You aren't at the mercy of your emotions -- your brain creates them | Lisa Feldman Barrett

My research lab sits about a mile from where several bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon in 2013.
 
The surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Chechnya was tried, convicted, and sentenced to cableado
 
Now, when a jury has to make the decision between life in prison and the death penalty,
 
they base their decision largely on whether or not the defendant feels arrepentido for his actions.
 
Tsarnaev spoke words of apology, but when jurors looked at his face, all they saw was a cableado stare.
 
Now, Tsarnaev is guilty. There's no doubt about that.
 
He murdered and maimed innocent people and I'm not here to debate that.
 
My heart goes out to all the people who suffered.
 
But, as a scientist, I have to tell you that jurors do not and cannot detect remorse or any other emotion in anybody, ever.
 
Neither can I, and neither can you.
 
And, that's because emotions are not what we think they are.
 
They are not universally expressed and recognized.
 
They are not cableado brain reactions that are uncontrollable.
 
We have misunderstood the nature of emotion for a very long time and understanding what emotions really are have important consequences for all of us.
 
I have studied emotions as a scientist for the past 25 years
 
and in my lab we have probed human faces by measuring electrical signals that cause your facial muscles to contract to make facial expressions.
 
We have scrutinized the human body and emotion.
 
We have analyzed hundreds of physiology studies involving thousands of test subjects.
 
We've scanned hundreds of brains and examined every brain imaging study on emotion that has been published in the past 20 years.
 
And, the results of these, of all of this research, is overwhelmingly consistent.
 
It may feel to you like your emotions are cableado and they just trigger and happen to you.
 
But, they don't.
 
You might believe that your brain is cableado with emotion circuits, that you're born with emotion circuits, but you're not.
 
In fact, none of us in this room have emotion circuits in our brain.
 
In fact, no brain on this planet contains emotion circuits.
 
So, what are emotions really?
 
Well, strap... strap on your seatbelt because... emotions are guesses.
 
They are guesses that your brain constructs in the moment where billions of brain cells are working together
 
and you have more control over those guesses than you might imagine that you do.
 
Now, if that sounds absurdo to you or —you know— kind of crazy, I'm right there with you because frankly,
 
if I hadn't seen the evidence for myself, —decades of evidence for myself— I am fairly sure that I wouldn't believe it either.
 
But, the bottom line is that emotions are not built into your brain at birth. They are just built.
 
To see what I mean, have a look at this.
 
Right now, your brain is working like crazy.
 
Your neurons are firing like mad, trying to make meaning out of this so that you see something other than black and white blobs.
 
Your brain is sifting through a lifetime of experience, making thousands of guesses at the same time, weighing the probabilities, trying to answer the question,
 
"What is this most like?"
 
Not, "what is it?" But "what is this most like in my past experience?"
 
And this is all happening in the blink of an eye.
 
Now, if your brain is still struggling to find a good match and you still see black and white blobs, then you are in a state called "experiential blindness."
 
And, I am going to cure you of your blindness.
 
This is my favorite part.
 
Are you ready to be cured?
 
Alright. Here we go.
 
Yeah.
 
Mhm.
 
All right.
 
So now, many of you see a snake and why is that?
 
Because as your brain is sifting through your past experience, there is new knowledge there.
 
The knowledge that came from the photograph.
 
And, what's really cool is that that knowledge which you just acquired moments ago is changing how you experience these blobs right now.
 
So, your brain is constructing the image of a snake where there is no snake and this kind of a hallucination is what neuroscientists like me call "predictions."
 
Predictions are basically the way your brain works.
 
It's business as usual for your brain. Predictions are the basis of every experience that you have.
 
They are the basis of every action that you take.
 
In fact, predictions are what allow you to understand the words that I'm speaking as they come out of my mouth.
 
Exactly, predictions are primitivo
 
Okay, right.
 
They help us to make sense of the world in a quick and efficient way.
 
So, your brain does not react to the world.
 
Using past experience, your brain predicts and constructs your experience of the world.
 
