Guess what? The brain has to deal with all that internal noise, too, and run an ongoing simulation and predictive system as well. The other deeply counterintuitive insight in Barrett's perspective stems from our prejudice that, to quote The Police (and millennia of religious philosophy), 'We are spirits in the material world.' Not true: We are also hugely complex pieces of meat, with hormones, an immune system, an electrolytic equilibrium, and an autonomic nervous system silently running all the biological processes that function without our having to pay the slightest bit of attention to them.

'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.'

Even though the guests knew that the smears were food, several actually gagged.' Her daughter once threw a 'gross foods' party: 'We used mashed baby food-peaches, spinach, beef, and so on-and artfully smeared it on diapers. She recounts an amusing example of simulation at work. 'You don't walk around,' she points out, 'being surprised all the time.' 'What we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell,' she writes, 'are all simulations of the world, not reactions to it.' Our brains are constantly running an internal simulation of our immediate environment and parallel-processing the possibilities of what might happen next. Our brains contain north of 85 billion neurons, each wired to some 10,000 other neurons in various parts of the brain-which means we have hundreds of trillions of synapses, any number of which are firing at any given moment. Barrett sees the brain as more like a self-driving car sporting a massive onboard computer. Giants of the field, such as University of California professor emeritus Paul Ekman, have built their careers around connecting basic emotions-fear, anger, surprise, disgust, joy-to facial expressions.Įxperimental psychology tends to make us think of the experience of perception as similar to that of reactive lab rats. Charles Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, translated the classical view into what has become a pillar of modern psychology: that people emote in biologically rooted, universally recognizable ways. Since at least the time of Plato, emotions have been viewed as reflexive responses that we struggle to govern via our capacity to reason. We don't feel like we're the architects of our own experience.'īarrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern who also holds an appointment in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, begins making her case by critiquing what she calls the 'classical view' of the brain and emotions. 'We don't feel like we're in control at all.

Lisa how emotions are made