Recently spoke at a bookstore and newton massachusetts. This is just over one hour. Lisa feldman barret is here tonight in celebration of her book how emotions are made the secret life of the brain. Doctor barrett is a University Distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School in massachusetts and at the 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. Here is a sampling of the praise for doctor barrett in her book. In a review Library Journal says barrett presents a new nor scientific explanation of why people are more swayed by feelings than facts. She offers unintuitive theory that goes against not only the popular understanding but also that of traditional research. Emotions do not 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 because the book freshness. In the wall street journal because it fascinating. And another review, list says quote barrett figurative healthy of the brain is brilliance. Please help me welcome, lisa feldman barret. [applause] thank you so much. Thank you for that lovely introduction. It is very special for 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 have been coming here since it was in newtonville. And then you know friends and family here as well. I would like to welcome as well. Im going to be a couple of selections from the book and then we will open up to questions. I will start with a passage i wrote about a Birthday Party that through my daughter when she was 12 result. 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 multiperiod so it has like fuzzy cheese. I made vomit jello. If you want the recipe let me know it actually, i used peach jello and put in bits and pieces of chopped up little pieces of vegetables. Apple juice and medicine sample cups. But the best part of the party was the game that we had after lunch. I took baby food, mashed carrots, mashed beef and things like that. I smeared it artfully on diapers to look like poo. The kids had to take each diaper and hold up to the nose take a deep smell and identify the smell. Even though the kids know is baby food, many of them had a gag when they went to smell the diapers. This exuberant joyful discussed that we had cultivated as kids and believe it or not the party actually holds the key to understanding how emotions are made. The science of emotion is filled with unintuitive detail, very counterintuitive. Each day we experience the delight of happiness, the dread of fear, the burn of anger. These days resembles the burn of anger is a very common emotion. And we are surrounded by people who are caught up in the throes of their own emotion. But these experiences, as compelling as they are, do not actually reveal whats going on inside your brain and your body. The reason for this is that the human brain is a master of deception. It creates direct actions with magician skill. Never revealing how it does though. And the whole time, the brain is giving us a false sense of confidence that i was experiences that we have every day, that these reveal the inner workings. Emotions seem distinct and feel built in. Because that is really how we experience emotions. We assume that joy and sadness and fear and anger and so on of separate causes inside of us because of the way that we experience emotions. As it is happening to us. It is easy to come up with the ron beer emotions because in fact were just a bunch of grades trying to figure out how brains work. What i would like to do now is give you a, i guess started first principle. Lets look around the room. When you look around you see me, he seeped book shows and each other. First it seems as if that visual information from the world just enters the retina of your eye and mrs. Faye to raise vc stuff all around you. That is actually not whats happening. And to demonstrate visibility and bite my lovely assistant and this is my husband. So who here sees a white square in the middle of this image . Actually is no white square on that page. So what is your brain doing to conjure an image where no square exist where there is just in fact open space . Well, this is something that we talked about in the book. The book explains what is happening in your brain to create the perception of a square there is none and it also explains what this has to do with how the brain makes emotions. Thank you my lovely assistant. Your brain is basically, when it looks at the image your brain is adding stuff from its vast array of experiences of other squares, boxes, rooms, angles and so on. And it is constructing the square that you saw. Neurons in the visual cortex in the back of the brain constructed image for you. They were changing the firing for their own firing to create lines that werent present so you could see a shape that actually wasnt physically there. So you were in a matter of speaking hallucinating. Not the scary kind of i better get to the hospital kind of hallucination but the every day, my brain is built to work like a hallucination. Your experience of that square reveals a couple of insights. First of all your past experiences from direct encounters for movies and books and so on give meaning to your present sensation. Your entire process of this is invisible to you. No matter how much you try you cannot experience yourself constructing that square. And we need an especially designed example tools unmask the fact that this is occurring in your brain. The process is so habitual that in fact, it is 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 fire of its own neurons. In the absence of the incoming sensory information. There are no lines there that caused you to see a square simulation can be visual as we just saw