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ALPHABETICAL BRAIN® VOCABULARY
HUMANIST SECULAR SCIENTIST
LISA FELDMAN BARRETT
April 30, 2022
HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE:
The Secret Life of the Brain.
Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017
(i-xv, 425 pages)
note = "Constructed Emotion" is the name of a new theory of emotion.
Quote = The book answers the following four questions and more:
"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?"
Quote = "Emotion is constructed in the moment, by core systems that interact across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning. This means that you play a much greater role in your emotional life than you ever thought." (Paraphrased slightly by webmaster from publisher's summary)
Quote = "Barrett argues that emotions are not a 'fixed component of our biological nature', but rather are constructed in our minds based upon predictions. Emotions take form from how they are perceived, and moreover, they take different forms in different cultures." (Paraphrased slightly by webmaster from Publishers Weekly Review)
BOOK OUTLINE
note = Numbers in parentheses refer to pages
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 is 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 Brain Basics = brain facts hat you must know in order to understand the book! (302)
note = Use diagram enhanced with AB image: navigating the brain with locations of functional areas marked by words (305)
[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" that attach to other neurons at synapses. (302)
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)
AUTHOR NOTES, SUMMARY,
AND BOOK DESCRIPTION
AUTHOR NOTES = 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. Her new book is Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain 2020. She lives in Boston.
SUMMARY = This book by psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett is about a new theory of how the brain constructs emotions. Her research overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain and are universally expressed and recognized. This new theory could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind.
BOOK DESCRIPTION = Barrett's new theory of emotion is driving a deeper understanding of the mind and brain, and shedding new light on what it means to be human. 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.
Scientists assumed that emotions were hardwired in the body or the brain, since emotions feel automatic, like uncontrollable reactions to things we think and experience. 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. This paradigm shift has far-reaching implications for all of us. 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.
EDITORIAL BOOK REVIEWS
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. – Library Journal, STARRED review: 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 are not 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 are to --- "eat healthfully, exercise, and get enough sleep" among others. And she investigates 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 are what rule 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
PROFESSIONAL BOOK REVIEWS
[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.
[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] 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.
[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 the book, 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 the book, 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 the book, 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 such books as: Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst; 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 the book, 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 the book, 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 the books, Against Empathy and How Pleasure Works.
[12] 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 the books, Anxious and Synaptic Self.
[13] 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 the book, Failure: Why Science is So Successful and Ignorance: How It Drives Science.
[14] 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 book, The Seven Sins of Memory
[15] 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 the book, Positivity and Love 2.0
[16] 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.
[17] 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
[18] 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.
AMAZON READER REVIEWS
[1] Jan C. Hardenbergh - Deeply stimulating look at the brain and emotions = This book is about emotions, but, the setup work of describing how the brain works was more interesting to me. I love the idea that we Experience our Constructed Model of the World as Reality. The other big ideas are: Constructed Emotions, Body Budgeting, Affective Realism, Social Reality (as a Super Power), and the Interoceptive System. There is a lot to unpack here. And, there are a few nits, too. Some of this is my spin on what the book says.
Since my lens is Consciousness, the idea of the Model as Reality is the key to the book for me. This is a fragment of text that needs a lot of set-up. And the set-up needs set-up, too. So, the set-up and this text are repeated near the end. Obviously, the book leads you into this gently.
On page 287: "From these three inevitabilities of the mind, we see that construction teaches us to be skeptical. Your experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, your brain is wired to model your world, driven by what is relevant for your body budget, and then you experience that model as Reality..."
Also, very current about unlearning implicit bias, aka, Training the Elephant: "It is your responsibility to learn concepts that, through prediction, steer you away from harmful actions."
