Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: How to Understand Emotions | Huberman Lab Podcast

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University she also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital where she is the chief scientific officer of the center of law brain and behavior Dr Barett is considered one of the top World experts in the study of emotions and her laboratory has studied emotions using approaches both from the fields of Psychology and Neuroscience indeed today you will learn about the neural circuits and the psychological underpinnings of what we call emotions you will learn what emotions truly are and how to interpret different emotional states you also learn how emotions relate to things like motivation Consciousness and affect affect is a term that refers to a more General State of brain and body that increases or decreases the probability that you will experience certain emotions during today's discussion Dr Feldman Barrett also teaches us how to regulate our emotions effectively as well as how to better interpret the emotional states of others you'll also learn about the powerful relationship that exists between our emotional states and the movement of our body in fact much of today's discussion is both practical and will be highly informative in terms of the mechanisms underlying emotions and it is likely to also be surprising to you in a number of ways it certainly was surprising to me I've been a close follower of Dr Feldman Barrett's work over many years now and have always found it to be tremendously informative and when I say her work I mean both her academic published papers as well as her public lectures that she's given and her two fabulous books on emotions in the brain the first one entitled how emotions are made and the second book which includes information about emotions but extends beyond that entitled s and a half lessons about the brain as you'll see from today's discussion Dr Feldman Barrett is not only extremely informed about the neuroscience and psychology of emotion she's also fabulously good at teaching us that information in clear terms and in actionable ways you'll also notice several times she pushes back on my questions in some cases even telling me that my questions are ill posed and I have to tell you that I was absolutely delighted that she did that because you'll see that every time she did that it was with the clear purpose of putting more specificity on the question and thereby more specificity and Clarity on the answer which of course she delivers by the end of today's discussion you will have both a broad and a deep understanding of what emotions are and their origins in our brain and body you will also have many practical tools with which to better understand and navigate emotional states and moreover you'll have many practical Tools in order to increase your levels of motivation and better understand your various States of Consciousness before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the foundation of mental health physical health and performance one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature has to 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real-time feedback using a continuous glucose monitor one of the most important factors impacting your immediate and long-term health is the way that your body manages its blood glucose or sometimes referred to as blood sugar levels to maintain energy and focus throughout the day you want to keep your blood glucose steady without big spikes or dips using levels you can monitor how different types of foods and different food combinations as well as food timing and things like exercise combined to impact your blood glucose levels I started using levels a little over a year ago and it gave me a lot of insight into how specific Foods were spiking my blood sugar and then leaving me feeling tired for several hours afterwards as well as how the spacing of exercise and my meals was impacting my overall energy and in doing so it really allowed me to optimize how I eat what I eat when I exercise and so on such that my blood glucose levels and energy levels are stable throughout the day if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous UC Co monitor yourself go to levels. l/ huberman right now levels is offering an additional two free months of membership again that's levels. linkli nkh huberman to get two free months of membership and now for my discussion with Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett welcome wow it's my pleasure to be here I've wanted to talk to you for a very long time I'd like to talk about emotions I think every everyone has a sense somehow of what an emotion is feeling happy feeling sad feeling excited feeling uh Curious perhaps is even an emotion I don't know you'll tell us what are the core components what are the sort of macronutrients of a of an emotion uh because I know there's a debate about whether or not we should be talking about emotions versus States but what is an emotion we all are familiar with what one feels like to us but from a scientific perspective how do you define an emotion well SCI this is a scientist debate about this um nobody in the last 150 years has ever been able to agree on what an emotion is um and I think from my perspective the interesting but tricky bit is that anytime you want to talk about what the basic building blocks are of emotion none of those basic building blocks are specific to emotion so for example there are a group of scientists who will tell you well an emotion is a coordinated response where you have a change in um some physical state a change in the brain a change in the physical state um which um leads you to make a particular facial expression so you've got physiological changes in the body changes in the brain changes in the face or in motor movements okay but that describes basically every moment of your life um your face is always moving in some way if it wasn't you would look like an avatar basically so we're we're constantly engaged in in movements and those movements have to be coordinated with the physiological changes in the body because whether we're whether we're in a state that we would conventionally call emotion or not because the physiology is supporting those it's supporting the you know the glut glucose and the oxygen and all the things that you need to make uh movements of your body and of course all these movements are being coordinated by your brain so of course there's a coordinated set of um features that doesn't really describe how emotions are distinct from any other experience that you have but the the claim was for a really long time that there would be diagnostic patterns okay so when something triggered fear you would have an increase in heart rate and you would have um a propensity to run away or to freeze or um not just to fall asleep although that is something animals do when they are faced with a predator but that's not part of the western stereotype for fear so that wasn't what scientists were looking for and um and also that you would make a a particular facial expression which was presumed to be the universal expression of fear where you widen your eyes and you get gasp like um that facial set of facial movements in other cultures like in melanesian culture for example is um is a symbol of threat where you are threatening someone you are threatening them with aggression basically is a war face but in Western cultures that's the the face that Western scientists believed was the you know the the distinctive part of that distinctive pattern for fear and so the way that scientists defined emotion for a long time was these kind of um states where you'd see this diagnostic Ensemble of signals and that would mean that anytime someone showed one of those signals they may move their face in a particular way or their heart increased at a particular time you'd be able to diagnose them as being in a state of fear as opposed to a state of anger or sadness or whatever the empirical evidence um just doesn't bear that out and so it was kind of a mystery the mystery is how is it that you feel angry or sad or happy or you know full of gratitude or awe how is it that you experience these moments but scientists can't find a single set of physical markers that correspond with each state distinctively right that in a way that you could tell them apart that's a that was a really big puzzle for a really long time I have to ask you about this perhaps myth perhaps truth about facial expressions and emotions because as you were explaining the core components of emotions I had to think back to to the classic textbook images of the different faces associated with fear with delight with confusion on and on we we will get to that and your opinions on that scientifically informed opinions of course but there is a bit of a myth that the emotion system and the facial expression system run in both directions for instance people will say if you smile it's harder to feel sad or anxious I can't say that's been my experience but I very well could be wrong so we know that when people's emotional states change their facial expressions often will change right if you see someone crying on the street um versus somebody smiling really big you we can make some assumptions about what might be going on at uh internally for them but put simply is it true that changing one's facial expression can direct shifts in the brain and body perhaps that change our emotional states if you'll permit me what I would say is that your question is ill posed so first of all it presumes that there's an emotion system and that there's a facial expression system now clearly there's a system for moving facial muscles okay but a movement is not the same as an expression a movement is a movement an expression is an interpretation of the meaning of a movement not all movements of the face are expressions um and this is a you know a problem it's a problem in science um in it's often the case uh I think in my experience in the science of emotion but elsewhere to that scientists in their efforts to make their work um meaningful to people will try to interpret their findings in in ways that uh the average person would um find interesting or the way that a physician would find interesting or a teacher or what have you to be able to use this information but then they forget that they're actually making an interpretation and they start to refer to their observations with the labels of interpretation so facial movements are facial movements people move their faces and that those movements have meaning but they're not always to express an internal state in fact one might think that they're very rarely to um Express an internal state so I don't know that there's a facial expression system either so that's there is certainly like I said um there there's circuitry for moving a face but um but what those movements mean um is highly variable and so that would be my second point that where I would say when you see someone crying on the street you are not looking only at their face you might be aware um that you're focusing on their face that might be the part of the entire sensory Ensemble that you are focusing your attention on but your brain is taking in an entire ensemble of signals as you know it's taking in not just the you know movements of the face that tears or whatever it's taking in all of the the entire sensory array The Sounds the smells what's going on inside your own body your brain is being um bombarded with signals from from all of those sources and when it's making an meaning out of any signal it's doing it in an ensemble of signals so research shows that baby's cries aren't acoustically specific to when they're tired or hungry or right um the you can I can show you a video without context and show you someone crying and um you might make a judgment you might think make the stereotypic judgment in the west oh that person is sad and then we pan out and really you know it's a little girl whose dad just came home from Iraq or something right so brains are always interpreting faces in context they're making guesses this is something that I've talked about quite a bit that we don't read movements in people we don't read emotions in facial Expressions we make inferences about the emotional meaning of facial movements and we do it in an ensemble of other signals the the context uh as you if you will and that's really what's what's happening so um do I think that um that there is feedback from the face to the brain sure I mean there's feedback from every muscle but there's this constant conversation between the brain and the body um the brain is sending motor commands the body is you know has sensory surfaces which are sending signals back to the brain so if the face is influencing the brain it's doing so in a way that's not special it it's doing it in a way that that works for all other parts of your body too and I guess what I would say this kind of long-winded answer but over time your brain has learned that certain patterns of signal over time um recur and so if you're smiling if your brain is you know telling your your facial muscles to move in a particular way that looks like smiling um it's happening in a larger Ensemble of signals and then the brain is predicting what's going to happen next because it's learned over time what happens next so probabilistically so if you think about that as cause then sure but it's not as it's not this simplistic kind of idea that an emotion is triggered um uh it causes facial muscles to move in a particular way and therefore if you just pose your face in in those in that particular Arrangement it that will somehow feed back to the emotion system and change that system because there are no there is no emotion system in your brain and the the causation just