ALPHABETICAL BRAIN™ VOCABULARY
HUMANIST GALAXY OF
SECULAR BRAIN SCIENCE STARS
LISA FELDMAN BARRETT

December 23, 2019

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HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE:
The Secret Life of the Brain.

Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017
(i-xv, 425 pages)


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Note = This book describes a revolutionary new theory of human emotions known as "Constructed Emotion."

The theory states that: "Emotions are constructed in the moment by core systems that interact across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning." This new theory means that "You play a much greater role in your own emotional life than you were ever told or may have ever thought."

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BOOK OUTLINE
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INTRODUCTION — the two-thousand-year-old assumption (ix-xv)

[1] "Chapters 1-3 introduce the new science of emotion;" (xv)

[2] "Chapters 4-7 explain how, exactly, emotions are made;" (xv)

[3] "And chapters 8-12 explore the practical, real-world implications of this new theory of emotions on our approaches to health, emotional intelligence, child-rearing, personal relationships, systems of law, and even human nature itself." (xv)

[4] "Chapter 13 reveals how the science of emotion illuminates the age-old mystery of how a human brain creates a human mind." (xv)

1) THE SEARCH FOR EMOTION'S "FINGERPRINTS" (1-24)

Note = diagram of human brain divided into "voxels:" use last para 21 and beginning of 22 (21)

2) EMOTIONS ARE CONSTRUCTED (25-41)

Note = use rest of paragraph at bottom of page = definition of "simulation" as your brain's guesses of what's happening in the world. (27)

Note = Simulation is the default mode for all forms of thinking and plays a role in emotions (28)

3) THE MYTH OF UNIVERSAL EMOTIONS (42-55)

4) THE ORIGIN OF FEELING (56-83)

5) CONCEPTS, GOALS, AND WORDS (84-111)

6) HOW THE BRAIN MAKES EMOTIONS (112-127)

7) EMOTIONS AS SOCIAL REALITY (128-151)

8) A NEW VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE (152-174)

9) MASTERING YOUR EMOTIONS (175-198)

10) EMOTION AND ILLNESS (199-218)

11) EMOTION AND THE LAW (219-251)

12) IS A GROWLING DOG ANGRY? (252-277)

13) FROM BRAIN TO MIND — the new frontier (278-291)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (293-301)

APPENDIX A — Brain Basics (302-306)

Note = use the Brain Basics brain facts that must be understood in order to understand the book. (302)

note = The following brain facts are the shortest summary possible of the most important brain ideas known. They make possible the brain's neuroplasticity ("plasticity"), which is its ability to create itself:

[1] "The most important type of brain cell for our discussion is the neuron. There are a wide variety of neurons, but in general, each one consists of a cell body, some branch-like structures at the top, called dendrites, and one root-like structure at the bottom, called an axon, which has axon terminals at the end." (302)

[2] "The axon terminals of one neuron are close to the dendrites of other neurons --- usually thousands --- forming connections called synapses. (302)

[3] "A neuron 'fires' by sending an electrical signal down its axon to its axon terminals, which release chemicals called neurotransmitters into the synapses, where they are picked up by receptors on the dendrites of other neurons." (302)

[4] The neurotransmitters excite or inhibit each neuron on the other end of a synapse, changing its rate of firing. Through this process, one individual neuron influences thousands of others, and thousands of neurons can influence one, all simultaneously." (302-303)

APPENDIX B — Supplement for Chapter 2 (307-308)

APPENDIX C — Supplement for Chapter 3 (309-310)

APPENDIX D — Evidence for the Concept of "Cascade" (311-320)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (321-365)

NOTES (366-408)

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS (409)

INDEX (410-425)

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AUTHOR NOTE, SUMMARY,
AND BOOK DESCRIPTION

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AUTHOR NOTE = Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Psychiatry and Radiology. She received a National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award for her groundbreaking research on emotion in the brain, and is an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada. She lives in Boston.

SUMMARY = Lisa Feldman Barrett has developed a new theory about how the brain constructs emotions, which could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind. It is a new theory of human emotions known as "Constructed Emotion."

