Cultivating Wisdom: The Power Of Mood | Lisa Feldman Barrett | TEDxCambridge

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so I want you to come on a little journey with me right now I want you to imagine that you are a soldier in wartime patrolling the forest with your squad and then suddenly up ahead you hear rustling in the bush you scan around you and then it hits you with horror you see them a long line of Fighters guerrilla fighters dressed in camouflage and carrying machine guns instinctively you raise your rifle you flip off the safety catch and you point it at the leader who is carrying an ak-47 this is actually a true story that was told to me by a man who was drafted against his will into the Rhodesian army before the fall of apartheid before he was drafted he was an attorney who defended guerrilla fighters in court and now to his utter astonishment and dismay he was preparing to kill them he focused in on his target finger on trigger and then he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder don't shoot whispered one of his squad members it's just a boy our friend lowered his rifle and took another look it was a boy maybe 10 or 11 years old carrying not a rifle but a long stick and trailing behind him was a long line of cows I'm a psychologist and neuroscientist and in my lab we study why people have these surprising visual experiences and here is the secret what you see is influenced by how you feel your mood influences what you see your vision what you hear your hearing and every sense that you have smell and taste and touch not just in the heat of war but every day of your life and this discovery of the power of mood just abolish as common sense and it actually holds serious implications for how we live our lives now when I say mood I am NOT talking about emotion like anger and sadness and fear mood is more basic it's just a simple accounting of how you're doing so maybe you're hungry right now maybe you had a terrific dinner before you came to the show so you're feeling pretty comfortable maybe you are feeling very awake because you had a great night's sleep you slept like a baby and maybe you were kept up all night by a baby so you're feeling pretty tired maybe you're sitting next to someone who you care about and you feel really comfortable with or maybe you're sitting next to a stranger who's hogging the armrest all of these things combined together to create your mood so check in with yourself for a second using this graph are you feeling pleasant and kind of good are you feeling unpleasant mmm lots of calm alert jittery somewhere in the middle this is your mood or what scientists like me call effect you know because scientists always give something a really complicated name effect is with you every moment of your life from the moment that you are born until the moment that you die whether or not you're emotional and whether or not you're even aware of it let me show you an example all of us right now are looking at the same image but we don't all see this person in exactly the same way some of you see her as slightly smiling and your first impression of her would be as that she's friendly and trustworthy other people in this audience see her as slightly frowning and maybe find her less appealing and still other people find her completely neutral the difference is your mood your effect we actually have demonstrated this effect many many times in our laboratory and in fact if you were to come to my lab we could make her seem more appealing to you or less appealing just by fiddling with your mood your effect and that would influence whether or not you want it to be her friend or maybe whether you wanted to even hire her for a job this power of effect happens in every day of our lives so the last time that you devoured a delicious piece of chocolate cake that deliciousness was not in the cake it's not even in your taste buds to actually in your brain it's your effect when you're driving on the highway and some idiot cuts you off your certainty that he is an idiot is your effect in fact everything that you will hear tonight will be filtered through your effect so right now I'm sure that many of you are thinking wow this is an amazing talk yeah she's awesome and that is your aspect and for the one or two people in the room who are skeptical and don't see the wisdom of my words you know yet that's a sec - so where does that come from you know what is it really affect is made by your brain as it controls the systems of your body to keep them all in balance one of your brains most important jobs is running a budget for your internal resources like oxygen and glucose water salt hormones to help keep you alive and well so that you can do the things that you really like to do like pass your genes on to the next generation if you know what I mean and this body budgeting is completely invisible to you it's happening under the hood in a way that you are largely unaware of most of the time which is a really fortunate thing because if you were aware of it this is what you would experience you would hear your heart beating and your lungs expanding and contracting as you breathe you'd be listening to a never-ending symphony of bodily sounds and sensations that is so distracting that you would never pay attention to anything outside your own skin that is what's actually going on inside of each and every one of you right now so instead of making you aware of this distracting Symphony evolution gave you a workaround that merely hints at whether your body budget is in balance or is in the red and that workaround is effect somehow the sensations of body budgeting which are physical become transformed into effective feelings which are mental scientists don't yet understand how this transformation happens but we know that it does because there are hundreds of studies from laboratories all around the world which show us that it does and this transformation from physical to mental is one of the great mysteries of consciousness so our brains are continuously regulating our body budgets and continuously generating effect and the tricky bit here is that effect is really imprecise it's really vague so here's an analogy if vision is like watching high-definition TV then effect is like watching a 50-year old TV set in black-and-white with a really bad connection through a layer of bubble wrap it would have been totally awesome if evolution had given us a SmartWatch to regulate our body budget you know so that would go something like this beep you're running