Barrett goes into a lot of detail on a set of concepts that all have to do with modeling “reality.” They are: Concepts (the model), Simulation (running the model), Prediction (using the model), Error Correction (tweaking the current categorization and/or the Concept). [by jch]
Our mental model is a "deep learning" model and categorization similar is "inference" in deep learning lingo, except deep learning does not have the simultaneous predictions... Prediction: (See Also: Clark's Surfing Uncertainty)
On page 59: "Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in you current situation."
On page 62: "Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It is a huge ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act..."
On page 64: "When prediction errors occur there are two general options:" 1) change prediction or 2) filter sensory input to match prediction (Affective Realism, aka, implicit bias)
[I would add 3, by jch] Throw the prediction error to consciousness. Perhaps that would be considered "Experiential Blindness."
Barrett's concepts are very similar to Bor's “Chunking” where the "bits and pieces" of consciousness are packaged up into easily retrievable bundles.
On page 29: "Every moment that you are alive, your brain uses concepts to simulate the outside world. Without concepts, you are “experientially blind,” as a blind person has no sight. “With concepts, your brain simulates so invisibly and automatically that vision, hearing, and your other senses seem like reflexes rather than constructions."
Constructed Emotions: emotions are concepts and the finer the granularity of your concepts, the easier it is to accurately feel what reality is. And it is more efficient.
On page 67: "Usually, you experience “interoception” only in general terms: those simple feelings of pleasure, displeasure, arousal, or calmness [mentioned earlier]. Sometimes, however, you experience moments of intense "interoceptive" sensations as emotions. That is a key element of the theory of constructed emotion. In every waking moment, your brain gives your sensations meaning. Some of those sensations are interoceptive, and the resulting feelings can be an instance of accurate emotions caused by real experiences."
On page 35: "The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of all three flavors of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And from neuroconstuction, it adopts the idea that experience wires the brain."
Barrett spent the early part of her PhD work trying to detect the "signatures of emotions" for the universal emotions, which was and still is the commonly accepted view. She could not find them. Instead, she started thinking in terms of population thinking. Each instance of anger is unique, based on habit and circumstance.
On page 138: Emotions are (1) to make meaning = to understand that one emotional state is more efficient; (2) to prescribe action, (3) to regulate your body budget so you are prepared for a particular action. These 3 are about you alone. Two other functions are related to yourself in relation to others: emotional communication and social influence.
Under Social Reality = page 134: "Emotions become real to us through two human capabilities that are prerequisites for Social Reality. First, you need a group a people to agree that a concept exists, such as "Flower" or "Cash" or "Happiness". This shared knowledge is called collective intentionality. Most people barely think about collective intentionality, but it nevertheless is a foundation of every society. Even your own name is made real through collective intentionality."
On page 135: "Collective intentionality is necessary for social reality but not sufficient. Certain non-human animals are capable of a rudimentary form of collective intentionality without social reality. Ants work together toward a common activity, as do bees... Humans are unique, however, because our collective intentionality involves mental concepts. We can look at a hammer, a chainsaw, and an ice pick and categorize them all as "Tools." Then we can change our minds and categorize them all as "Murder Weapons." Also we can impose functions that would not otherwise exist, thereby inventing reality. We can work this magic because we have the second prerequisite for social reality: language. No other animals have collective intentionality combined with words."
Body Budget = Body Budget is a term that is purposefully vague, but it works. Your brain minimizes the amount of energy it expends. It can refer to body budgeting regions, metabolism, psychological well being. The lab just published: Evidence for a large-scale brain system supporting allostasis and interoception in humans. See the Nature journal article about Human Behavior by Ian R. Kleckner.
On page 200: Your body budget fluctuates normally throughout the day, as your brain anticipates your body's needs and shifts around your budgetary resources like oxygen, glucose, salt, and water. When you digest food, your stomach and intestines "borrow" resources from your muscles. When you run, your muscles borrow from your liver and kidneys. During these transfers, your body budget remains solvent.
Affective Realism = Affective Realism is a step past implicit bias. The "reality" we see/hear is shaped by our affect.