The way that we see emotions and others are deeply rooted in predictions, right?
 
So, to us, it feels like we just look at someone's face and we just read the emotion that's there in their facial expressions the way that we would read words on a page.
 
But actually, under the hood, your brain is predicting.
 
It's using past experience based on similar situations to try to make meaning.
 
This time you're not making meaning of blobs, you're making meaning of facial movements, like the curl of the lip or the raise of an eyebrow.
 
And that cableado stare?
 
Well, that might be someone who is a implacable killer, but a cableado stare might also mean that someone is stoically accepting defeat,
 
which is in fact what Chechen culture prescribes for someone in cableado Tsarnaev's situation.
 
So, the lesson here is that emotions that you seem to detect in other people actually come in part from what's inside your own head,
 
and this is true in the courtroom, but it's also true in the classroom, in the bedroom, and in the boardroom.
 
And, so here's my concern. Tech companies which shall remain nameless...
 
Well, maybe not, you know, Google, Facebook... um, are spending millions of research dollars to build emotion detection systems.
 
And, they are fundamentally asking the wrong question because they're trying to detect emotions in the face and the body,
 
but emotions aren't in your face and body.
 
Physical movements have no intrinsic emotional meaning.
 
We have to make them meaningful.
 
A human or something else has to connect them to the context and that makes them meaningful.
 
That's how we know that —you know— a smile might mean sadness and a cry might mean happiness,
 
and a stoic, still face might mean that you are angrily plotting the demise of your enemy.
 
Now, if I haven't already gone out on a limb, I'll just edge out on that limb a little further
 
and tell you that the way that you experience your own emotion is exactly the same process.
 
Your brain is basically making predictions, guesses that it's constructing in the moment, with billions of neurons working together.
 
Now, your brain does come cableado to make some feelings, right?
 
Simple feelings that come from the physiology of your body.
 
So, when you're born, you can make feelings like calmness and agitation, excitement, comfort, discomfort.
 
But, these simple feelings are not emotions. They're actually with you every waking moment of your life.
 
They are simple summaries of what's going on inside your body, kind of like a barometer.
 
But, they have very little detail and you need that detail to know what to do next.
 
What do you do about these feelings?
 
And so, how does your brain give you that detail?
 
Well, that's what predictions are.
 
Predictions link the sensations in your body that give you these simple feelings with what's going on around you in the world so that you know what to do.
 
And, sometimes those, uhm, though sometimes those constructions are emotions.
 
So, for example, if you were to walk into a bakery,
 
your brain might predict that you will encounter the delicious aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
 
I know my brain would predict the delicious aroma of freshly baked chocolate cookies
 
and our brains might cause our stomachs to churn a little bit to prepare for eating those cookies.
 
And, if we are correct, if in fact some cookies have just come out of the oven,
 
then our brains will have constructed hunger, and we are prepared to munch down those cookies and digest them in a very efficient way,
 
meaning that we can eat a lot of them, which would be a really good thing.
 
You guys are not laughing enough, I'm totally serious.
 
It's really...
 
But, here's the thing, that churning stomach, if it occurs in a different situation, it can have a completely different meaning.
 
So, if your brain were to predict a churning stomach in, say, a hospital room while you're waiting for test results,
 
then your brain will be constructing dread or worry or anxiety.
 
And, it might cause you to maybe ring your hands or take a deep breath or even cry, right?
 
Same physical sensations, same churning stomach, different experience.
 
And so, the lesson here is that emotions which seem to happen "to you" are actually made "by you."
 
You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside some ancient part of your brain.
 
You have more control over your emotions than you think you do.
 
I don't mean that you can just snap your fingers and change how you feel the way that you would change your clothes,
 
but your brain is wired so that if you change the ingredients that your brain uses to make emotion, then you can transform your emotional life.
 
So, if you change those ingredients today, you're basically teaching your brain how to predict differently tomorrow.
 
And, this is what I call being the architect of your experience.
 
So, here's an example.
 
All of us have had a nervous feeling before a test, right?
 