BOOK DESCRIPTION = Emotions feel automatic, like uncontrollable reactions to things we think and experience. Scientists have long supported this assumption by claiming that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology — and this paradigm shift has far-reaching implications for us all. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose theory of emotion is driving a deeper understanding of the mind and brain, and shedding new light on what it means to be human. Her research overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain and are universally expressed and recognized. Instead, she has shown that emotion is constructed in the moment, by core systems that interact across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning. This new theory means that you play a much greater role in your emotional life than you ever thought. Its repercussions are already shaking the foundations not only of psychology but also of medicine, the legal system, child-rearing, meditation, and even airport security.

Why do emotions feel automatic? Does rational thought really control emotion? How does emotion affect disease? How can you make your children more emotionally intelligent? How Emotions Are Made answers these questions and many more, revealing the latest research and intriguing practical applications of the new science of emotion, mind, and brain.

LIBRARY JOURNAL REVIEW = Barrett (psychology, Northeastern Univ.) presents a new neuroscientific explanation of why people are more swayed by feelings than by facts. She offers an unintuitive theory that goes against not only the popular understanding but also that of traditional research: emotions don't 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. These networks run nonstop simulations, making predictions and correcting them based on the environment rather than reacting to it. Tracing her own journey from the classical view of emotions, Barrett progressively builds her case, writing in a conversational tone and using down-to-earth metaphors, relegating the heaviest neuroscience to an appendix to keep the book accessible. Still, it is a lot to take in if one has not been exposed to these ideas before. VERDICT The theories of emotion and the human brain set forth here are revolutionary and have important implications. For readers interested in psychology and neuroscience as well as those involved in education and policy.-Nancy H. Fontaine, Norwich P.L., VT

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW = Psychologist and neuroscientist Barrett painstakingly attempts to refute traditional thinking about human emotions as portrayed in the popular media, such as the TV show Lie To Me and Oscar-winning movie Inside Out. She argues that emotions aren't a "fixed component of our biological nature," but rather are constructed in our minds based on predictions. Emotions take form from how they are perceived, Barrett writes, and moreover, they take different forms in different cultures. Her ideas make intuitive sense and are convincing, though her presentation is often slow going as she painstakingly dissects every conceivable counterargument. Some of her ideas are, as she admits, speculative, though "informed by data." The book includes possible implications of constructed emotions, Barrett's prescriptions for emotional health-"eating healthfully, exercising, and getting enough sleep," among others-and an investigation into whether animals experience emotions. Most startling is Barrett's suggestion that chronic pain, stress, anxiety, and autism might be caused by errors in predicted, constructed emotions. The book is a challenging read and will offer the most rewards to researchers already familiar with the longstanding and apparently still unresolved arguments about what emotions are. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman Inc.

BOOK LIST REVIEW = *Starred Review* Prepare to have your brain twisted around as psychology professor Barrett takes it on a tour of itself. A brain learning about the brain via words on a page is clearly a concept Barrett relishes. Her enthusiasm for her topic brightens every amazing fact and theory about where our emotions come from. Hint: it's not what you think. Indeed, each chapter is chockablock with startling insights. The brain's neurotransmitters, plasticity, microwiring, degeneracy, multipurpose circuitry, and more comprise a complex system whose basic function is to balance our body budget, dispensing and apportioning what is necessary to keep us alive and healthy enough to reproduce. To accomplish this task, the brain must be both architect (of our individual and collective realities) and electrical engineer. And to pull that off, it must be continuously attuned to how we feel. It is affect loosely translated: physical feelings that rules the mind. With that bit of news, Barrett explodes the myth that we are rational beings. All this is quite a drastic turn from centuries of bad guessing, beginning with the ancient Egyptians, who pulled the brain out through the nose when preparing a body for burial because they believed it was a useless organ. Barrett's figurative selfie of the brain is brilliant.-- Chavez, Donna

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BOOK REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
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[1] I have never seen a book so devoted to understanding the nature of emotions...the book is down-to-earth and a delight to read. With a high level of knowledge and articulate style, Barrett delivers a prime example of modern prose in digestible chunks." – Seattle Book Review, 5 Stars