On page 79: "You might believe that you are a rational creature, weighing the pros and cons before deciding how to act, but the structure of your cortex makes this an implausible fiction. Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver's seat and rationality is a passenger. It does not matter whether you are choosing between two snacks, two job offers, two investments, or two heart surgeons. Your everyday decisions are driven by a loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses." [some paraphrasing by webmaster]
Interoception = Interoception senses our internal state, whereas with exteroception the senses such as vision and hearing see and hear what is outside our body.
On page 73: "Interoception is a fundamental feature of the human nervous system, and why you experience these sensations as affect is one of the great mysteries of science. Interoception did not evolve for you to have feelings but to regulate your body budget. It helps your brain track your temperature, how much glucose you are using, whether you have any tissue damage, whether your heart is pounding, whether your muscles are stretching, and other bodily conditions, all at the same time. Your affective feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and calmness and agitation, are simple summaries of your budgetary state. Are you flush? Are you overdrawn? Do you need a deposit, and if so, how desperately?
Experiencing our Constructed Model of the World as Reality. Now, hopefully this makes sense. Perhaps, as my wife says, this is obvious to everyone, but, to me, it is a great model for consciousness.
On page 283: "Affective Realism, the phenomenon that you experience what you believe, is inevitable because of your wiring. The body budgeting regions ... are the most powerful predictors in your brain, and your primary sensory regions are eager listeners. Body budget predictions are laden with affect, not logic and reason, are the main drivers of your experience and behavior."
On page 284: "Affective Realism is an inevitability, yet you are not helpless against it. The best defense against it is curiosity... The second inevitability of the mind is that you have concepts, because the human brain is wired to construct a conceptual system... The third inevitability of the mind is social reality"... The social world becomes real.
On page 287: "From these three inevitabilities of the mind, we see that construction teaches us to be skeptical. Your experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, your brain is wired to model your world, driven by what is relevant for your body budget, and then you experience that model as Reality..."
We are responsible for our actions. Sure, your brain made you do it, but, "It is your responsibility to learn concepts that, through prediction, steer you away from harmful actions." We all need to "Train the Elephant" in Haidt's rider and the elephant metaphor.
On page 155 "If you grow up in a society full of anger or hate, you can't be blamed for having the associated concepts, but as an adult, you can choose to educate yourself and learn additional concepts. It is certainly not an easy task, but it is doable. This is another basis for my frequent claim, "You are an architect of your experience?" You are indeed partly responsible for your actions, even so-called emotional reactions that you experience as out of your control. It is your responsibility to learn concepts that, through prediction, steer you away from harmful actions. You also bear some responsibility for others, because your actions shape other people's concepts and behaviors, creating the environment that turns genes on and off to wire their brains, including the brains of the next generation.
The concept of “social reality” implies that we are all partly responsible for one another's behavior, not in a fluffy, let's-all-blame-society sort of way, but a very real brain-wiring way."
Now some of the "nits" that I found in the book:
Granted, I am not the target for this book. I have read a lot of books and papers on Consciousness. This book is aimed at a much wider audience and I hope it does really well. For the most part, Barrett does a good job balancing between abstraction and complexity and dumbing the subject down. One example of dumbing it down too much is when she discusses Damasio’s research and the loss of a specific brain region such as the orbitofrontal circuit.
1) Terminology - intrinsic networks (p58), which is way too vague. The term Intrinsic Brain Network gets 1.5M gaggle hits, while Large Scale Brain Networks (LSBN) gets 9.7M hits. Why not use the more descriptive and more widely used term?
Another example, Theory of Mind is the widely used term for figuring out intentions, beliefs, etc of other people. She uses “mental inference.” If you are going to use a different term, use a more explicit term. Interoception system would be better than interoception network. If the default mode Network is a part of it and the brain network concept is well established, do not add another layer of networks. Also there is no mention of the Vagus Nerve.
