is here in celebration of her book how emotions are made the secret life of the brain. She is University Distinguished prefer of psychology at Northeastern University with a appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in psychiatry and radiology. She received a National Institutes of Health Directors pioneer award for heir groundbreaking research on emotion in the brain. She is an elected member of the Royal Society of canada. Heres a sampling of the praise. In review Library Journal says barrett presents a new neuroscene tick explanation of why people are more swayed by feeling than facts. She offers intuitive theory that goes against in the popular understanding and that of traditional research. Emotions dont arise, rather, we construct them on the fly. Furthermore, emotions are neither universal nor located in specific brain regions. They very by culture and real from dynamic neuronal networks. Scientific american says talk about freshness of ideas. And wall street journal says its fascinating. And one says their selfie of the brain is brilliant. Help me welcome lisa feldman barrett. [applause] thank you very much. Thank you so much. Its thank you for the lovely introduction. Its very special for me to be here to talk to you about the book this evening because this is actually our home book store. We live in newton and have been coming to news tonville books since it was in newtonville. And then friends and family here as well, and id like to welcome the rest of you as well. What im going to do is read a couple of selections from the book, and then well open it up to questions. So im going to start with a passage i wrote about a Birthday Party that i threw for my daughter when she was 12 years old. We threw the Birthday Party with the theme of gross food. Made pizza that was doctored to look as itself was green and moldy. So it had fuzzy cheese. I made vomit jello. If you want the recipe, let me know. And it actually dish used peach jello and then put in bits and pieces of chopped up little chopped up pieces of vegetable. Served apple juice in medicine urine sample cups. The best part of the party was the game that we had after lunch. Took baby food, mashed carrots, mashed beef, thinks like that, and i smeared itself artfully on tigers to look like pooh and then the kids has to take each diner and hold it up to their nose and take a good, deep whiff, and identified the food by its smell. Even though these kids knew that it was baby food, many of them had a full body gag when they went to smell the tigers. This was exuberant, joyful disgust that we had cultivated in these kids, and this party actually holds the key to understanding how emotions are made. The science of emotion is filled with unintuitive details, very, very counterintuitive. Each day we experience the delight of happiness, the dread of fear, the burn of anger, these days for some of us the burn of anger is a very common emotion and were surrounded be people who are caught up the throes of their own emotions. These experience as compelling as they are dont actually reveal what is going on inside your brian and body your brain and body. This reason for this is that the human brain is a master of deception. It creates experiences and directs actions with a magicians skill, never revealing how and the whole time the brain is giving us a fulls sense of confidence that its products, our experiences these products reveal its inner workings. Emotions seem distinct and feel builtin because that is really how we experience emotions. So, we assume that joy and sadness and fear anding a gary and so on have separate causes inside of us because of the way that we experience emotions. As if its happening to us. So when you have a like ours its easy to come up with the wrong theory of emotions because wore just a bunch of brains figuring out how brains work. So, what id like to do now is give you i guess start at first principles. Lets look around the room. When you look around the room, you see me, you see bookshelves, you see each other. To us it seems as if the visual information from the world just enters the retina of your eye and makes its way to your brain so you see stuff all around you. But that is to go my not what is happening. And im to demonstrate this id like to invite my lovely assistant up, and this is show you an image. So, who here sees a white square in the middle of this image . Right. But there actually is no white square on that page. So, what is your brain doing to conjure an image of a square where no square exists. Theres just open space. Well, this is something that we talk about in the book. What is happening the become explains what is happening in your brain to create the perception of a square where there is none, and it also explains what this has to do with how the brain makes emotion. Thank you, my lovely assistant. Your brain is basically when it looks at that image your brain is adding stuff from the vast array of Prior Experiences of other squares, boxes, rooms, with angles and so on, and its constructing the square that you saw. Neurons in your visual cortex at the back of your brain constructed that image for you. They were changing the firing the own firing to create line that werent present so you could see a shape that actually wasnt physically there. So you were in a manner of speaking hallucinating. Not the scary kind of issue better get to the hospital sore of hallucination but the everyday, my brain is built to work like this hallucination. Your experience of that square reveals a couple of insights. Your past experiences from direct encounters, from photos, movies and books and so on, give meaning to your present sensations. Have you heard a song you cannot get rid of . That is a simulation as well. Cortisol to use the sugar in the apple. Right now your brain is changing the firing of its own sensory neurons. Usual in my book how emotions are made i explained how that is no different from what youre doing right now you make the cure listening to me speak in reacting but in fact your brain is creating simulations that are predicting every single word that comes out of my mouth. [laughter] so your break right now