isn't that it's not that simplistically mechanistic that makes sense to me I I uh frankly never bought the idea that just smiling would make me feel happy um especially if my internal state was not one of Happiness like fighting the internal state also um in the early 2000s I think it was there was a lot of discussion about how positioning the body in certain ways you know taking up more space would allow people to feel more powerful and they some of these studies um and uh argued that there were even hormonal shifts associated with um taking up more space that were associated with feelings of empowerment and then when shrinking of oneself was in associated with elevated cortisol States and as I say all this I'm I I want to be clear that um do not take a simplistic view of the nervous system or endocrine system and I I didn't um I don't think that you were implying that either so want to make sure that anyone listening or watching isn't thinking that uh for instance that cortisol is bad cortisol is wonderful and essential you just need it regulate properly or that um the idea that the body and emotional states are are inextricably linked makes a ton of sense to me but the idea that you could just you know grab onto one of the nodes in the EM now I have to be careful not say emotion system um like position of the body like being hunched over makes you depressed no that never made sense to me taking up more space makes you feel more uh powerful that doesn't it it can't be that way and yet we were told for about a decade through especially through popular press that this stuff was true um and so what I love about your work is that it includes a neuroanatomical a psychological a Network perspective that that there isn't one seat of emotions and and so on um so if we could go a little bit further into the facial expression piece for a moment sure I was taught in my Psychology and Neuroscience textbooks because it was right there in front of me that there were some core categories of facial expression that were Universal cross cultures that conveyed something about the internal state of the person that the downward you know lips in the corner and and some and maybe even a furrowing of the brow was associated with negative veent States like sadness perhaps even depression that the opposite of upward turn corners of the mouth and widening of the eyes was delight and excitement some of that feels pretty true to my experience but how do you and other serious scientists of emotions view that somewhat classic literature now yeah so I'll just say that my um my journey here my scientific Journey was not one of um attempting to overturn um a Century's worth of are we alled to swear basically I mean it's just it's like it's it's stereotyp it's basically Western stereotypes enshrined as scientific uh fact and that sounds like a pretty harsh thing to say but I think I pretty much stand by that at this point um but for me when I was a graduate student When I Was An undergraduate in uh in Psychology and in physiology and in anthropology you know I also had read that Darwin said that there were these distinctive facial expressions that um were coordinated with specific emotional states specific states of the nervous system this was Darwin's View and I assumed it was correct um until I started to try to use that information um in the lab and everything fell apart you know so when you show someone in uh a laboratory like a student or um somebody from the community a face a disembodied face where their the person's eyes are widened in the face and they're gasping like a stereotypic fear expression most of the time they don't know what it is and so I would try to use these faces and um as stimuli and experiments and they W they weren't working the way that they were supposed to work and there were really going all the way back to the beginning of psychology there were always debates about whether or not this was actually accurate and there's a really interesting story about how Darwin came to this idea um which I can tell you about but it it's not because he cared about emotion and he was basically taking his own very Western views about emotion to make some claims about Evolution actually so um I have more to say about that and about why it's a problem to take anything that anybody said even Darwin from you know 150 or so years ago or whatever it is and treat it like it's a modern text you know he was writing at a particular time for a particular purpose um and that doesn't necessarily mean that whatever he wrote is true um but I'll just tell you what the evidence says um that there has been in Psychology a debate really vicious debate actually for probably 50 years about the nature of facial expressions and whether they are Universal and whether there's this onetoone correspondence between a particular face and like a facial configuration in a particular emotional state smiling in happiness scowling in Anger wrinkling your nose and disgust and so in 2016 I think the association for psychological science um tasked me and some other senior scientists uh with attempting to write a white paper a consensus paper on what the literature actually show so what does the research actually show if you read all the research you know can you find a pattern there does it actually reveal anything about whether or not facial expressions are Universal particularly for emotion um and the way they do this they have a journal for this purpose for taking a widely held belief that is highly debated and bringing together a panel of experts who disagree with each other at the outset and they have to work together to see if they can come to consensus over the data and this is something that you know people have tried in the past and I mean they're really vicious people have been vicious with each other over this question so when we brought together a a group of people so me several people refused to serve senior scientists refused to serve on this panel but out of fear of losing their funding or something um you know that's a whole other conversation about why SC certain scientists would not want to engage W uh with um people who disagree with them um that's an interesting conversation to have but um I don't think it's as simple actually as just they their careerist or they they care about you know their money or or funding or whatever that would be an easy answer but I don't actually think that's what's going on but that's another sort of but anyway so uh there were five of us who got together um all senior scientists all from different fields some of us hadn't met each other before we all knew of each other of course and we met over Zoom for two and a half years this is preco because people were all over the world right and we we read over a thousand papers so so I was the only one in this group of the five of us who my starting hypothesis was that facial movements are meaningful but they're not there's no one-o-one correspondence between a particular facial configuration like a scowl and anger not not just that it would vary across cultures but that it varies AC for you across situations I mean do you scowl every time you're angry I don't scowl every time I'm angry in fact and I also scowl at times when I'm not angry so and there are scientific reasons to think that that the that a the collection of facial expressions that people make when they're angry or when they're sad or whatever would be highly variable so that was my starting position and then the there were varying four guys so there was I just refer to them as the guys because it was me and four guys and the guys they all to some extent thought that facial expressions were Universal but they had differing reasons and all for for for hypothesizing that and they also had different commitments degrees of commitment to that position but we right off the bat sort of agreed that we it didn't matter who was right that was just not relevant the only thing that mattered was that we could come to the consensus over the data and if we couldn't we had to really pinpoint why like so what would be the critical experiments that would have to be done in order for us to come to consensus over the data and we also agreed that um we had all kinds of contingency set up so you know you've got five senior people who are all running big labs and they're investing you know upwards of three years working on a paper so if we can't come to consensus what are we going to do are we going to write one paper and sort of write about the process or are we going to write separate papers or you know but we we had all these contingencies laid out but the key here I think is that we agreed that we were not going to be adversarial about it because it didn't matter who was right and in fact if somebody had to admit they were wrong and someone was going to have to admit they were wrong I mean it turns out all of us were wrong about something but it we were going to be like supportive of each other and and really encourage each other um because you know being wrong is no one likes to be wrong but for scientists to admit they're wrong is hard and it's something that we should encourage each other to do I think more and and more publicly and I think the people who do that are really Brave and so that was my position and they all agreed and the long story short here is that two and a half years a thousand papers later we all very reasonably came to consensus that there was no evidence for facial expressions of emotion being Universal and that instead what is what there's clear evidence of is um that facial expressions the way that people move their faces in in in moments of expression is highly variable meaning sometimes in Anger you scowl meta analyses so statistical summaries of many many many studies even in the west show that people scowl about 35% of the time when they're angry which is more than chance so it get you a good publication in you know the proceedings of the National Academy but that means 65 % of the time people are moving their faces in other meaningful ways that's not scowling so if you actually used a scowl um or even you know a scowl in blood pressure or you know just maybe not one signal but like a couple signals but you would be wrong more than half the time you would miss more than half the cases and even more importantly I think that that's the reliability question so there's low reliability for um the the correspondence between a scowl and anger it's above chance so scowling is one expression of anger but it's certainly not the dominant one and there is no dominant one it's just highly variable depending on the situation that you're in so sometimes when I'm angry I sit quietly and plot the demise of my enemy you know sometimes I smile in Anger Sometimes I Cry in Anger it really depends on the situation um but more importantly half of the scowls that people make are not related to anger that means that the specificity is again higher than chance but not that much higher than chance so if you see someone scowling the chances are that they might not be angry they might be concentrating really hard or they might have gas I mean there are a lot of reasons why people make a SC owl um and we found this for every emotion category that had ever been studied and I want you to notice what I just did there I'm not I'm no longer referring to an emotion as if it's an entity or a thing so anger isn't one thing it's a category of things a grouping of things and if I'm not mistaken it includes verbs right that like anger as a set of verb actions in the in the brain and body yes it's a process it's not an event process exactly it's not a noun it's a verb and it's a and it's a process but the point is that um it's it's a highly variable grouping of instances if you're if you are talking about all instances of anger all instances of anger that you have ever experienced or witnessed um is a highly variable grouping of instances That Vary that they that doesn't mean they're random but what the body does in Anger depends on what the physical movements will be in anger and that depends on the situation that you're in and what your goal is and um and there are ways to talk about that in Neuroscience terms which are a little more precise but the important thing to understand here I think is that we're only talking about Western cultures now the minute that you go outside of the West to or even to the east I mean so you know there are other cultures you know that have been studied um like uh China and cultures in China in Japan in Korea they they all have access to knowledge about Western cultural practices a norm so what happens when you go to you know to remote cultures which um have much less access so they it's not like they have no access because we live in a globalized world so even hunter gatherers in Tanzania the hza have access to Western practices and Norms but much less much less and we did do that and and um and all bets are off there I mean most of the time they don't even they don't even understand or experience facial movements as having anything to do with emotion so if they saw an emoji of a smiley face would they just assume it was a couple they might think it's a face there because as we both know there's some fairly hardwired brain circuitry for the the two eyes and a and a line beneath it and something in the middle that's pseudo nose that organization of just spatial features cues up face for both for most prates it's really interesting that you say that because yes of course that's true but it's not there at Birth what's there at Birth is a preference for that configuration right so it's it's like there's some and we could talk about why that's there it's actually very controversial but um but what babies what newborns Orient to they Orient to that or they Orient to that configuration but it doesn't have to be a