Barrett refers to brain regions as if they were homogeneous "brain blobs." If all nodes in a network are homogeneous, then the intelligence would live in the routing tables, and down plaining the regions would be fine. However, cytoarchitecture makes it clear that the different nodes have different processing capabilities. So the brain regions are as important as the network topology and they should be identified if they are relevant.
Universal Emotions = p173: So when the classical view [ of emotions ] reasserted itself in the 1960s, half a century of anti-essentialist research was swept into history's dustbin. And we are all the poorer for it, considering how much time and money are being wasted today in pursuit of illusory emotional essences. At press time, Microsoft is analyzing facial photographs in an attempt to recognize emotion. Apple has recently purchased Emollient..."
What if emotions are not essences?
If they are not purely physiological, then is it not a waste of time to detect them?
Since language is learned, is it not a waste of time to do speech recognition? What if the core emotions are not inherently physiological, but are nearly universal because they are part of the "social reality" learned early in childhood that they are virtually universal? Maybe they are like Proto-Indo-European roots.
Another nit is that she uses the phrase "scientists say" too much, as if everyone agrees with her.
Nerdly nit = p129: "We only experience red when light of 600 nanometers reflects off of an object". If you are reading a screen and there is red on it, that is being emitted, not reflected.
So, if you are well read in neuroscience, it may be a little distracting in some places, but, it was a lot of new material for me and so very worthwhile!!!
[2] The Hibernian Autodidact - I could not construct the emotion of liking for this book! But a few caveats before I begin the review proper - I take writing a negative review very seriously and understand full well that online actions have consequences. I also understand that Barett is far more accomplished, successful, intelligent, well-read and many other positive things, person than I will ever be.
However, even brilliant people can be misguided. I have personally known people who have PhDs in the most rigorous scientific fields from the world's best universities who appeared to have been misguided on various issues. I especially see this on what I will characterize as the nature vs. nurture issue of the human mind.
I read this book back in March of 2017, and refrained from writing this review because generally I am uncomfortable with writing them. However, about an hour before writing this, I listened to science writer Robert Wright's podcast of the author discussing her book and was so bothered by it that I felt compelled to write the review you are now reading.
Dr. Barrett discusses this book, and I personally found the discussion disingenuous at best, and intellectually dodgy at worst. Dr. Barrett, to me, sounded more like an attorney than she did a scientist. She nitpicked the meaning of Mr. Wright's choice of words, and if you nitpick enough, you can find a flaw in anything, then focus on it ad nauseam. She absolutely dominated the discourse with what I perceived to be a veritable flood of verbiage, while avoiding a truly honest debate on the issues with Mr. Wright, as he clearly disagreed with her.
Le us take for instance the point that Mr. Wright brought up about schadenfreude, which Dr. Barrett discusses in her book. Wright implied this is an instinctive emotion, Dr. Barrett claims this is a culturally constructed emotion, as are all emotions. Schadenfreude is a German word denoting the pleasure that someone feels at the misfortune of others. Can a three year old experience this, Mr. Wright asked. Dr. Barrett made a somewhat snarky remark to Mr. Wright saying that maybe you feel schadenfreude a lot, but most of us do not.
Then she went on to discuss that three year old children would not feel this because they have not been taught, or learned the concept of it. Ultimately, this is as most questions in psychology, an academic question because we cannot prove anything about subjective experience. However, can any of us honestly say that we have never seen a three year old who has no idea what shadenfreude is, experience it anyway? Have you not felt it at some time, even though you may never have heard the word?
Here's another thing I did not like in the book: Dr. Barrett joking referred to "brain blobs," as she pokes fun at the notion that the brain has specified locations for various functions. If I understand her point correctly, this would directly contradict eminent scientists such as Dr. Robert Sapolsky's view of the brain, which is greatly divided by function, and has much experimental evidence to back up his claims in his book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, which I personally find a far superior book to this one. Here's a statement from "Behave" which directly contradicts the fundamental premise of Dr. Barrett's book - "by the time you finish this book, you'll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are "Biological" and those that would be described as, say, "psychological" or "cultural." Utterly intertwined. I think Sopolsky would agree that you could replace the word "behavior" with "emotion" and still agree with him.
