Transcripts For CSPAN2 How Emotions Are Made 20170709 : vima

CSPAN2 How Emotions Are Made July 9, 2017

University with appointments at Harvard Medical School in massachusetts and General Hospital in psychiatry and radiology. She received a National Institutes of Health Directors pioneer award for her groundbreaking research on emotion in the brain. She is an elected member of the Royal Society of canada. Heres a sampling of the phrase for her and her book. In a review, Library Journal says, she presents a new neuroscientific explanation of why people are more swayed by feelings than fax. She offers an intuitive theory echoes against out on the popular understanding but also 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 vary by culture and result from dynamic neuronal networks. Scientific american calls the book remarkable for its freshness of its ideas and the wall street journal calls it fascinating. In another star review, booklist says quote that secretive selfie of the brain is brilliant. Please help me welcome lisa feldman barrett. [applause] thanks very much. Thank you so much. Thank you for the lovely introduction. Its a very special me to be here to talk to you about the book this evening because this is actually our home bookstore. We live in newton and weve been coming to newtonville books actually since it was in newtonville. And then friends and family here as well, and i 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 we will open it up to questions. So im going to start with a passage that a road about a Birthday Party that i threw for my daughter when she was 12. We through the Birthday Party with the theme of gross foods. So i made pizza that was doctored to look as if it was green and moldy. It had like fuzzy cheese. I made vomit jello picky do want the recipe let me know. Actually, i used peach jello and put in bits and pieces of chopped up pieces of vegetables. I served apple juice in medicine urine sample cups. [laughing] but the best part of this party was the game that we had after lunch. I took baby food, mashed carrots, mashed beef, things like that and i smeared it artfully on diapers to look like to come and the kids had to take each diaper and hold up to the nose and take a good, deep with and identify the food bites. Even though these kids knew that it was baby food, many of them had a fullbodied gag when they went to smell the diapers. This was exuberant, joyful discuss that with cultivated in these kids. And believe it or not this party action holds the key to understanding how emotions are major the signs of emotions is filled with an intuitive detail, very, very counterintuitive. Each day we experience the delight of happiness, the dread of fear, the burn of anger. These days are some of us the burn a bank is a very common emotion. And were surrounded by people are caught up in the throes of their own emotions. But these experiences, as compelling as they are, dont actually reveal whats going on inside your brain and your body. And the reason for this is that the human brain is a master of deception. It creates experiences in direct actions with the magician skill, never revealing how it does so. And the whole time the brain is getting as a false sense of confidence that its products, our expenses, the ones with everyday, that these products review its inner workings. Emotions seem distinct and feel builtin because thats really how we experience emotions. So we assume that joy and sadness and fear and anger and so on have separate causes inside of us because of the way that we experience emotion, as if it is happening to us. So when you have a brain like ours its easy to come up with the wrong theory of emotion because effect largest a bunch of brains try to figure 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, bookshelves, each other. To us it seems as if the visual information from the world just enters the retina of your eyes and makes its way to your brain. So you see stuff all around you. But that is actually not whats happening, and im too divisive this i like to invite my lovely assistant up, and this is my husband. To show you an image. So who here sees a white square in the middle of this image . But there actually is no white square on that page. So what is your brain doing to conjure an image of a square or no squir square exists . Winfax vistas open space. Well, this is something that we talk about in the book. What is happening, the book 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 youthank you, my lovely a. Your brain is basically, when it looks at the image, your brain is adding stuff from its vast array of Prior Experiences of other squares, of boxes, upper rooms with angles and so on, and it is 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, they were changing their own firing to create lines that were not present so that you could see a shape that actually wasnt physically there. So you were in a manner of speaking hallucinating. Not this scary kind of i better get to the hospital sort of hallucination, but the everyday my brain is built to work like this hallucination. Your experience of the score revealed a couple of insights. First of all, your past experiences from direct encounters from photos, from movies and books and so on give meaning to your present sensations. Additionally, the entire process of construction is invisible to you, the matter how hard you try you cant introspect and express yourself constructing that square. And as specially designed except unless the fact that construction is occurring in your brain. The process is so habitual that, in fact, its very difficult for people to not see a square and just see blank space instead. This little magic trick of the brain is called simulation. It means that your brain was changing the firing of its own neurons in the absence of incoming sensory information. There was no come there were no lines either the cause you to see a square. Certain parts of your brain for changing the firing of other neurons in other parts of your brain, which led you to see a square. Simulations can be visual as we just saw