face and then very quickly they start learning faces because they're exposed to fa I mean really the first three months of life is almost like a massive continuous tutorial on what faces are because they're you know being fed and and everyone's in your face saw a baby last night and you see the baby friends of have a unbelievably cute baby with the big cheeks and you want and there's this desire to see the baby smile right so you do the things that and if that the baby shows some sort of facial expression that makes it seem like it's a little bit um like resist in what you're doing you you stop doing it you change up your strategy and then when baby cracks a smile like now I'm going to assume that the baby may or may not have been happy inside um that little baby head um but when they do there's a reciprocity then we smile there's a template that that's very robust right but I want you to notice though that so first of all I'm not saying that um that recognizing faces a face as a face is not hardwired it is but it's hardwired by not by genes alone right and in fact there's a really wonderful book called not by genes alone basically there's cultural inheritance we have the kind of nature that requires nurture we have the kind of genes that require Early Learning we have we need wiring instructions from the world to get the rest of the information that we need to be competent culturally competent in our in our in our lives and that starts at Birth it probably starts before birth even um but um in the third trimester there's some evidence of learning fetal learning even in the third trimester so um the point is not that people aren't hardwired for viewing faces or recognizing faces it's just where does that hard wirring come from it's not by genes alone genes aren't the blueprint the brain is expecting certain inputs from the world and it needs that because infant brains are wiring themselves to their world and part of that world is people making faces at them and smiling and those people happen to also be the ones who are maintaining who are maintaining that baby's nervous system I mean there is reward learning right or reinforcement learning right off the bat because these are the people who keep you comfortable they are the ones who feed you they're the ones who help you get to sleep and so on and so forth and so you're going to be very very sensitive to changes in the contingencies of their behavior your brain as a pattern learner is just going to learn those patterns if we know that smiling is more you know smiling is a cue for happiness it's because we've learned it and that doesn't mean that that learning isn't hardwired it just means that it that information got into your brain by cultural inheritance which is a part of evolutionary theory in the extended evolutionary synthesis not in the original you know not in the original uh formulation that some people still kind of stick to as many of you know I've been taking ag1 daily since 20 2 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that's designed to meet all of your foundational nutrition needs now of course I try to get enough servings of vitamins and minerals through whole food sources that include vegetables and fruits every day but often times I simply can't get enough servings but with ag1 I'm sure to get enough vitamins and minerals and the probiotics that I need and it also contains adaptogens to help buffer stress simply put I always feel better when I take ag1 I have more focus and energy and I sleep better and it also happens to taste great for all these reasons whenever I'm asked if you could take Just One supplement what would it be I answer ag1 if you'd like to try ag1 go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman so it's far more nuanced uh than it was presented to me in those textbooks and and it sounds like it was outright wrong on many dimensions well can I just mention one thing though please this is really serious stuff like sometimes people think well you know what's the big deal this is such a big deal I'll tell you why it's a big deal because in our culture people believe that they can read mental states of other people by their face and they believe it so much that it's enshrined in the legal system and there are people who lose their lives because juries believe that they can read remorse or or the lack of it and in fact there was just a case um you know last year I believe where um you know the Innocence Project uh got involved because there was a woman who was on death row and what put her on death row was um a police officer's claim that he could read her emotions by her the comportment of her face and her body and um and you know uh it was possible to get a stay of execution so that she could be retried and you know um so I'm not saying she was guilty or not guilty I'm just saying what put her on death row was evidence that would not be admissible in a scientific um way now um and there are there are lots of cases where judgments are made that end up impacting people's lives in pretty serious ways so this is a really serious thing and it's um it's puzzling to me why it's so it's got such traction this idea that there are these Universal um Expressions that we can use to read each other you know um it's it's just not true I mean the science just it's so overwhelmingly I feel like you know scientists I don't like to use the t word you know the FW fact you know it's a scary word t word truth but I think in this case I feel like I can I can really at least with a little te I can I can use it you probably have particular facial movements that you make on a regular basis that are tells for you I know I do you know my husband can look at my actions and he can make really decent guesses about what's going on for me upstairs right but that's because he's known me for 30 years actually 30 years today I should just met each other 30 years ago today but he's you know brains are pattern Learners so I'm not saying that everything is random and like there's no it's all noise I'm saying that there just aren't these you know Universal templates they just it's not like that and we really have to stop assuming that that that there are well I'm so glad that you're getting that message out there and I'm very thankful that you highlighted the seriousness of this um these myths that have propagated and that's a perfect segue into what I was already going to ask which is um it's based on something that I think is in very much agreement with what you're saying a previous guest on this podcast I think it was our first guest episode Dr Carl di Roth colleague of mine at Stanford incredible bioengineer um really you know 0.01% in his you know category of science as well as a practicing uh psychiatrist said something which really stuck with me over the years which I once heard him say you know we don't really know how other people feel at all in fact most of the time we don't even know how we feel and that prompted the question for me about how good or poor are we at gauging our own emotional states and in particular at labeling them both to others and for ourselves and and so here's the the direct question is language sufficient to capture this incredibly complex thing that we're calling emotions so for instance the other day I was in New York with my sister then she left I went out for a bit I was having a pretty good day and then I returned to the place where I was staying and I was hit with this feeling of intense loneliness and I don't know why and then I had a bunch of ideas about how that related to growing up and but I was going to see friends the next day and I'm an adult and so I could use some top down regulation and say oh you know maybe I'm a little tired or I didn't because I hadn't slept as well the night before I've been pretty rested recently and then I actually wrote in my journal I I said you know maybe most of feeling good is being pretty well rested and not in any physical pain that's a big part of feeling good is the absence of fatigue and the absence of physical pain and and then I thought wow that's just so basic that's like two bill buing blocks is clearly insufficient but then I couldn't think of a word to adequately describe the emotion that came about an hour later when I was feeling a little bit better but not completely better so was I lonely not really not anymore was I sad not really but you know as I had headed out into the city I was thinking I don't really have a word for how I feel I'm sort of okay not great not low you know and so I think that we have emotional labels I certainly do for Peak you know these Peak emotional states super happy I loved the time with my sister we do this every year this was a particularly good year for us um to do this and and it went really well we were texting back and forth how great it was I certainly know what it feels like to be really down in the in the pits I've got language for that but then there's this huge range in between and so I guess the simple question is should we even trust language as a way to understand how we're feeling or are there additional if not better signals that we should perhaps learn to elaborate um our understanding of emotions with so I'm going to give you a a simple answer and then I'm going to give you a more complicated answer right so the simple answer is no language is not sufficient period I think the way that you have well I should say one language is not sufficient so English is not sufficient and probably French on its own is not sufficient and probably Swahili on its own is not sufficient although it's very interesting that the the states that we Mark with words in each culture some of them overlap but a lot of them don't and it's very very useful to have labels of emotion Concepts from other cultures that that capture configurations or a state that we we don't really Mark we don't Mark those and and sort of distinctively pull them out as as different from other states I'd love to know what some of those are oh there there um I should have brought them with me I mean there there are some like there's one there's a German word which I can't remember the name of the word but it's like um the experience of someone having a face that deserves a punch I'm sure someone will tell us in the comments someone someone who knows German or spend time there please put that word in in the comments but don't don't punch any another one that's my favorite is um um liot which is is um it's a Polynesian um head hunting um uh emotion word and it means um exuberant aggression in a group like soccer or or head hunting right where you're basically um or I should say also um in the military so when I was listening to m one day A couple of years ago must have been more than that because it's in my book so it was probably more than seven years ago I was listening to these guys talk these former um um military uh Personnel talk about being um deployed in a war where they're with their buddies and they're they're basically hunting the enemy and they feel exuberant like they're you know and and they're it's not that they're happy but they're it's Pleasant and it's very intense very high arousal you know and in the moment it it seemed right and then they come back um you know and they ask themselves like they come back and so they're now you know their deployments ended now they're back home and they're like am I a psychopath like I enjoy killing people what is this about and I was thinking no no you just experienced liot and if you had a word for it you would understand that it's a groupy feeling where you're all in it together and it's really intense and you know they were experiencing the um the intensity of of um having their life on the line and and being responsible for their for their brothers you know and sisters in in in their troop you know so um the the what they would realize is it's a perfectly it's perfectly within the range of normal human variation it's just that in English we don't have a word for it really but there are words there are Concepts in other languages right or the other one that I like is called gigle which is where when you see a baby who's really cute and you just want to like oh you yesterday evening squee oh my God that kid was so cute those little cheeks are just like jumping at you and and the parents are delightful people too and they was just facing out cuz they had one of those outward facing baby things and it's just sort of like yeah it's and I thinkle it's called it's gigle gigle oh keigle is from the other episode that we did on well it also has to do with babies but yeah in a different way um or there's one in I think there's a Japanese word for the despair that you feel when you got a bad haircut really yeah cuz it's I mean it's really is a different kind of feeling than you know because you got to like wait for it to grow up you know whatever anyways the point being that amazing words for us Mark particular States and they're not all the they're not always the states that other people in other cultures care about but I there's a but the even again the phrasing of your question I just want to come back to and I'm not trying to pick at you but feel free what I love is that what what you said before when you said my question was illposed in your in the answer that followed it made it very clear why and I learned something about how the the the the not emotion system but the things plural that that create emotions work so uh feel free I I I grew up in the same culture that you did I'm not Canadian by birth but but in the academic culture yeah you know I mean the the stuff that we take online by the way folks is nothing compared to the kind of hazing that I experienced growing up in uh in academic culture as it was done then I don't know if it's still that way now so uh feel free yeah I'm tougher than I look well no