but they also involve other senses. For example, have you ever heard a song playing in your head that you just cannot get rid of . Did that ever happen to anyone . Yeah. So that kind of audio hallucination is also a sort of simulation. So now i want to do some simulation with you. We will do an example right now. Think of the last time someone handed you a red juicy apple. He reached out for it, took a bite and experience the tart flavor. During those moments neurons in your brain and the northern parts of your brain refinery. Motor neurons fired and sensory neurons fired so that you could process the sensations from the apple. Like the color, it may be a blush of green, maybe it felt smooth against her hand. When you bit into it you could taste the tangy taste with a hint of sweetness. Other neurons in your brain because your mouth to water, to release enzymes and begin digestion. And cortisol to prepare your body to process the sugars and maybe make your stomach churn a little bit. But now here is the really cool thing. Just now, when i said the word apple, your brain responded to a certain extent that the apples actually present. Your brain combines bits and pieces of knowledge of previous apples that you have seen and tasted and changed the firing of neurons in your sensory region to construct a mental image of an apple. Your brain simulated nonexistent apple using sensory and motor neurons. So who here right now can imagine in their minds eye and apple . Like one that you each champion who here can hear the crunch of the apple when you bite into it . And what about the taste of the apple . Sort of tart, maybe some sweetness. Yeah. Some people want to give this example actually start to say that they can feel themselves started to salivate. Right now, your brain is changing the firing of its own neurons so that you have the image of an apple that taste of an apple, the sound of an apple and so on. This kind of simulation, even though we are doing it very deliberately right now as an example, is actually very quickly and very automatically occurring in your brain. It is kind of business as usual for how the brain works. In my book, how emotions are made, explain how the square and the apple are no different from what you are doing right now. You may think that youre listening to me speak, reacting to my words. But in fact, the brain is creating simulation predicting every single word that comes out of my mouth and effects that another body part you would be surprised. Your brain when i was doing something very remarkable. Neurons in some part of your brain are changing the firing of neurons in other parts of your brain to anticipate what is coming next. Here is how i like to think about it. Your brain works like a scientist. It is always making a slew of predictions. Just like a scientist makes competing hypotheses. 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 the hypotheses against the data in an experiment. And if your brain is predicting well, and input from the world confirms your predictions. For example when you are simulating the apple if i pulled out an apple and actually showed it to you, and it was exactly as you has stimulated it, as you predicted it then no new information from this apple would enter very far into the 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 there are prediction errors and your brain, like a scientist has some options. It can be a responsible scientist and changes predictions to respond to the data. So lets say the apple was slightly more green than what you had simulating or what you 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. We have a very fancy name for this in the science of psychology and neuroscience, we call it learning. This is what you do when you learn. Your breathtaking information that does not have the force of a can use it to better in the future. Your brain can also be an unscrupulous scientist and ignore the dater altogether maintaining its predictions are reality like we saw with the square. Or, like the quintessential scientist, your brain can run armchair experiments to imagine a world, pure simulation without any sensory input or any prediction error at all just as he did as he imagined everyone or hearing the sound of your song that you cannot 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 have used here so far about objects and events in the outside world apples and squares. But the really important and wonderful thing is that the same process about the sensations inside your own body. And this is the key insight into understanding how emotions are made. So i am at the wrong page. There we go. From the brains perspective, your body is just another source of sensory input than it has to make meaningful. Sensations from your heart pounding, your lungs expanding, metabolism, changing temperature and so on are ambiguous. These purely physical sensations inside your body have no objective psychological meaning. If you feel an ache in your stomach at the dinner table you might experience that is hunger. If flu season is around the corner, the same ache 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 cannot be trusted. At a given moment in a given context brain uses the past experience to give meaning to the internal sensations from your body as well as external sensations from the world. This is all happening continues and simultaneously throughout the entire life. From an aching stomach, your brain constructs hunger or nausea or mistrust not considered the same stomachache can also occur when youre sniffing a diaper that is heavy with purced lamb as kids sit at my daughters Birthday Party or