but they also involve other senses. So for example, have you ever heard a song playing in your head that you just cant get rid of . Has that ever happened to anyone . So that kind of audio hallucinations also a sort of simulation. Now i want to do some simulation with you. Will do an example right now. I get the last time someone handed you a red, juicy apple. You reached out for it. You took a bite. You experienced the tart flavor, and during those moments neurons in your brain, and essential parts of the brain, in the motor parts of your brain were firing. Motor neurons fired to perdition movements. Sensory neurons fired so that you could process the sensations in the apple, its red color. Maybe it had a blush of green, and may have felt very smooth against your hand. When you get into it you could taste the tangy taste with a hint of sweetness. Other neurons in your brain caused your mouth to water to release enzymes and begin digestion. Release cortisol to prepare your body to metabolize sugars in the apple, and maybe even major stomach turn a little bit. But now heres the really cool thing. Just now when i said the word apple, your brain responded to a certain extent as if the apple was actually present. Your brain combined bits and pieces of knowledge of previous apples that youve seen and tasted and change the firing of neurons in your centur sensory r region to conduct the mental image of an apple. Your brain simulated nonexistent apple using sensory and motor neurons. So who here right now can imagine in the minds i and apple, like a macintosh apple, of the kind that you eat . And who here can hear the cries of the apple when you buy into it . And what about the taste of the apple, sort of tart, maybe with some sweetness . Some people want to give this example actually start come they can feel themselves starting to salivate. Right now your brain is changing the firing of its own sensory neurons so that you have the image of an apple, the case of an apple, the sound of an apple and so on. This kind of simulation, even though were doing it very deliberately right now as an example, is actually a cursory quickly and very automatically in your brain. Its kind of business as usual for how your brain works. In my book how emotions are made i explain how the square and apple are no different from what you are doing right now. You may think youre listening to me speak, reacting to my words, but in fact, your brain is creating simulations that are predicting every single word that comes out of my mouth. [laughing]. Just like the scientists make competing hypothesis and like a scientist, your brain is using knowledge, past experience to estimate how confident you can be that each prediction is true. Your brain then test these predictions by comparing them to incoming sensory input from the world, much like a scientist compares hypothesis against the data in an experiment and if your brain is predicting well, then input from the world confirms your predictions. When you are simply simulating the apple, if an apple and showed it to you and it was exactly as you had stimulated it, as you had predicted it, then no new information from this apple would enter very far into your brain. Because your neurons are already firing in a way that captured the visual information from the apple. You already were prepared to see it essentially. Sometimes though, theres prediction error in your brain, like a scientist has options. It can be a responsible scientist and change its predictions to respond to the data. So lets say the apple was slightly more green than what you had simulated, what you had predicted. Your brain would then change its, it would learn the error and change its representation of the apple so you would see the apple differently. This is, we have a fancy name for this in the science of psychology and neuroscience. We call it learning. This is what you do when you learn. Your brain is taking in information that has not had before so we can use it to predict and get better in the future. Your brain can also be an unscrupulous scientist and enjoy ignore the information altogether like we saw with the square. Or like the quintessential scientists, your brain and run armchair experience to imagine a world of pure simulation without any sensory input or any prediction error at all, just as you did when you imagine the apple or when you are hearing the sound of the song you cant get out of your head. And how emotions are made explain more about how simulations give meaning to sensations that allow you to experience the world and act in the world. The examples that i used here so far are the object and events in the outside world like apples and squares. But the really important and wonderful thing is that this same process happens about the sensations inside your own body. This is a key insight to understanding howemotions are made. So, i am on page. There we go. From your brains perspective, your body is just another source of sensory inputs that it has to make meaningful. Sensations from your heart pounding, from your lungs expanding, from metabolism, from changing temperatures are ambiguous. These early physical sensations inside your body no objectives psychological meaning. If you feel and eight in your stomach while you are sitting at the dinner table, you might experience that as hunger. If flu season is just around the corner, the same eight might be the experience of nausea. If you are a judge in a courtroom, you might experience the eight as a gut feeling that the defendant cant be trusted. In a given moment in a given context, your brain uses your past experience to give meaning to the internal sensations from your body as well as external sensations from the world. This is all happening continuously and simultaneously throughout your entire life. So from an aching stomach, your brain instructs an instance of hunger or nausea or mistrust. Now consider that the same stomachache can also occur when you are sniffing a diaper that heavy with purced lamb as a kid did at my daughters Birthday Party or you might experience the eight as longing if your lover walks into the room or if you are in a Doctors Office waiting for the results of a medical test, you might experience the eight as an anxious feeling. In these cases of disgust and longing and anxiety, your brain is using past experience to make sense of the meaning of your aching stomach together with the other sensations around you in the world. This is how your brain constructs your experiences and guide your actions. This is actually how emotions are made. Emotions are meaning. They explain your body sensations in terms of what is going on around you. The simulations make a motion not only give you your feeling, they also allow your brain to know exactly what to do next. They are prescriptions 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 at any given moment and this representation is your experience, often it is an experience of emotion. 