I think my point is that I'm trying to get at here is that when we ask questions any of us me too anybody ask a question there are certain assumptions that we're making in order to allow us to pose the question and sometimes what I'm taking issue with is not the question itself but it's the assumptions behind the question right and this is a very classic thing in philosophy of science which I know I just said the p word philosophy which scientists you know usually they roll their eyes back in their head and fall over when you talk about that but I think it's really important so you know can language is language sufficient to label or to to to gauge emotional states kind of sounds like and this is the assumption that people make that there's a state in here called an emotion and now I have to label it I have to identify it that is not how it works like that is not what your brain is doing at all and in order to explain what I think is happening and what I my best available guess you know like based on what I understand it's like not even remotely that that is just not a meaningful question at all um I do think words are important I just don't think that they have to be insufficient by virtue of what the brain is actually doing and the way that I come at this is just really different from a lot of my colleagues so really for a hundred years at least I hate when people say things like that like for a hundred years but it really is like for for a hundred years at least what psychologists and neuroscientists do have did and are still doing is they start with a folk experience a folk category a common sense experience I feel angry uh I'm making a decision um having a memory I'm remembering something they start with their experience and then they go looking for the physical basis of that experience in the brain or in you know in the body I think that's really problematic because not everybody in the world actually uses those categories or has those experiences a lot of that has to do with the scientific publication process one of the most important statements I ever heard is from the late Ted Jones one of the greatest neur anatomists of probably the last 500 years um which was the following he said a drug is a substance that when injected into an animal or a person produces a scientific paper and in many way foot yeah yeah you kind of catch catch you square in the face can you go oh right yeah I mean basically every drug disrupts if taken an hour or two before sleep changes the amount of REM sleep that you get so so I could imagine that almost any perturbation of the language system the body the facial movements system could give you a quote unquote effect that you could write a paper about yeah but that doesn't mean it has any semblance whatsoever to what's happening in the world when we or other people experience emotions and here's the here you know there's so much in what you said that I I just want to it's very it's very exciting to talk to you so the first thing I'll say is that um you know we often will identify we we as in the you know people but also scientists identify biological um signals um by what we believe them to mean psychologically so serotonin is is a happiness chemical no serotonin evolved as a metabolic regulator it is a metabolic regulator and whatever it's doing it's allowing an animal to spend resources when the animal the animal's brain isn't sure there's a a reward at the end of that right so you were saying before you know the absence of fatigue the absence of discomfort that's a that's a pleasant feeling right well yeah so maybe serotonin has something to do with pleasantness because it has something to do with energetics right cortisol cortisol is not a stress hormone it's not a stress hormone I mean it's a hormone that is secreted more when the brain believes that there is a big metabolic outlay that's required that's what stress is basically it's the brain believes there's a big metabolic outl that's about to be required and it matters these kind of like little semantic tweaks like they matter a lot because of how we do because of how we do research so I would say I don't start with the categories that derive from English and my own experience um I start with the nervous system I try to learn what is the best available evidence for for how that nervous system evolved how it developed how it structured right Anatomy to me is very important some of my best hypotheses come from just learning the anatomy and realizing oh well there's a connection there that's direct that mean that should mean something you know I mean um I could give you lots of examples of um uh where we've had we've made discoveries solely because we noticed an an a set of anatomical connections and were're really curious about what they might be involved with but if you start with that premise then you think about the brain in I think about the brain a really different way right so I don't think about the brain as a stimulus driven organ um I think about it more like this that the the brain is um first of all the brain is not running a model or or making inferences about the world all the brain knows is are signals from the sensory surfaces of its body so your brain is modeling your retina and it's modeling your ca and it's modeling the sensory surfaces of the skin and sure signals you know are you know hit those surfaces and those surfaces transduce those signals and send them up to the brain but the brain only knows the body and anything it knows about the world it knows about the world through the body through the sensory surfaces of the body so that's the first for me really big important point the second important point is that I think about the brain as being trapped in a dark silent box called your skull you know and it's so weird saying these things to you you're so much you know you're like you're this really esteemed like neuroscientist in here I am explaining to you how I think the brain works it's just very you know what's important for our audience but it's also important for me even though yes I know I know these facts but it's I believe it's always uh informative to go back to the fundamentals because we forget you know actually I would say that the uh someone once described um the I'll call him the great because he's a great visual neuroscientist uh visual neuroscientist Tony maavin who founded the department of of neuroscience at NYU once said you know a real intellectual is somebody that can appreciate and work with a topic at multiple levels it's not and oftentimes the more experti is associated with more focus on detail so I love returning to the core Basics so I I think it's wonderful please please continue so I think about the brains being trapped in this box and um it's receiving signals continuously from the sensory surfaces of the body but those signals are the outcomes of some set of changes and the brain doesn't know what the changes are it doesn't know the causes of those signals it just knows the outcomes it knows the signals that's what it's receiving and so it has to guess at what the causes of those signals are in order to stay alive um and so that's in philosophy called an inverse problem so the brain just has a massive continuous inverse problem that it has to deal with all the time like it can't have it doesn't have access to all the information no it's just a guessing machine it's a guessing machine so for example um you know if you hear a loud bang what is that loud bang could be a car door slamming it could be thunder it could be a car backfiring it could be a gunshot the brain doesn't know it has to guess and it's not making a guess like uh intellectual guess the Guess is a motor plan it's a plan for changing the internal state of the body in order to support motor skeletal motor movements do I do I need to run do I need to shut the window do I need to get an umbrella do I you know do I need to hold my breath because the car is backfired you know what do I need to do so where does that plan come from well it comes from past experience the experience that's been wired into the brain um what the I think that the evidence suggests that what the brain is doing is basically reinstating bits and pieces of past experience so remembering although we don't experience ourselves as remembering but basically it's reimplementing ensembles of signals from the past that are similar to the present in some way now a bunch of things which are similar to each other in Psychology is a category so what the brain is doing is it's creating a it's constructing a category and in fact we think about the brain as a continuous category Constructor it's constructing a category of possible Futures possible outcomes possible motor plans and how does it know which is the right one because it's not just picking one there's going to be some sample that it's re it's re-implementing but how does it know which one which is the right one because there can only be one well I feel like in the example of a loud noise what I immediately thought of as you were describing that is that my system would become aware of it I would become aware of it but then it's a question of is there another loud noise how closely are those loud noises spaced is it getting louder or less loud and then and so a bunch of categories it it's like a bookshelf with an infinite number of books but then with the second loud noise now it's just you know one uh wing of the library and then with the the next thing that happens and the context it starts narrowing and then pretty soon you get presented with the book that says you know the roof is about to cave in sure and and I think your your PO your your analogy there is pointing out two things one is that um really why why the what the brain is attempting to do is to reduce uncertainty because uncertainty is super expensive now sometimes we like deliberately you know cultivate uncertainty right like we do not you know we deliberately try to learn things we don't you know that we don't know we we you know put ourselves novel situations you know we seek novelty and because it's fun and interesting and whatever sure but imagine every single waking moment of your life was like that where you didn't know you couldn't narrow things down from the library to the wing to the Bookshelf to the you know the to the the particular shelf on that bookshelf to yeah you terrifying yeah it would be that's the label I would give it it would be terrifying cuz I couldn't plan anything or do anything because all possibility are open right it's and it's just actually metabolically unsustainable and you know there are some there are some brains that are wired in a way that they don't predict very well they don't create these categories very well and so they're they're dealing with in really unbelievable amounts of uncertainty so that's one thing I is but that part of what's the goal here if you could say there's a goal is to reduce uncertainty and I'm going to get why this has anything to do with emotion in a minute but I I just need to set up the ground rules or the assumptions uh you know of what I'm what I'm working with here so the other thing though that you pointed out which I think is really important is that the um none of this is static it's all evolving over time right the signals are evolving over time so both the signals that are constantly hitting the sensory surfaces of the body and making their way to the brain but also the intrinsic signals in the brain it's all changing over time so when we talk about context that's important how is the brain making a decision about similarity like what are the features that are similar it's it's not just at a single snapshot in time it's always happening dynamically over time right and most of the time though you don't ask your you don't wait to hear a second sound you don't you're not deliberately attempting to figure out what the sound is your brain is just sorting it out right and it's sorting It Out by narrowing down the possibilities and there are some selection mechanisms in the brain that help it guess better but also the signals coming from the world um are are also helping to select which possibility um is the right one I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor inside track track ER inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you meet your health goals I'm a big believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term Health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test however with a lot of blood tests out there you get information back about blood lipids about hormones and so on but you don't know what to do with that information with inside tracker they have a personalized platform that makes it very easy to understand your data that is to understand what those lipids what those hormone levels etc mean and behavioral supplement nutrition and other protocols to adjust those numbers to bring them into the ranges that are ideal for your immediate and long-term Health inside tracker's ultimate plan now includes measures of both apob and of insulin which are key indicators of cardiovascular health and energy regulation if you'd like to try inside tracker you can visit inside tracker.com huberman to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's insid tracker / huberman to get 20% off there's this scene that comes to mind from that movie I think it was Saving Private Ryan where like the the um the guys that are about to hit the ground on D-Day are flinching with every crack of gunfire like they're just everything's a stimulus to move and to end and then some of the more seasoned soldiers are literally having bullets whizzing by their head and people are dropping Dead all around them and they're moving forward steeli and stable and upright and in part we look at that and and say okay they're courageous they're seasoned