[2] Most of us make our way through the world without thinking a lot about what we bring to our encounters with it. Lisa Feldman Barrett does—and what she has to say about our perceptions and emotions is pretty mind-blowing." – Elle

[3] A well-argued, entertaining disputation of the prevailing view that emotion and reason are at odds...Highly informative, readable, and wide-ranging." – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review

[4] Barrett (psychology, Northeastern Univ.) presents a new neuroscientific explanation of why people are more swayed by feelings than by facts. She offers an unintuitive theory that goes against not only the popular understanding but also that of traditional research: emotions don't 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." – Library Journal, STARRED review

[5] This meticulous, well-researched, and deeply thought out book reveals new insights about our emotions — what they are, where they come from, why we have them. For anyone who has struggled to reconcile brain and heart, this book will be a treasure; it explains the science without short-changing the humanism of its topic." – Andrew Solomon, best-selling author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon

[6] A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin." = Daniel Gilbert, best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness

[7] Ever wonder where your emotions come from? Lisa Barrett, a world expert in the psychology of emotion, has written the definitive field guide to feelings and the neuroscience behind them." – Angela Duckworth, best-selling author of Grit

[8] We all harbor an intuition about emotions: that the way you experience joy, fear or anger happens automatically and is pretty much the same in a Kalahari hunter-gatherer. In this excellent new book, Lisa Barrett draws on contemporary research to offer a radically different picture: that the experience of emotion is highly individualized, neurobiologically idiosyncratic, and inseparable from cognition. This is a provocative, accessible, important book." – Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and A Primate's Memoir

[9] Everything you thought you knew about what you feel and why you feel it turns out to be stunningly wrong. Lisa Barrett illuminates the fascinating new science of our emotions, offering real-world examples of why it matters in realms as diverse as health, parenting, romantic relationships and national security." – Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls & Sex

[10] After reading the book, I will never think about emotions the same way again. Lisa Barrett opens up a whole new terrain for fighting gender stereotypes and making better policy." – Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business.

[11] What if everything you thought you knew about lust, anger, grief, and joy was wrong? Lisa Barrett is one of the psychology's wisest and most creative scientists and her theory of constructed emotion is radical and fascinating. Through vivid examples and sharp, clear prose, the book defends a bold new vision of the most central aspects of human nature." – Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy and How Pleasure Works.

[13] Lisa Barrett writes with great clarity about how your emotions are not merely about what you're born with, but also about how your brain pieces your feelings together, and how you can contribute to the process. She tells a compelling story." – Joseph LeDoux, author of Anxious and Synaptic Self.

[14] The book offers a grand new conception of emotions—what they are, where they come from, and (most importantly) what they aren't. Brain science is the art of the counterintuitive and Lisa Barrett has a remarkable capacity to make the counterintuitive comprehensible. This book will have you smacking your forehead wondering why it took so long to think this way about the brain." – Stuart Firestein, author of Failure: Why Science is So Successful and Ignorance: How It Drives Science

[15] The book is a provocative, insightful, and engaging analysis of the fascinating ways that our brains create our emotional lives, convincingly linking cutting edge neuroscience studies with everyday emotions. You won't think about emotions in the same way after you read this important book." – Daniel L. Schacter, author of The Seven Sins of Memory

[16] Lisa Barrett masterfully integrates discoveries from affective science, neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy to make sense of the many instances of emotion that you experience and witness each day. How Emotions are Made will help you remake your life, giving you new lenses to see familiar feelings—from anxiety to love—anew." – Barbara Fredrickson, author of Positivity and Love 2.0

[17] The book is a tour de force in the quest to understand how we perceive, judge and decide. It lays the groundwork to address many of the mysteries of human behavior. I look forward to how this more accurate view of emotion will help my clients in athletics and trading." – Denise K. Shull, MA, Founder and CEO of The ReThink Group.