The author had the temerity to take a veiled swipe at fellow psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. Not directly, mind you, but it was an unmistakable negative remark towards him. Kahneman is the only psychologist to win a Nobel Prize; he won it with his contribution to economics on the psychology of decision making in uncertain circumstances. In his masterwork book of psychology, Thinking Fast and Slow, he summarizes his decades of research on human psychology by postulating that we have two different thinking systems, one rapid and intuitive, the other slow and deliberate.
Barrett completely denied the existence of this distinction, in language I found similar to poking fun at "brain blobs." I admire a writer who has grand ambitions. However, taking a shot at perhaps the most accomplished living psychologist, and missing the mark entirely, further solidified my inability to construct much positive emotion for this book.
Ultimately, Dr. Barrett is trying to convince the reader that there are no universal emotions, as say psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman and others would have us believe, and that they are all dependent upon learning and culture. Now this view may auger well with our current intellectual zeitgeist, which is averse to the notion of human nature, and believes that most human ills can be mended by being educated in the right ideas. While I believe this in part, I do not believe this entirely. Why is it that there are emotions engraved on our DNA and our experience from birth to death that interacts with our human nature?
Wright and Barrett also discussed indigenous cultures, who are very often discussed in psychological texts because they do not have any of the influence of modern western cultures, and live in a way that humans are more evolved to live in. Dr. Barrett says that for instance, the !Kung simply do not feel fear in the way that you or I would because of their culture. So, if a !Kung saw within stepping distance of themselves a coiled snake ready to strike, they would not feel what any other human would feel? I highly doubt that.
Dr. Barrett resides in academia's ivory tower... I was hoping for cutting edge insights from the Ivory Tower to help me help others. I found woefully little, unfortunately. I see countless people ruled, tormented and sometimes ruined by their painful, negative emotions. If I summarized this book to my clients: "Well, your emotions are just constructs that you learned and you create. So just change them!" I think I would be out of a job. Our emotions are just not that simple. Not even close.
Perhaps I misunderstood the book. I was hoping that the podcast would convince me of Dr. Barrett's way of thinking. It didn't. It actually secured my own existing beliefs, partly because I found her so overbearingly loquacious, without really saying much of anything with substance. Mostly a big disappointing word salad.
On a more positive note, I really liked her discussion about the concept of emotion differentiation and emotional granularity, and found them extremely helpful to my job as a mental health therapist. I now have lists of words for emotions that I have clients read through to help them better identify feelings that cause them trouble, or feelings of things that they find pleasurable. It has been very helpful, so I'm thankful for that.
If there is something I'm misunderstanding, I really would like some enlightening. In short, I simply don't believe the premise of this book, that emotions are cultural constructs. They are a product of both our natures and our experience.
[3] George - Beautiful science ruined by the market for self-help books = I don't hand out 5 star reviews often and I may even downgrade my review later, but as of page 95, I love the author and the language she uses to convey her point. As someone who has recently taken college A&P, some of what she has suggested goes against what's currently being taught. I do not have a degree in neuroscience or even psychology and I am definitely under qualified to review Barrett's work, but it is good enough to make me start my review mid-way through the book.
EDIT: From page 1 all the way to page 174, I loved this book. The science, and the changing perception of emotion's origin and purpose. It is all fascinating. FAST FORWARD: Chapter 9 and beyond becomes a self-help, gobbledygook waste of paper. I originally gave this 5 stars and HATED to drop it so drastically; but, the complete change in purpose and direction warranted it.