maybe they're desensitized in certain ways but actually it fits much better with the idea based on what you're saying it fits much better with the idea that um they have intimate knowledge both conscious and unconscious knowledge that something right next to them is a threat but not a threat worth responding to right exactly but if it were headed straight for them they would quite quite understand what I would say it's is that it's um it's not uh you know I keep referring to things as signals and really I'm just I'm that's like my generic word for a quantity of energy of some sort you know but your brain my brain every brain is constantly making signal noise distinct you know like distinctions do I need to care about this do I do I not need to care about this right and we have ways of learning and we also have ways of queuing each other so um you know humans use eye gaze to cue each other about what is signal and what is noise right so if you and I were sitting or let's say we were at a coffee shop and we were in a part of town that i' had never been to before and we were sitting having coffee and you know a loud siren went by if you turned and looked i' would probably turn and look because you just cued me that that was something I need to care about if you ignored it I'd probably ignore it because you just cued me that I I didn't need to worry about it I didn't need to care and we're constantly doing that with each other and we also do it with little babies and with kids and that's how we teach children this is signal this is noise this you need to worry about this you can ignore and so yeah your your description is perfect so what does this have to do any of this have to do with emotion in order to answer that part of the question I I I want to say so okay you've got these signals the brain is like has these electrical signals going on we'll just ignore the hormonal signals for the moment because that's complic you know one is complicated so it's got all these electrical signals going on it's when it's remembering something it's just basically reinstating a pattern of signals and it's got these signals coming in um from the sensory servfaces okay so what's so what is the brain doing it's a signal processor so what is it I don't mean a computer I mean a signal processor in the engineering sense so what's it what is it doing without getting into all the Dynamics of prediction and you know whatever what the brain is doing is it's um it's assembling a set of features it's some of the features that it's assembling are very close in detail to the sensory surfaces of the body so in primary visual cortex there's a retinotopic map the details there are very very low level like a line an edge you know same thing in primary auditory cortex right it's tonotopic so there are tones but it's very very very lowlevel details and we might there are many many many many of these little features so we would say there there's a it's a high dimensional array lots and lots and lots and lots of features and then and let's just talk about one structure just the cerebral cortex let's not worry about just but what I'm about to say is basically true of really the rest of the brain as well if you take the cortex off the surface uh the cortical sheet off the that wavy you know cortical sheet you take it off the rest of the brain the subcortical parts and you stretch it out like a napkin you can see there's a compression gradient there in the architecture of the neurons so at the primary sensory areas there are these tiny little paramal neurons that are representing these little these very low-level features and they feed into bigger neurons which feed into bigger neurons which feed into more bigger neurons so what's happening is you've got this very detailed array being compressed in its dimensionality until you get to the middle of the brain at the front where there are many fewer neurons but they're bigger and they have many more connections so it's a dimensionality reduction that's happening so just to make sure I understand um correctly and that the audience understands the physical world obviously is um transformed by our sensory apparati the retina the ca the the sensing neurons in our skin umal things mechan pressure phon sound waves okay that's translated into neural code which is chemical and electrical yeah and and those sensory inputs are are fairly vast and you call high dimension high dimensionality so lots of different orientations of lines lot even you know even though it originates with just three uh cone photop pigments lots of opportunity for encoding different shades of color contrast okay and all of that so you have lots of little neurons to represent all the possibilities of the physical world that are occurring MH but as that information is passed further up along EXC I have to be careful with the use of hierarchies because that's controversial nowadays not for political reasons but for accuracy reasons um as that information is passed along there's more um convergence onto a smaller number of larger neurons so these are neurons that have access to a lot of information but in coarser form right so there are low you know it's like like compressing an MP3 like how an MP3 compresses information for example so the cortex is representing features so and I represent I'm just using that in a generic way because that's also controversial about exactly how is the okay but yeah but it works but for now I'm using it just in a generic way so you go from lines and edges to a shape like a round shape to a face to a right so you're you're basically you're you're um you're going what's happening is there are summaries of summaries of summaries of summies I love that I hope everyone hears that because I've been in this field of Neuroscience a long time as you move along the neur axis from the sensory epithelium now it sounds very very Gomen clish but from the surface of the skin inward you're getting summaries yeah they send more and more summaries I think that's so important I that's a that's a like a gazillion dollar statement for understanding of the nervous system so but each of those points correspond to some mental feature like a line or an edge or a circle or a square or a face or right but but now then you when you when you're in the midline at the front what are those features well those features are things like they are they are multimodal summaries meaning they are summaries of the sights and sounds and smells and right but they and they are lower dimensional meaning they are they're coarser so there are things like threat reward pleasure I mean really abstract that's what abstract means it doesn't mean that those representations have no sensory or motor meaning it means that threat for example a summary can have many different patterns associated with it and the brain is treating them all as equivalent this this to me again feels so so important for people to understand because um as I'm hearing this and this word summaries is just ringing in my mind it's so important because one of the core components of my experience of my emotions because that's all I can really say for sure my subjective interpretation and labeling of my own emotions is that they are pretty broad bins like I described ear pretty broad bins and so that that's where I was exactly where I was going so what about the word anger where is that represented like well that's a that's a one of these multimodal abstractions in fact anger is just a couple of phones it's a couple of sounds but those sounds the sound of anger corresponds over thousands of instances that you've learned in your life to very different patterns of sensory motor features that's right because what's going on in your body during anger can vary what the way you move your face in Anger can vary depending on the situation what you see someone else doing in Anger can vary and so the word anger or any word is actually just a multi Al summary of many many many many instances which are in their sensory and motor features the sensory and motor meaning very different and and it seems to me are highly constrained by Developmental and cultural experience absolutely because just today I learned that there's a word in Japan for the feeling that one has of having gotten a haircut they don't like there's a word in Germany that pertains to the feeling of wanting to punch someone specifically because of the look on their face well really it's more like you like you they to you it feels like they're asking to be punched in the face even so you added yet more dimensionality to it so upon learning just those things just today there is additional dimensionality brought in such that if I were to ever um want to punch somebody in the face simply because of the look on their face that I wouldn't NE necessarily label that as anger alone it now has another dimension to it and so I I think I'm finally I think I'm finally starting to understand how the Developmental and the cultural influences plus the fact that language is a pretty crude descriptor for this neural process that you're describing oh absolutely absolutely but okay so but but before you use the word granularity and so I'm going to use that word too in fact I've you I've coined that phrase emotional granularity um just as an aside you know I coined that phrase almost 30 years ago and now people study it like it's a phenomenon which is cool in a sense but also I kind of want to keep reminding them like that's a word that refers to a process it's not a thing it's a process and the but the process is so when the brain is a category Constructor how fine grained are the categories how size of the categories right like if you're using if your feature of equivalence that your brain is using is threat you're in really big trouble because there are like a gazillion different sensory motor patterns that could go with threat so your category is going to be massive so how does the brain figure out which of those massive number of options is the one to use in this in in this instance if on the the other hand you don't just want to use sensory motor patterns as the features of equivalence or the features that you're using to say this instance right now is similar to these past instances if I had to search like right now what is similar to right now it would be me sitting across the table from somebody who has a beard and is um dressed in black and you know there there are a lot of details there that probably don't matter right so you you'd be searching for a specific match from the past that's not very efficient either so you need something in the middle and that that is to say you need to have C your brain has to be able to make categories that are more fine grained but not super fine grained but they have to be more fine grained than just threat yeah you want to keep the in the library analogy that I made earlier you want to keep the rest of the library accessible at some level yeah so you're not just staring at that one book but if you use the category bad this feels bad then your brain is basically um going to be partially constructing an entire Wing full of books like a entire Wing full of options if you use the word angry um then maybe it's a bookcase it's constructing a bookcase full of options and a category that's the size of a bookcase and if you were using the word frustrated then maybe it's a shelf the brain can learn to construct categories at different scales of gen generalizability so if I'm in an instance and um my brain is making a guess is it drawing from past instances that were associated with the word anger uh were associated with the word fear maybe it's some combination it's the words are just features they're just sounds there are also all sorts of other features like what was my heart doing what what what kind of motor actions did I make what did I see next so the point being what I'm trying to bring here is that it's not like your brain creates an emotional state and then labels it what your brain is doing is creating a category of possible futures of what's going to H what it's going to do next and that state is largely determined by the what the brain is remembering and it's drawing from that huge population that huge library of options which books is it sampling I love this so much because it explains so much that frankly has been perplexing to me and also somewhat troubling to me like for instance I um we hear about emotional intelligence you know and and sometimes I wonder whether or not um true emotional intelligence would be what you just described the understanding of how this process works so that you can work with it and I definitely want to talk about how one can work with this knowledge because I think it's incredibly powerful in its um explanatory power but also um it's actionable power um the other thing is that it's clear to me just based on my experience today of hearing these words from other cultures that relate to different emotional states that this system unlike a lot of systems in the brain I like to think is fairly plastic yeah like the moment that you know that there are additional Dimensions to sadness Etc there's something comforting about that what's really unsettling is the idea that we have such broad bends that we are we would Define you know a near infinite number of situations as just fear that would suck that's not a good existence and yet I have to ask whether or not you think that as a species not as a culture but our entire species whether or not we are taking the exact opposite approach that we're sort of moving into the Emoji isation is that a word I'll make it a word and people can assault me in the comments um the emojiz of this very rich and complex system we're starting to get into this mode of like I'm going to post an angry face and therefore like this is a bad I'm angry at you this is a bad