is doing something remarkable neurons in some part of the brain for changing the firing and other parts to anticipate what is coming next. In this is how i like to think about it your brain works like a scientist always making a slew of predictions just like a scientist makes a hypothesis. And then you use and how each prediction was true and then compare them to incoming sensory input so if your brain predicts well said your simulating the apple of i pulled one out to show a two yearold but no new information would enter into your brain but then it captured that visual information than it was exactly as you had predicted it, and no knew information from this apple would enter into your brain because you were already prepared to see it essentially. Lets say the apple was slightly more green than what you would predicted. Your brain would then change, it would learn the error and change its representation of the apple so you would see the apple differently. This is we have a very fancy name for this in the science of psychology and neuro science. We call it learning. And then you can use it to predict better in the future. So then to maintain their or your brain can run experiments to imagine the World Without any prediction error at all just as you did when you imagined the apple orare or are hearing the song you cant get out of your head. Examples i have used here are about objects and events like apples and squares. But the important and wonderful thing is the same process happens about the senations inside your own body. You have to understand how emotions are made. I am at the wrong page. From your brains perspective, your body is just another source of sensory input it has to make meaningful. Sensations from your heart from changing temperature and so on are ambiguous and these purely physical sensations are no objective psychological meaning. If you feel an ache in your stomach while at the dinner table you might experience that as hunger. If it is the flu season it might be nausea. If you are a judge in a courtroom you might be experience that feeling when a defendant cant be trusted. Your brain uses your past experience to give meaning to the internal sensations from the body and external sensations from the world and this is happening throughout your entire life. From an aching stomach your brain constructs hunger, nausea or mistrust. Now consider the same stomach ache can also occur when you are sniffing a diaper that is heavy with lamb like at my daughters Birthday Party or you might experience the ache as longing if your lover walks into the room or if you are in the Doctors Office you might experience the same ache as an anxious feeling. In these cases of disgust, longing and anxiety your brain is using past experience to make sense of the meaning of your aching stomach together with the other senations around you in the world. Sensations. This is how your brain constructs your experiences and guides your actions. This is how emotions are made. Emotions are meaning. They explain your body senations in terms of what is going on around you. The simulations that make emotion not only give you your feelings but also allow your brain to know exactly what to do next. They are prescription for action. So your emotions are not your reactions to the world even though it feels that way to you. In fact, they are your constructions of the world or more precisely your brain is constructing a representation of your body in the world in a given moment and this representation is your experience. Often it is an experience of emotion. Now, this perspective i realize is new to many of you. The book actually provides plenty of examples and a lot of evidence to help you understand how your brain works. When we talk about this as a new there oh, we are using the word theory in a scientific way. A theory is a set of ideas, hypotheses that are backed up by a tremendous amount of Scientific Evidence as is the case with this theory. In how emotions are made, you will learn how the brain works, how this information empowers you to be able to better control your own emotion and improve your emotional intelligence, it will show you how understanding how your brain works can actually benefit you in many domains of your life. And in addition, it also explains why the theory of constructed emotion is so counter intuitive. How emotions are made also uses the science of emotion as a convenient flash lay to illuminate all sorts of issues are emotions are important like in the relationship between physical and mental health. In the law, in communicating across cultures, in rearing your children, and even addressing whether animals have emotions like human emotions. The book takes on one of my favorite topics which is how this new science of emotions changes our understanding of what it means to be human. What i would like to do now is take your questions or listen to your comments and thoughts. And encourage you to have a close look at the book. How is this information about how the brain is working been found . Through an mri . There are a number of scientific literatures. One thing we know for example is from an anatomical perspective we can see the brain is wired were prediction. We can see the brain is wired to use your past experience to make guesses about what is going to happen next and it is sort of continually doing this. Neuro anatomy tells us something about how the brain works predictively. There is evidence from signal processing so your neurons have electrical signals and that is how part of neurons talk to each other. There is evidence from signaling, physiology, certainly evidence from brain imaging as well, evidence from lesion studies of humans and other animals who have brain lesions, there is evidence from observing young babies and children in how they learn to have emotion and learn to experience other people as having emotion to perceive emotion in others, there is evidence from Cross Cultural work where team of researchers, including some of my own, have gone to remote cultures around the world including to africa. We sent two teams to africa. Just a lot of evidence from different domains of signs to reveal to us that