you might experience the ache as a longing if your lover walks into the room. Or if you are a Doctors Office waiting for the results of a medical test you might experience the same ache 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 that make emotion not only give you your feeling, they ally your brain to know what to do next. Their prescriptions for actions. So your emotions are not reactions to the world even though it feels that way to you. In fact, they are constructions of the world or more precisely your brain is constructing a representation of your body in the world any given moment and this representation is your experience. Often, it is an experience of emotion. This perspective i know 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 is in a scientific way. And science a theory is a set of ideas hypotheses are backed up by a tremendous amount of scientific evidence. As is the case with this theory. And 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 emotions and improve your Emotional Intelligence. It will show you how understanding how your brain works actually can benefit you in many domains of your life. And in addition it also explains why the theory of constructed is so counterintuitive. How emotions are made also uses the signs of emotion as a convenient flashlight to eliminate all sorts of issues where emotions are important like in the relationship between physical and mental health. In the law. And communicating across cultures. And 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 the new science of emotion fundamentally changes our understanding of human nature of what it means to be human. And so what i would 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. Thank you very much. Yes . How is this information about how the brain is working been found, through mris . Actually there is a number of different scientific literatures. One thing we know for example is from an anatomical standpoint. Just looking at how the brain is wired. We can see that the brain is not wired for reaction. It is actually wired for prediction. So the brain is wired in such a way that neurons are talking to each other. You can see that the brain is wired to use your past experience to make guesses about what is going to happen next. And it continually does this. So neuroanatomy tells us something about how the brain works predictably. There is also signal processing so neurons are actually having electrical signals, that is part of how neurons talk to each other with electrical signals. So there is evidence from signally, evidence from physiology, certainly evidence from brain imaging as well. Evidence from studies of humans and other animals who have brain lesions. There is evidence from observing young babies and children and how they learn to have emotion and learns to experience other people as having a motion to proceed emotion in others. There is evidence from crosscultural work where teams of researchers including some of my own have gone to remote cultures around the world and including to africa. We sent two teams to africa. Theres just a lot of evidence from a lot of different domains of science to reveal to us that even obsessive physically or reacting to the world and that emotions lurk in some deep animalistic parts of our brain actually our brains dont really work that way. Secondly, it sounds we have very little control when feeling and emotion, i would assume it is not legitimate exactly but you appreciate the brain has constructed this so where is me in a certain way . That is a great question. Actually i talked about the self and your ownership of your own emotions. One of the things that becomes clear i think we start to think about how the brain works, a couple of things become clear. One is that you will never be able to snap your fingers and change how you feel just like that. That is just not possible for most people to do. You might be able to take in filling with distress and change it from sadness to anger for example. Just by changing the kind of simulation but turning down the volume on the intensity of the feeling is super hard to do. That being said, this understanding of Predictive Power of the brain allows you to broaden the horizon of control for your emotions. So for example if its really the case, the brain is using your past experience to predict and instruct what is it about or what you are about to feel. Like in the immediate future, then it means that if you invest a little bit of effort to cultivate new experiences in the present, that feeds your brain to more automatically make different emotions in the future. So that is one way that for example learning and emotional work, learning emotion concepts from other cultures can broaden the repertoire or vocabulary of emotions that your brain is to make and that you practice good it can make it automatically with no effort from you. And there are additional benefits to learning emotion where it is for example, for schoolage children we teach them to broaden their emotion vocabulary just 20 or 30 minutes a week, it does not just improve their social functioning and ability to communicate with each other. It actually improves their test scores and changes all emotional climate of the classroom. Because the cans have more control. Over their experience and behavior. Yes, montana. [inaudible question] i had this realization because like a lot of time to think of emotions as sort of these innate and uncontrollable actions that just happen but sort of like being able to recognize that there is nothing about emotion that is an action. It is just a prediction. It means that you and thierr