interaction we're going to it's it's um combat potentially combative or and you know maybe um Twitter X or Instagram or other social media sites are kind of the the epitome of this where you reduce this High dimensional space in you you keep the the sensory stimulation very high it's movie after movie after movie and color and sound and people doing crazy parkour stuff and bears eating giraffes or whatever it is probably not bears eating giraffes but you know what I mean and you can see stuff that's sexual and violent and political and emotional and sweet and then the cats are kissing the monkey and you're like or the monkey's kissing the cat and so it's high dimensionality in terms of sensory space but then what do we call it we're like oh this is an emoji you ass sign an emoji you're heting something you're giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down so I almost feel like we we're trying to uh we we're regressing to a state where we're kind of like an infant trying to figure out like what the hell is going on and we're saying you know what you get like six categories of response when in reality um we should probably be expanding the number of different responses that we can have in order to accurately match the way that our nervous system actually works yes exactly there are many different things we could talk about with respect to the summary that you just gave which I I think is completely accurate so what I would say is that if you look through even just the last I don't know hundred or so years like the 19th you know 19th 20th centuries maybe you can see that the complexity of the of people's responses expands and contracts right so for example this is something that I've written really speculatively about um but one of the things that I found really interesting um is that you know authoritarianism authoritarian thinking is the reduction of complexity to some things that are really really simple like you're getting rid of all the complexity to you know basically these very very coarse low dimensional judgments and Things become black and white um it's the avoid of complexity um so that there can be simple single answers to things and it happens in human culture at times and then then there's an expansion of complexity at times too so what predicts that like what is it in the human nervous system or our Collective human nervous you know like we're we're just a bunch of brains attached to bodies interacting with other brains and bodies right so like what is it that causes these um ripples of and and I have some thoughts about that that are really really really speculative um but I think the other thing that's that's really important is that we've talked about we'll go back to our our cortical sheet that we've and by the way this is just one compression gradient in the brain there are others too right um there are at least four others that I can think of um so this is just one but all compression gradients work the same way which is that now we've talked about going from the low-level details um compressing to these multimodal summaries these really like simple um features that are right but that compression is what Engineers would call lossy meaning you lose the information you lose the information so when you go from lines and edges to a face those neurons they just know the face they don't have they lose what they've thrown away the details they've thrown away those details are gone for those neurons that are representing a face they don't have access to that they don't have access to it you know so we said well the brain is making a guess it's making a guess about what these what this big very very high-dimensional you know soup of signals in the world and in the body like what do they mean right when the brain makes a guess it starts with the compressed low dimensional sign it starts with the features like anger or like threat or it starts with these summaries and then it has to infer or guess at every synapse there's a guess that's being made about what the details are at the next level because what's happening is the guess is basically the brain going from these really General things to these very specific sensory motor patterns it happens along the cortical sheet it happens also down the Nur axis down the ner you know from the cortex to the midbrain to the brain stem to the spinal cord you have to go from a representation of you know run to the actual physical movements of muscles spindles and you know angles of joints and things like that so what you're doing is you're going in the other direction you're adding detail you're particularizing and the brain is guessing it's guessing well if it's using anger as the general feature well which which instance of anger is it and what are the specifics that are going to happen and and what are the WT and forgive me but and what are the Adaptive steps that I might take or not take because um I'm quoting a lot today so forgive me but in the words of the great sharington Nobel prize winning physiologist the final common pathway is movement is movement and that's and and movement is nuanced right humans I I suppose have among the greatest variety of different speeds and types of movement I think about parkour or gymnastics think about then what like a a cheetah can do cheetah are impressive a gymnist is truly impressive in terms of the range of movements and speeds Etc in any event the ultimate choice of the nervous system has to make is whether or not to move which direction how fast or stay still move move back and and I just I'll just add because I'm I'm hoping that you'll expand on this um it's been said before that ultimately the nervous system is trying to make decisions about yum yuck or me like like am I going to move towards something am I going to move away from it or am I just going to stay put well that's only that's only at the that that's a very I would say that those are very low dimensional features those are those compressed features but that's not the only thing the brain has to decide that's just a misnomer well good that I can get out of this little pickle that I just put myself in by saying that I didn't say that now I won't quote who did because he's a very famous neuroscientist but he tried to reduce it all he's at Caltech it um he's not somebody who studies emotion he studies the visual system but he said that you know that that there's a that the the neural circuits maybe it's because he studies mice are are essentially bended into um yum yuck and meh outputs and and i' I've always liked it on the one hand cuz threes work and it's simple but rarely is the way that we describe things the way it actually works so we would you know in in studying humans we would say well that's affect affect that's mood or you know it's just like is it is it um should I move towards it is it Pleasant should I move away from it is it unpleasant or you know is it irrelevant basically I don't care okay think about when you're feeling horrible you just feel you feel you just feel you feel bad what do you do you don't know what you don't know because you don't have a plan of action and that's ultimately that is what those those compressed like summary features those very low coarse features they have to be decompressed into details otherwise you don't know what to do so ultimately what the brain is doing is it's sampling from the past based on similarity to the present to plan an action and when I say action I don't just mean skeletal motor action like moving a limb it you the first actions that are planned are the actions of coordinating the heart and the lungs and you know all of the internal actions that are required to support the motor the skeletal motor movements so your brain is making uh is categorizing and it's making a it's it's creating a category and it's there are options there those options the motor plans begin with should the heart beat faster should it beat slower does blood pressure need to go up should the you know should the blood vessels constrict or should they dilate um should the breathing be deeper or more shallow I mean those are the first plans that get made and then milliseconds later there are the skeletal motor plans and then your experience of the world derives from those motor plants those viscero motor that is the plans for the viscera for the internal organs and the skeletal motor so I'm just going to refer to them as motor those motor plans actually give rise to your experience of the world there's not some state that exists as an emotional state which then you apply a label to the label is a just a set of features that are useful for generalizing from the past to the present and the bin size or the the you know of of what a word refers to can change it can change it's different for different people and it can change in your lifetime and you can add new Bins that is you can so for example there's a there's a concept gusin look which I probably just butchered so if you speak Turkish I'm sorry but it's like um it has features of it of like loss and um like people blocking your goals so we would say it's anger and sadness together that's gusin look when you lose something and you're pissed off about it um that's a but that's a category on its own right it's just a different way of parsing that that that really detailed soup and the more words you know the more words are just useful for pointing to a set of features that are similar to each other so what I mean by that is if I say to you Andrew I had pizza last night for dinner pizza two sounds two syllables that those two syllables s they stand in for like 50 different sensory and motor features because I don't have to say to you I had a food I didn't have pizza L thing but let's say I did I had a food that was round and flat and had sauce and also cheese and it it had mozzarella cheese and also a little parmesan cheese and it had mushrooms on it and a little bit of uh Olive and you know um that's like really really uh detailed and complicated but instead I can just say I had pizza two features two sounds two syllables phones and with those two phones I have just communicated to you in your brain my brain had 50 features it was representing of details and now I have just communicated those to you or some number of them with two sounds very efficient now of course you might think that I was from Chicago and had deep dish pizza and I'll just resist I don't I don't want to like offend anybody from Chicago it's not pizza that's not real pizza that's not real Pizza um right so you could then ask me uh was it but you're from Chicago is that deep dish pizza and then I would say no no I'm actually from Toronto which is just like New York and so no it was thin crust pizza which is really the only kind of pizza there is just saying but you know but my point is that words are just stand in for they're just low these low dimensional features these these s of gross features that stand in for many many many many little detailed features and that's how we communicate with each other and and we are constrained by you know what we know and our yes so and what we can say and the extent of our vocabulary and I'll just say that little babies three months old they don't speak yet and they don't understand language but they can use words to learn abstract categories so abstract just means that the the word refers to many different patterns of sensory motor features so the word is um or the category the things that make the instances similar um are a function um or goal not like the sensory motor features so you say to a baby very explicitly like because if we're talking about three four-month-old babies right babies can also do this implicitly too um but in experim exp you say to a baby look sweetie this is a bling and you put the bling down and it makes a beeping noise and then you say now this looks different feels different right smells different look sweetie this is a bling it beeps now you take something else which also is different and you say look sweet this is a bling now the baby expects this to beep by the way folks just listening Lisa just gave three examples first with a pen then a coffee mug and then her very own watch uh three very distinct objects but all of which make uh that are told uh the baby is told make uh a bling sound and they will bend those three yeah visual distinct objects functionally distinct objects into one single bin because they make a because they are sharing a function which is to beep I think this is so so important and I um and if I may I I I want to ask whether or not we can take this incredible understanding of emotions because that's really what we're talking about well we're really talking about how the brain my my version of how the brain works and how emotions emerge out of this system basically and and absolutely um you described it far better than I could and and and anchor that to this concept of movement like the movement is the final common path with the understanding that the movement system and forgive me but that we have systems in the brain and body that allow us to move that's for sure systems plural that they run in both directions in other words how we feel what we feel our emotions has some bearing on the movements that are more or less likely for us in a given context and our movements clearly can also influence the way that we feel internally well it's well I mean so if um if we just look at how things are happening here's here's what the anatomy tells us that when the brain makes a guess that guess starts as a motor plan starts as a visceral motor plan and a skeletal motor plan so heart rate changes breathing changes blood pressure changes and potentially skeletal muscle movement right and literal copy literal copies efferent copies of those signals are sent to they propagate to the sensory areas telling the brain telling