even though to us it feels like we are reacting to the world and emotions you know lurk in some deep animalistic parts of our brain our brains are not structured that way and dont really work that way. It sounds like we have little control in a certain way so you know, feeling an emotion i would assume it is not exactly legitimate but that the brain has constructed this. So where is me in a certain way . That is a great question. I actually talk about the self and you know, your ownership of your emotions. When you start to think about how the brain works a couple things are clear. You will never be able to snap your fingers and change how you feel. That is just not possible. You might be able to take a dealing of distress and change it from sadness to anger just by changing the simulation your brain does. But turning down the volume on the intensity of the feeling is super hard to do. That being said, this understanding the Predictive Power of the brain allows you to broaden the horizon. If your brain is using the past experience to predict and construct what you are about to feel, like in the sort of immediate future, it means if you invest a little bit of evidence to cultivate new experiences from the present that feeds your brain to automatically make difference emotions in the future. That is one way that learning the emotions words, concepts from other cultures, can actually broaden the vocabulary of emotions that your brain can make and if you practice it can make them automatically with very little effort from you. There are additional benefits to learning emotional words. For school age children, when you teach them to broad n their emotional vocabulary 2030 minutes a week, it doesnt just improve their social functioning and ability to communicate but improves their test scores and changes the whole emotional climate of a classroom because the kids have more control over their experience and their behavior. Yup . I was going to say something. [inaudible question] a lot of the time we think of emotions as sort of these innate and uncontrollable actions that just happen. But like sort of like being able to recognize that there is nothing about an emotion that is an action. It is all just a prediction. That means you have the capability to recognize that prediction before you act. Which is like it feels very liberating to realize that and being able to change your emotions by represent eggs around you and these new learning instances. I have learned about different therapy like ddt. That is exactly right. Often times i get questions where people ask me how does the theory relate to ddt or different therapy. What you are describing is one really important piece of this. Your brain is automatically constructing stimulations as predictions of what is going to happen next. It is using the present sensory array right now like sights, sounds and feelings from the buddy in the present moment to predict what is going to happen in the next moment. It uses the evidence from the next moment to confirm those predictions and they become your experience or to modify them. One way to also control your emotions is to notice more details, to be mindful of more details in the present moment. That actually gives your brain more freedom to stimulate new and different things. There is a very cool thing that our brains do. Our brains dont just search for a match in your Prior Experience and then retrieve a memory file. Our brains can take bits and pieces of past experience and use them and assemble them in a brand new way to make simulations and therefore predictions. That is how we have, you know, terrific imaginations and how we day dream. But that is really also how we make emotions. So we can make emotions sometimes we dont even have words for because we can make the stimulation on the fly using bits and pieces of past experience. For example, before we had a german word shotten floyd and anyone know what that means . Enjoying the suffering of others. It is to enjoy pleasure at someone elses discomfort. But even before we knew that word we could perceive that emotion but it was difficult. There is a scientific term for this and it is generativety. If i wanted to explain feeling pleasure at someone elses misfortune it would take me a bunch of words to explain the experience and the context in which i was experiencing this emotion so you didnt think i was a horrible person. If you dont know me and i am just telling you how i am feeling pleasure at someone elses dysphor misfortune you might think what is wrong with her. Instead though when we learn the word i can just say a single word to you and conjure in your brain a simulation with many features in a very efficient way. The more detail that you Pay Attention to in the world the more words you learn and concepts you learn and the more control you have over your emotions. I will just say one last thing. Controlling your emotion doesnt mean not making some emotions and making others. It sometimes means not making an emotion. In the book, i describe this instance which is a true story where i was in graduate school and there was this guy asking me out and i kept saying no and eventually i said yes. I went out for coffee and while we are having coffee i realize i am feeling flushed and jittery and having trouble concentrating and thought i must be attracted to him and he asked me to go out again and i was like okay, feeling enthuiastic. I went home, put my keys in the door, opened the door, dropped by keys on the floor and ran to the bathroom and was in bed with the flu for a week. The sweatiness and jitteriness, i wasnt mistaking that for attraction but using those feelings to create attraction. I did date this guy for a couple months actually. But imagine how much grief i would have saved myself if i had been able to not take those feelings and construct an emotion out of them but to construct merely a physical semitism symptom such as im coming down with the flu. Other questions . One thing you talked about, you know, actually seeing what is going on in the world and looking at it. I may be totally wrong about this but i dont think. I read the visual cortext is constantly bomb bar