low on glucose have an apple at the intermission or even better have a piece of chocolate but if this revolution it would be telling you to have an apple or B you didn't sleep too much last night so you're running low on a brain chemical called dopamine so drink eight ounces of coffee preferably dark roast with a little bit of cream to borrow energy from tomorrow to help you get through the rest of today but that's not what we have we have mmm feeling kind of crappy and then your brain is constantly guessing to figure out what caused that crappy feeling so that it knows what to do next to keep you alive and well sometimes your brain guesses really well it's like right on the mark and other times not so much so you can be walking down the street and then you come to a hill and you're effect can help can actually cause you to see that hill as steeper than it actually is if you have the misfortune to interview for a job on a rainy gray day the listless feeling that we get when it's gloomy outside can cause your interviewer to actually be less impressed with you than they otherwise would making it harder for you to actually get that job and we we all know that after we've had a few drinks and we're feeling pretty good miraculously everyone around us becomes much more attractive than they were before so the bottom line here is that feeling is believing you believe what you feel the wiring of your brain guarantees that this is how it works and in my lab we give this a fancy name we call it effective realism effective realism you believe what you feel and now we are equipped to understand what happened to our friend in the forest when he saw those guerrilla fighters so he was in a dangerous situation that disrupted his body budget and he felt a powerful wave of affect and he physically saw a gun that wasn't there effective realism and he prepared to shoot an unarmed African civilian does that sound familiar to you it should now I'm being deliberately provocative here to make a point and I just want to be really clear I'm not suggesting that every time an unarmed civilian is shot that it's merely a case of effective realism these are really tragic situations and they are caused by a variety of very complex influences but as a scientist I have to tell you that your brain the human brain is wired to see the world through effect color glasses and a deeper appreciation of this of effective realism might help to save someone's life just like that tap on the shoulder save the life of that young African Shepherd and his cows if we were gonna pursue this a little further we could discuss how effective realism may be at the heart of some of our society's most challenging problems like the opioid crisis fake news escalating gun violence and every single financial meltdown of the past century because effective realism is part of human nature it is inevitable for you and for me and for every person on this planet but that doesn't mean that we are destined to hallucinate to shoot people by mistake to become addicted to pain medication or make bad decision after bad decision because we can learn to use effect to our advantage and when we do effect becomes a source of wisdom so let me give you one example you can use effect as a cue to step back from your deeply held beliefs so that you can better connect with people who see the world in a way that's different from the way that you do when you watch something on television or you read something in the newspaper or on the internet or you listen to something on the radio and it hits you immediately that it is obviously true right or obviously a piece of foolishness that is a cue that whatever you've encountered has touched a deeply held belief and either confirmed it or violated it impacting your body budget and so that's the moment to open your mind to listen and to learn even if you know you're right maybe especially if you know you are right conservatives know that abortion is immoral and liberals know that abortion is a woman's right this knowing is effect and maybe if we were a little less suspicious of each other and a little more suspicious of our own certainty which is forged in the fires of effect maybe our democracy would be a little healthier and this skill is something thank you right and this skill is something that we can use in our own lives each and every day so that idiot who cut you off on the highway maybe he is just an idiot or maybe he's an idiot who's rushing to the hospital to be with his kid you can use the effect that that came about right when he cut you off it disrupted your body budget and gave you a strong sense of affect and you can use that as a cue to take a breath to take a deep breath breathing it turns out is one of the ways that we can control effect a little bit because breathing it allows one part of our nervous system to kind of dial down the other parts to create enough space for us to transform certainty into curiosity and that curiosity can let you consider other options options that don't necessarily involve swearing at him or chasing it with your car options that could save you from getting a speeding ticket or even having a car accident due to road rage now if if I were listening to this talk it's right about now that I would be thinking seriously in the heat of the moment who has time to hit the pause button and be curious about their effect it just sounds completely impractical in some situations and that's right it is so sometimes the trick is to be curious earlier to take a moment before the heat of the moment before you get behind the wheel before you have a meeting with your difficult boss before you draw your firearm take a breath that might allow you a moment to think about what to do next and you might discover other paths forward that don't involve you seeing a gun at the end we know where there is no gun with a little bit of practice effect can help you make better wiser choices it can make you can make choices that will improve your life choices that will maybe save your job or your relationship choices that will touch and maybe even save the lives of those around you thank you [Applause] you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 153,226

Rating: 4.8432603 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Science, Behavior, Brain, Cognitive science, Emotions, Fear, Mindfulness, Neuroscience, Psychology, Self

Id: ZYAEh3T5a80

Length: 21min 29sec (1289 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2018

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