[18] This book by Lisa Feldman Barrett has set the terms of debate for emotion theory in the 21st century. In clear, readable prose, she invites us to question both lay and expert understandings of what emotions are—and she musters an impressive body of data to suggest new answers. Barrett's theory of how we construct emotions has major implications for law, including the myth of dispassionate judging. Her 'affective science manifesto for the legal system' deserves to be taken seriously by theorists and practitioners alike." – Terry Maroney, Professor of Law and Professor of Medicine, Health and Society, Vanderbilt University

[19] Every lawyer and judge doing serious criminal trials should read this book. We all grapple with the concepts of free will, emotional impulses, and criminal intent, but here these topics are exposed to a new scrutiny and old assumptions are challenged. The interface of law and brain science is suddenly the area we ought to be debating." – Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC House of Lords, U.K.

[20] Extraordinarily well written, Lisa Barrett's book chronicles a paradigm shift in the science of emotion. But more than just a chronicle, this book is a brilliant work of translation, translating the new neuroscience of emotion into understandable and readable terms. Since that science has profound implications in areas as disparate as police shootings and TSA profiling, the translation is critical for scientists and citizens, lawmakers and physicians. (For example, what if there is no meaningful scientific difference between premeditated murder, the product of rational thought, which we consider most culpable, and the lesser offense of manslaughter, a 'crime of passion?') Emotions do not reside in dedicated brain areas, constantly at war with areas charged with cognition or perception, as Pixar caricatured it in Inside out, let alone the brain described by Descartes or Plato or other philosophers. Nor does the brain passively retrieve data from "outside" to which it reacts. The brain constructs the reality it perceives, and the emotions it (and we) experience, using core brain systems, not specialized circuits. And it does so in concert with other brains, with the culture surrounding it. The implications of this work ('only' challenging two thousand year old assumptions about the brain) and its ambitions are nothing short of stunning. Even more stunning is how extraordinarily well it succeeds." – Nancy Gertner, Senior Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School, and former U.S. federal judge for the United States District Court of Massachusetts.

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EXCERPT - CHAPTER 1
THE SEARCH FOR EMOTION'S
"FINGERPRINTS"

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[1] Once upon a time, in the 1980s, I thought I would be a clinical psychologist. I headed into a Ph.D. program at the University of Waterloo, expecting to learn the tools of the trade as a psychotherapist and one day treat patients in a stylish yet tasteful office. I was going to be a consumer of science, not a producer. I certainly had no intention of joining a revolution to unseat basic beliefs about the mind that have existed since the days of Plato. But life sometimes tosses little surprises in your direction.

[2] It was in graduate school that I felt my first tug of doubt about the classical view of emotion. At the time, I was researching the roots of low self-esteem and how it leads to anxiety or depression. Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious. My first experiment in grad school was simply to replicate this well-known phenomenon before building on it to test my own hypotheses. In the course of this experiment, I asked a large number of volunteers if they felt anxious or depressed using well-established checklists of symptoms.

[3] I had done more complicated experiments as an undergraduate student, so this one should have been a piece of cake. Instead, it crashed and burned. My volunteers did not report anxious or depressed feelings in the expected pattern. So I tried to replicate a second published experiment, and it failed too. I tried again, over and over, each experiment taking months. After three years, all I'd achieved was the same failure eight times in a row. In science, experiments often don't replicate, but eight consecutive failures is an impressive record. My internal critic taunted me: not everyone is cut out to be a scientist.

[4] When I looked closely at all the evidence I had collected, however, I noticed something consistently odd across all eight experiments. Many of my subjects appeared to be unwilling, or unable, to distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. Instead, they had indicated feeling both or neither; rarely did a subject report feeling just one. This made no sense. Everybody knows that anxiety and depression, when measured as emotions, are decidedly different. When you're anxious, you feel worked up, jittery, like you're worried something bad will happen. In depression you feel miserable and sluggish; everything seems horrible and life is a struggle. These emotions should leave your body in completely opposite physical states, and so they should feel different and be trivial for any healthy person to tell apart. Nevertheless, the data declared that my test subjects weren't doing so. The question was: Why?