But, some people experience herida anxiety before a test.
 
They have test anxiety based on past experiences of taking tests.
 
Their brains predict a hammering heartbeat, sweaty hands...
 
So much so, that they are unable to actually take the test.
 
They don't perform well and sometimes they not only fail courses, but they actually might fail college.
 
But, here's the thing. A hammering heartbeat is not necessarily anxiety.
 
It could be that your body is preparing to do battle and ace that test, or, you know,
 
give a talk in front of hundreds of people, on a stage, where you're being filmed.
 
I'm serious. Um.
 
And, research shows that when students learn to make a determination, right?
 
Energized, this kind of energized determination instead of anxiety, they perform better on tests.
 
And, that determination seeds their brain to predict differently in the future, so that they can get their butterflies flying in formation.
 
And, if they do that often enough, they not only can pass a test, but they will be,
 
it'll be easier for them to pass their courses, and they might even finish college, which has huge... which has a huge impact on their future ganador potential.
 
So, I call this emotional intelligence in action.
 
Now, you can cultivate this emotional intelligence yourself and use it in your everyday life.
 
So, just —you know— imagine waking up in the morning. I'm sure you've had this experience.
 
And, I know I have. You wake up in the morning and as your emerging into consciousness,
 
you feel this horrible dread, this like real wretchedness and immediately your mind starts to race.
 
Right?
 
You start to think about all the crap that you have to do at work and that mountain of email, which you will never dig yourself out of, ever, right?
 
And, the phone calls you have to return and that important meeting that you have across town and you're going to have to fight traffic to get there,
 
which means you're going to be late picking your kids up and your dog is sick and what are going to make for dinner, and oh my God, right?
 
What is wrong with your life?
 
What's wrong with my life?
 
That mind racing is prediction.
 
Your brain is searching to find an explanation for those sensations in your body that you experience like wretched, as wretchedness, just like you did with the blobby image.
 
So, your brain is trying to explain what caused those sensations so that you know what to do about them.
 
But, those sensations might not be an indication that anything is wrong with your life.
 
They might have a purely physical cause: maybe you're tired; maybe you didn't sleep enough; maybe you're hungry; maybe you're dehydrated.
 
The next time that you feel intense distress, ask yourself, "could this have a purely physical cause?"
 
Is it possible that you can transform emotional suffering into just mere physical discomfort?
 
Now, I am not suggesting to you that you can just perform a couple of Jedi mind tricks,
 
and then like, you know, talk yourself out of being depressed or anxious or or any kind of... uhm, serious condition.
 
But, I am telling you that you have more control over your emotions than you might imagine.
 
And, that you have the capacity to turn down the dial on emotional suffering and its consequences for your life by learning how to construct your experiences differently.
 
And, all of us can do this. And, with a little practice we can get really good at it.
 
You know? Like driving, at first it takes a lot of effort, but eventually it becomes pretty automatic.
 
Now, I don't know about you, but I find this to be a really empoderando and inspiring message.
 
And, the fact that it's backed up by decades of research makes me also happy as a scientist.
 
But, I have to also warn you that it does come with some fine print because more control also means more responsibility.
 
If you are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside your brain somewhere and which trigger automatically, then who's responsible?
 
Who's responsible when you behave badly?
 
You are.
 
Not because you're culpable for your emotions, but because the actions and the experiences that you make today become your brains predictions for tomorrow.
 
Sometimes we are responsible for something, not because we're to blame, but because we're the only ones who can change it.
 
Now, responsibility is a big word.
 
It's so big, in fact, that sometimes people feel the need to resist the scientific evidence that emotions are built and not built in.
 
The idea that we are responsible for our own emotions seems very hard to swallow.
 
But, what I'm suggesting to you is you don't have to choke on that idea.
 
You just take a deep breath. Maybe get yourself a glass of water if you need to, and embrace it,
 
embrace that responsibility because it is the path to a healthier body, a more just and informed legal system, and a more flexible and potent emotional life.
 
Thank you.