TOP INTERNATIONAL REVIEWS =
[4] Rita - new Descartian generation = In my generation, we are well aware of the importance of the mind, but Barrett is selling this idea to the extreme. For her, there is no reaction, no sensory channel reception, no awareness of sensory input. Everything is prediction, even an unexpected smell. It takes her to page 64 to accept less mindful sensory input reception processes, and such acknowledgment bears almost no echo in her writings. She denies cause effect and fails to see that she is putting the prediction and the mind as the cause (of everything). This is the new Descartian generation of Western intellectuals with little experiential sensorial training. For me, it is sort of a stretch to see sensory reception (which of course involves the nervous system, and may be tainted eventually by simulation and "illusion") as prediction, and self-awareness as prediction.
In brief, her brain is, as she says, locked in her skull. My brain is a sensorial organism permanently in inter-relation with everything else, being changed and changing!
On the upside, despite her bias and her crusade against Ekman tainting her reasoning, she is well acquainted with the literature.
[5] AM Hodge - Absolutely Fascinating = I thoroughly enjoyed this very well written book. Her writing style is quite easy to read although she is introducing some very difficult and challenging concepts. As an avid, though lay, reader of books on neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, her explanations in this book upend everything I thought I knew about the brain and the mind. There is some repetition, but personally I found this to be helpful because the book feels like the construction of a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, so having some ideas repeated helps to orient you to how things fit together. Definitely not a one time read and then put it aside. If you are interested in this topic, then in my view, this is one of the best books available and for that reason I would wholeheartedly recommend it.
[6] markr - challenging, interesting and well written = This is not an easy book, despite the very readable narrative style. The concepts are difficult to grasp at times - while feeling that I was understanding something, later I realized I was not, or might not be, doing so. That probably says more about my brain that author's or indeed about the book, but be warned — unless you have a good grasp of neuroscience already this book is likely not to be interesting and very challenging to grasp.
[7] Stiven Skyrah - Challenging a normal attitude to emotions = I have to give this book 5 stars based on its audacity and ambition alone. The author fearlessly challenges some of the fields (affective psychology/neuroscience) and the most revered and respected theorists and researchers, including Jack Panksepp, Antonio Damassio, Joseph LeDoux, Paul Ekman and even Charles Darwin.
That is audacious madness! The book is a virtual slaughterhouse of sacred cows. I have reservations about much of the author's assertions because she challenges so much of the current gospel. That being said, I have the strong intuition that this work represents a legitimate challenge to the old paradigm. It will be interesting to read the inevitable pushback.
[8] Philip M - An articulate book, very interesting but hard work. Prepare for a second read! = This is not an easy book to read. Several times I considered giving up, but I really wanted to understand the subject so I continued. And I am glad I did, the second half of the book was not only illuminating, but also truly interesting. There were many fascinating examples of studies and case histories, a very enlightening insight into criminal law (both in the US and the UK) concerning unconscious actions, and an insight into suggestions that animals might experience emotions.
As I intimated earlier, the first half of the book was very hard work. Admittedly some of the concepts are very complex and hard to grasp. I felt that the author was determined to drive home every detail of her considerable research into the roles of prediction and prediction error in the formation of our emotions in order to thoroughly dismantle the long-held classical view of “essential” emotions generated by specific regions of the brain. This is completely understandable since developing a prediction theory of the brain’s function has clearly been a major part of her professional career.
And this book is very convincing regarding her unique theory and reasonable explanations. The author is talented, articulate and dedicated. This book is probably one of the most thorough modern analyses of how emotions are created. It is definitely worth devoting time for several readings.
EXCERPT - CHAPTER 1
THE SEARCH FOR EMOTION'S "FINGERPRINTS"
"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."
"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."
PART ONE =
[1] 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.
[2] 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 were not doing so. The question was --- why?
[3] 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.
[4] 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.
[5] 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.
PART TWO =
[1] Here is 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.
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
[4] 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 had expected.
REMEMBER ALWAYS:
You Are Your Adaptable Memory!
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