those neurons this is the last time we made this in this context when this other stuff just happened the like this temporal context right the and we made these movements here is what we saw next here is what we felt next here's what we smelled next so yeah I think of this so the image that Pops in my mind and we should explain to people what efference copy is um in neuroscience and neuro Anatomy uh the connection to a structure is called an aarant with an A and the connections out from a structure are called the eer but the way I was say it doesn't even matter it's just basically the point here is that in our experience in our in the way the brain your brain conjures an experience okay and and that experience is that you feel something first you see something you feel something you act that's not what's happening what's happening is your brain is preparing the action first and the feeling what and your experience comes from that action preparation so it's a copy it's like literally you have axons that are sending motor signals down the the you know brain stem to the spinal cord and literal copies of those axons like those axons have branches that collateral branches that just send axons other places the same signal that is being sent to your spinal cord to move stuff in your body that same signal is being sent to other neurons in the brain as predictions of the sensations that are going to happen in a second from now a moment from now probably faster than a second but you know in a couple milliseconds if you move and so yes it is the case that what you feel is linked to what you do and what you do is linked to what you feel but not in this simple mechanistic way that that neuroscientists and psychologists have been using forever you it's not like you are you are you you're probed by a stimulus you you see something you hear something and then you process it and evaluate it and then you react to it no that's not what's happening what's actually happening under the hood is that based on how things are right now your brain makes a guess or some guesses and those guesses start as motor plans and the consequence of those motor plans are predicted Sensations and then of course sensory signals are coming from the sensory surfaces and they s and here's the really here's to me the really the most mind-boggling thing about this whole explanation if your Sensory neurons in your sensory areas are already so they're firing the the the the action potentials the spiking has changed based on these prepared motor movements these are sensory predictions and you know when I give talks and on my website I have some cool examples of of how this works you can experience it yourself you you know start to experience uh you know you hear things that aren't there you you feel vibrations in your chest that aren't there because your brain is predicting it's predicting these Sensations so let's say the sensations come the the sensory signals I should say let me so the sensory signals from the sensory surfaces of the body make it to the brain if you have if your neurons are already firing in a way to anticipate those signals those signals just confirm the firing and then they're done they don't make it any further into the brain so when you're predicting well your experience is constructed completely by your brain the signals from the sensory surfaces are there just to confirm irm or to change the signals so if there's things you didn't anticipate then those um errors of prediction those are the signals that are propagated and become compressed and stuff and we have a special name for that in science we call it learning you know Andy Clark is a philosopher who writes a lot about prediction predicting brain and and so on and he talks about normal uh everyday experience as being a controlled hallucination I think that's true yeah I subscribe to that um it's a fairly adaptive in most circumstances controlled hallucination but but it has its limitations and it I mean what we were talking about um if I could be a somewhat of a summary neuron you can tell me if my summary is too coarse um is that first of all that the neural systems and the Brain let's just call it the nervous system because we're talking about brain and body are incredibly Dynamic there's a bunch of inputs those inputs gets are incredibly elaborate they get summarized the summary prepares the body for a certain action that's a motor commands preo commands and then some action may or may not be taken but already as soon as an action is taken or not taken the whole state of the neural system is different it's changed as a consequence of just of what just happened now of course when people hear that and when I hear that indeed I I feel like wow it's a tough system to study because these are dynamical neural systems and and we have the technology to put people in functional scanners and look at what lights up so to speak we have the capacity to ask people how they feel based on questionnaires but you can imagine that's incredibly crude so then you give them liyer scales of you know rate from 1 to 10 how happy or sad you are and so you're adding some some depth and dimensionality to it but it's incredibly crude it's nothing like real experience and if somebody's more verbal less verbal maybe they somaticize more or less I mean an example comes to mind that you know occasionally you learn from social media which often I learn from social media and someone once said I don't think in thoughts I think in feels and I thought okay great you're probably also from Northern California and I said wait Andrew stop being so judgmental what do you mean and I asked and they said I experience emotions in their mind first as a as a bodily State then the label comes much later that's not how it works for me it feels fairly more integrated brain and body for me but other people started chiming in no I think of emotion I experience emotions clearly as a verbal label it's all in their head and so you start to realize that we might all be encoding The World Slightly differently or very differently and it's changing in time so then the question becomes you know how what are the anchor points in terms of our understanding of emotions that we can work with and and and the following questions come to mind um neither you nor I are clinicians as far as I know I'm certainly not I was actually trained as a clinician oh there you go I'm wrong again but I haven't no no no but I mean I haven't I haven't practiced in like really gazillions of years okay well you're you're well you're more than qualified to answer the question I'm about to ask which is to me there is a great conflict of information in the psychology Psychiatry and let's just call it wellness and mental health space which is when we are feeling lousy like not good let's put veilance on it just lousy I don't want in a state that we we're having an emotion that we don't want to have there's an entire category of information that says you need to feel your feelings you need to feel your feelings you need to acknowledge that they're there you need to go into the feeling maybe even full catharsis you need to amplify the feelings until they quote unquote leave your body after all Steve Job was into scream therapy and helped himun his anger who knows you get these examples he's probably the worst example because it seemed like he was angry a lot from what I hear but then there's another category of thought which is no you need to use your ability to top down control inhibition of the cortex on Lower structures again I'm deliberately using crude language here to say wait you know this is an emotion emotions pass this is not real this is just a limited set of uh High dimensionality stuff that's been summarized and you know what like I don't need to feel this way I can make myself feel differently maybe I'll go for a run in fact I always feel better after I go for a run so even this question as simple as should we feel our our feelings or should we not feel our feelings and of course you would hope that this would be answered appropriately such that people don't go harm other people or themselves but but but assuming that they're not going to harm other people eles verbally or physically then you really get yourself into a bit of a pickle like we don't understand what to do with emotions ours or other people's because clearly we don't understand emotions per se so I would say I'm going to answer your question and then I want to also pick it the word the I want to pick it an assumption um because it it's come up actually a couple of times and there's something super important in your descriptions that I just want to pull out for for the listeners because I think it's really important and you're doing it very naturally but I think some people it would be it just Bears commenting on so let me just deal with the question of should we feel our feelings or use our words you know we say to little kids use your words like don't throw a tantrum right um but then there was also this other feeling oh just feel it's important to feel and you don't want to get it have it be pent up and you or use your body and like and like hit a pillow I mean there's scream therapy bite the pillow SC pill tear the pillow's you can p $5,000 for a week ofing this and they'll tell you you're going to feel better at the end so the answer there is it's the wrong question like flexibility is important for everything always right so um first of all you don't have you don't have emotions in your body your body doesn't keep the score you know yeah great book title because it's super catchy but with all due respect to I think the important work of Vander I think it oversimplified and led people to believe that their back pain was trauma and that all trauma is somatized and it's not no it's not but I I would go further and say like first of all your body does keep the score your brain keeps the score your body is the scorecard that's super important and he has done really important work but his explanations for why things work is scientific ific Al incorrect it just is because we don't feel things in our bodies we everything we feel we feel in our brains we don't see in our eyes we see in our brains of course we need our eyes but we don't see in our eyes just like if you you know pinch your your hand with you know take skin and pinch between you know two two fingers the skin you don't feel that actually in your hand you feel it in your brain that's the magic of the brain in a sense so what I would say is it um uh it depends on the situation and what your goal is um sometimes it is useful to use your words and sometimes it is useful to go for a run it just depends on what your goal is well in both those cases you're you're uh that you gave both those examples excuse me you're um it's a way of Shifting off the emotion I guess what I'm asking is well sometimes you don't want to shift off the emotion sometimes the mo sometimes the wisest thing to do is live in the emotion that is you know sometimes uh discomfort sometimes when something feels bad it doesn't mean something is wrong it just might mean that you're doing something hard well earlier I wrote when you talking about the the broad categorization of emotions I I wrote down you know simple as good when it feels good you're like I just feel really great but then when things feel lousy that's where Nuance could be beneficial yeah AB absolutely because we're because emotions are recipes for Action when you go from be feeling bad to feeling angery or sad it's a recipe for action and I would also say and this just this is an analogy but I I sort of I stand by it um you know uh when I was um I had major back surgery a couple years ago and I know something about chronic pain it's not my area of study but I know something about it because I've I've and reanalyze some some data sets and I've read a lot so I'm not an expert but you know I have ideas and I thought to myself well I just I don't want to end up with chronic back pain so what I did was I made sure after I got through the first couple of weeks where I really needed oxycodone so that I could walk you know I was up and walking the same day I had surgery if you could call it walking it sort of a euphemism for like hobbling around on a with a walker but um I made sure that I felt the pain that is I dosed myself with discomfort quite deliberately because I wanted to make sure that I'm I'm I'm sorry for using you know cartisian language I don't know how else to say this I I wanted my brain to be taking in the prediction error I wanted my brain to to feel the to to I wanted to focus attention on the changing dis you know s the the changing discomfort over time because it meant that my body was healing as the discomfort got less but my brain would never feel that discomfort changing if I uh took painkillers and because the prediction error the things that the brain doesn't predict are teaching signals and I think it's true also in your life like sometimes you want to feel it because you you want to feel the discomfort because it's instructive about something and sometimes it's not and that's maybe that's not really an answer but the only way that you can figure that out for yourself is to do it sometimes if you're always getting rid of discomfort you never know when it's useful and it is useful sometimes but now I want to get to this point that I was making before like we are talking about feeling and emotion interchange like they're interchangeable and they're not right so here's how I would say it your brain is always regulating your body 247 and your body is always sending sensory signals back to the brain about the sensory state of the body and our nervous systems aren't wired for us to experience those sensory changes that are happening in the body in any degree of detail we're just not and it's