[5] As it turned out, my experiments weren't failing after all. My first "botched" experiment actually revealed a genuine discovery that people often did not distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. My next seven experiments hadn't failed either; they'd replicated the first one. I also began noticing the same effect lurking in other scientists' data. After completing my Ph.D. and becoming a university professor, I continued pursuing this mystery. I directed a lab that asked hundreds of test subjects to keep track of their emotional experiences for weeks or months as they went about their lives. My students and I inquired about a wide variety of emotional experiences, not just anxious and depressed feelings, to see if the discovery generalized.

[6] These new experiments revealed something that had never been documented before: everyone we tested used the same emotion words like "angry," "sad," and "afraid" to communicate their feelings but not necessarily to mean the same thing. Some test subjects made fine distinctions with their word use: for example, they experienced sadness and fear as qualitatively different. Other subjects, however, lumped together words like "sad" and "afraid" and "anxious" and "depressed" to mean "I feel crappy" (or, more scientifically, "I feel unpleasant"). The effect was the same for pleasant emotions like happiness, calmness, and pride. After testing over seven hundred American subjects, we discovered that people vary tremendously in how they differentiate their emotional experiences.

[7] I am a skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.

[8] Here's where the classical view of emotion entered the picture. Emotional granularity, in terms of this view, must be about accurately reading your internal emotional states. Someone who distinguished among different feelings using words like "joy," "sadness," "fear," "disgust," "excitement," and "awe" must be detecting physical cues or reactions for each emotion and interpreting them correctly. A person exhibiting lower emotional granularity, who uses words like "anxious" and "depressed" interchangeably, must be failing to detect these cues.

[9] I began wondering if I could teach people to improve their emotional granularity by coaching them to recognize their emotional states accurately. The key word here is "accurately." How can a scientist tell if someone who says "I'm happy" or "I'm anxious" is accurate? Clearly, I needed some way to measure an emotion objectively and then compare it to what the person reports. If a person reports feeling anxious, and the objective criteria indicate that he is in a state of anxiety, then he is accurately detecting his own emotion. On the other hand, if the objective criteria indicate that he is depressed or angry or enthusiastic, then he's inaccurate. With an objective test in hand, the rest would be simple. I could ask a person how she feels and compare her answer to her "real" emotional state. I could correct any of her apparent mistakes by teaching her to better recognize the cues that distinguish one emotion from another and improve her emotional granularity.

[10] Like most students of psychology, I had read that each emotion is supposed to have a distinct pattern of physical changes, roughly like a fingerprint. Each time you grasp a doorknob, the fingerprints that you leave behind may vary depending on the firmness of your grip, how slippery the surface is, or how warm and pliable your skin is at that moment. Nevertheless, your fingerprints look similar enough each time to identify you uniquely. The "fingerprint" of an emotion is likewise assumed to be similar enough from one instance to the next, and in one person to the next, regardless of age, sex, personality, or culture. In a laboratory, scientists should be able to tell whether someone is sad or happy or anxious just by looking at physical measurements of a person's face, body, and brain.

[11] I felt confident that these emotion fingerprints could provide the objective criteria I needed to measure emotion. If the scientific literature was correct, then assessing people's emotional accuracy would be a breeze. But things did not turn out quite as I expected.

[?] According to the classical view of emotion, our faces hold the key to assessing emotions objectively and accurately. A primary inspiration for this idea is Charles Darwin's book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, where he claimed that emotions and their expressions were an ancient part of universal human nature. All people, everywhere in the world, are said to exhibit and recognize facial expressions of emotion without any traininfg whatsoever.

[?] But they are not universal ...

[?] "Fear" takes no single physical form. Variation is the norm. Liekewise, happiness, sadness, anger, and every other emotion you know is a diverse "category", with widely varying facial movements.

[?] note = use this paragraph about applying the idea of "population thinking" to her study of emotion.

[?] Once I adopted a mindset of population thinking, my whole landscape shifted, scientifically speaking. I began to see variation not as error but as normal and even desirable. I continued my quest for an objective way to distinguish one emotion from another, but it was not quite the same quest anymore. With growing skepticism, I had only one place left to look for fingerprints. It was time to turn to the brain. [see Appendix (pages 302-306) for a quick overview of brain terminology, such as neurons, lobes, and so on.] (page 16)

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