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 theory, we are using the word theory and a specific scientific way. A theory is not just a set of ideas. In science, iberia is a group of ideas that are backed up by a tremendous amount of Scientific Evidence as is the case with its theory. In how emotions are made, you will learn how the brain works. You will learn how this information empowers you to be able to better control your own emotions and improve your emotional intelligence. It will show you how understanding how your brain works can benefit you in many domains of your life. And in addition, it explains why the theory of constructed emotion is so counterintuitive. How emotions are made uses the science of emotion as a convenient flashlight to eliminate all sorts of issues where emotions are important like in the relationship between physical health and Mental Health, in the law, in communicating across cultures, in rearing your children. And even in, it addresses whether animals have emotions like human emotions. The book also takes on one of my favorite topics which is how this new science of emotion fundamentally changes our understanding of human nature, of what it means to be human. So what id like to do now is just take your questions or listen to your comments and thoughts and encourage you to have a close look at the book. So thanks very much. Yes. How is this information about how the brain is forcing sound through mris . Theres a number of different scientific literatures. One thing we know for example is from an anatomical standpoint, just looking how the brain is wired, we can see the brain is not wired for reaction. Its wired for prediction. The brain is wired in such a way when we look at how neurons are talking to each other we can see that the brain is wired use your past experience to make guesses about whats going to happen next and its continually doing this. Neuroanatomy tells us something about how the brakes brain works productively. Theres evidence from signal processing. Your neurons have electrical signals that thats part of how neurons talk to each other with electrical signals so theres evidence from signaling, evidence from physiology, certainly evidence from brain imaging as well. Evidence from lesion studies of humans and other animals who have brain lesions. Theres evidence from observing young babies and children and how they learn to have emotion and learn to experience other people as having emotion, to perceive emotion in others. Theres evidence from crosscultural work where teams of researchers including some of my own have gone to remote cultures around the world including to africa, weve sent two teams to africa. Theres a lot of evidence from a lot of different domains of science to reveal to us that even though to us it feels like we are reacting to the world and that emotion lurks in some deep animalistic part of our brain, actually our brains are really structured that way and they dont work that way. It sounds like we have very little control in certain ways so you know, if im feeling and emotion i would assume its not legitimate exactly but to appreciate the range of constructing this. So where it is me in a certain way. Thats a great question. I talked a little bit about the self and your ownership of your own emotions. One of the things that becomes clear when you start to think about how the brain works, a couple things become clear. One of the things is you will never be able to snap your fingers and change how you feel just like that. Thats not possible for most people to do. You might be able to take a feeling of distress and change it from sadness to anger, for example, just by changing the kind of simulation that your brain does but turning down the volume on the intensity of the feeling is super hard to do. That being said, this understanding of the Predictive Power of the brain allows you to broaden the horizon of control for your emotions. For example, if its really the case that your brain is using your past experience to predict and construct whats, what you are about to feel like in the immediate future, it means that if you invest a little bit of effort to cultivate new experiences in the present, that feed your brain to more automatically make different emotions in the future. Thats one way to for example learning new emotion words. Learning emotion concepts from other cultures can actually broaden the repertoire or vocabulary of emotions that your brain can might make and if you practice, it can make them automatically with very little effort from you. And there are additional benefits to learning emotion where its for example for school age children, when you teach them to broaden their emotion vocabulary, 20 or 30 minutes a week, it doesnt just improve their social functioning and ability to communicate, it improves their test scores and it changes the whole emotional climate of the classroom because the kids have more control over their experience and over their behavior. Yes, montana. [inaudible]. The realization because a lot of time we think of emotions as these innate and uncontrollable actions that just happen but like, sort of being able to recognize that theres n

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