a good thing like right now as we talk here our hearts are beating and our you know pain pancreas is squishing stuff out you know liver is you know filtering and like you know oxygen concentrations are changing like a there's a whole drama going on inside each of us and our listeners and we're largely not aware and I hope our listeners aren't aware because if they were they would not be listening to anything we were saying they'd be completely you know in enraptured or or in discomfort at what's going on inside them instead the brain creates a low-dimensional summary this gross kind of like barometer which is feeling affective feeling we call it or you could call it mood but scientists call it affect with an A Feeling Pleasant feeling unpleasant feeling worked up feeling calm feeling comfortable feeling uncomfortable it's kind of a general barometer of the state of the body and it's not emotion that those feelings those features of feeling are features of consciousness because your brain is always regulating your body your body's always sending signals back to the brain the brain is always representing them in this low-dimensional way whether you're paying attention or not like whether the brain is focusing it's you know applying attention to those neurons or not the those signals are there and even when we're not emotional you know like if you're driving on the highway and somebody cuts you off and you think what an the assholeness of that person that intensity of that negative affect is you experience it as a property of that person but really it's coming from you it's it's not a property of that person it's that's a feature of your experience in that moment and affect is always there sometimes it's in the foreground sometimes it's in the background but it's always there and it's a summary of physical things which is why it helps to if you take ibuprofen or Tylenol it will redu I mean study show it reduces negative feeling if you go for a run if you go for a walk if you shift your attention to the outside world then the features that of experience that are derived from the inside World diminish that's why going for a run helps or going for a walk helps or you know getting sleep helps right these are all things where you're changing the state of your body and so the sensory state of your body is changing and so your affect changes but emotions are the story that the brain tells about what caused the sensory signals that affect derives from so what caused those changes what do I need to do about those changes that's that's like it's a it's a much bigger event than just these features of experience which are all features of Consciousness which are always there they're always there and in in fact in our culture we we pathologize people when they just experience their bodies as physical Sensations and not as emotions like we say oh that person is Som somatizing or somatizing they're not they should they're really they're they should be experiencing emotion but really they're you know experiencing a stomach ache and that's bad but that's actually a judgment call that is probably sometimes wrong sometimes it's probably better to experience a stomach ache sometimes it's more productive part of being emotionally intelligent is knowing when not to construct an emotion you know like uh right before Co the coid pandemic was announced officially I was in New Zealand giving talks and my daughter who was who was in college at that time was flying uh literally like I think less than a week before the pandemic was announced she got on a plane and she flew to New Zealand to meet me because it was spring break and I always would bring her with me on spring break and in that and I remember really vividly I was in New Zealand there was only one case one case of coid in New Zealand at that point and I I got on the phone to my husband and I said I'm experiencing a very high level of arousal and it's it's very very unpleasant now my husband knows me very well and he said yeah there's a lot of uncertainty and I said I know now he didn't say to me well you're anxious and you just don't really know it I because I wasn't anxious I was feeling uncertain and as you know or maybe people are know that when there's a lot of uncertainty there's also a lot of arousal because the brain is attempting to learn and the neurom modulators that are important for learning new things happen to also cause uh a subjective sense of arousal and some they actually also modulate your autonomic nervous system so your heart can beat faster and whatever and our go-to explanation for what that is is to experience that arousal as anxiety but I was uncertain and remember that how your brain the story it's telling itself the category it's making is a plan for action well what do you do in anxiety and fear you freeze or you run away what do you do in uncertainty you forage for information you tolerate the discomfort and you forage for information which is what I was doing when I called and said what should we do should I meet her at the airport and turn around and come back or should we have a vacation like I don't really know um and you know what I ended up doing was foraging for information for another couple days and then made a Split Second decision in the air when we were flying from one Island to the other and we just re-rooted us and we went home and then the borders closed like two days later you know but my point is that it this is not just you know uh psychological mumbo jumbo you can train yourself to experience your heart pounding in your chest as determination what when my daughter this is all in how emotions are made these examples but they're true I mean my daughter this is the this book I wrote a couple years ago when my daughter was 12 years old she was testing for a black belt in karate she was 5 feet tall not even and she was testing against these like massively large adolescent boys okay who were like a foot taller than her and her Sensei who was a 10th degree black belt didn't say to her don't be afraid he said get your butterflies flying in formation and I was like in raptured I was like oh my God this guy is totally brilliant that is the best you know meaning to give to arousal that changes the meaning of it what you do when you create an emotion is you're giving meaning to those affective feelings and you have have more control than you might think in how you do that you can do it by changing the physical state that gives rise to those feelings but you can also change it by learning more how to make more categories and how to make them more fluidly um so that you do something different and the it's not that things will necessarily feel any more unpleasant or any less or or any more pleasant it's that the feeling becomes a source of wisdom it's a cue to do something different this is a case uh where I absolutely believe that uh knowledge about how emotions and affect and states of the brain and body work which is what you're beautifully describing for people today is extremely useful in and of itself and I think um and I it's a frankly it's a it's a refreshing and welcome departure from a lot of the conversations that we normally have on this podcast where you know we talk a lot about protocols we talk about tools right things that people can do ways they can implement the knowledge and here this is certainly one of those cases as well but um it's a beautiful one and a very um important one where the knowledge itself just the knowledge of additional words for different states uh I love the example example of butter putting butterflies into formation because it it inherent to that is that you're not trying to get rid of the Butterflies quite the opposite yeah um you're deploying them in certain ways and there's an action step and a psychological step there of course that's required but that it isn't um you know view morning sunlight for an average of 10 minutes to set your circadian rhythm which is something that I say over and over again I'll go into the grave saying that they'll probably put a window over my grave so sunlight can get in at this point but which would be fine with me but in any case um knowledge is power is something that we hear but it's not always true often it's knowledge is power but you need to do X Y and Z in a certain order but here what you've provided and you you're continuing to provide is knowledge that people can use that real estate within their brain I'm deliberately not giving it a name um because it's it's distributed real estate that allows them to take an unpleasant feeling and work with it um that it has more dimensionality than we probably realize um that's becoming clear to me that rarely if ever is there less dimensionality um you can always give it more dimensionality by just shifting your attention and you can practice this really so you know like there's a story that I tell about when I the brief uh moment when I tried to learn how to paint you know and so uh there's an object like a cup and you have this three-dimensional object and you want to render it on a two-dimensional canvas so you could just try to draw the cup and then what you get is a pretty shitty looking you know cup um but what what a realist painter will teach you to do is to take the cup and to break it apart into pieces of light and then what you try to paint are the pieces of light so you're transferring your first what you're doing is you're taking this very low dimensional coarse object called a cup and you're breaking it into tiny little pieces of light which is what the visual system does which is what the visual system does and so what you're doing is you're categorizing it differently in order to emphasize the features that are more High dimensional that are in there right they're in there in in the brain but you can but what you're doing essentially is you're you're having the brain your brain is applying attention to basically um focus more on those details and then you transfer the details on to the two-dimensional canvas and what you get is a pretty decent looking three-dimensional Cup on a two-dimensional canvas aming un unless you're me and and then it still looks shitty uh you know and so maybe I'll I'll take it up again sometime uh in the future but my point is that you can do that with your own sensory condition of your body in Emotion you can deliberately focus on what your heart is doing to the to your the best of your ability that you can sense it right or you can deliberately Focus on your breathing or you could deliberately focus on what your muscles are how they how tense they feel you can you can change the dimensionality of your experience by the shifting of your attention I love it and uh forgive me for giving another example but I think it's one that will resonate with both of us and hopefully with our listeners as well which is um the great Oliver Sachs neurologist and author um talked about and wrote about you know he'd work with these patients that were either had locked in syndrome or severe autism or severe tourettes or Parkinson's and you know most people would even clinicians who specialize in those areas would look at those people and say that they're living in a diminished world it's it's they lack capacities that other people have and um and it's all about the a the absence of certain abilities and uh and then what he did eventually was incredible he loved animals so he would spend time thinking about what would be like for instance to be a bat hanging in the corner of a room and experience the room not through vision but mainly through echolocation and he would spend a lot of time thinking about that he also did a lot of drugs at one point in his career and then stopped because they were very destructive drugs not just psychedelics but also methamphetamine so yes he has that but he eventually changed his practice to trying to experience human emotion but first think about animal sensory experience MH and and he would do that for lots of different types of animals octopus and bats and all these different things and then it allowed him in his words it allowed him to then interact with patients in a way where he could feel maybe even empathize a little bit with how they experienced life and then he would write books about it in a way and here I'm borrowing someone else's words that storied these people into almost greater Larger than Life characters and now of course he wasn't trying to detract from their suffering but he was trying to give people an understanding of what that suffering was like through their actual experience and he did it in my opinion and the opinion of many other people a masterful job in doing and and it but it came through much in the same way that your art teacher said you know pay attention to the way the the the changes in light across the the the object as opposed to trying to draw draw the object themselves that when we so the the takeaway here that I I think we're arriving at is that that you've provided is that if we take a if we add dimensionality to our description of or experience of the sensory inputs and there's a ton of it to reach to and we maybe even come up with some new internal labels or language based labels that we can experience the world in much richer and much more adaptive ways absolutely and I I love I love your stories and I love this story in particular about Oliver sax because um it resonates with my experience when I was reading um Ed yong's new book oh um first he wrote We contain multitudes which I think one aiter and then um uh what is the recent one with animals an immense World an immense world and what I what I was thinking was you know it's a first of all it's a masterful masterful masterful book I I wish I had written that book I I wrote him a fan letter I was like this is such an amazing book it's an amazing book um but because he help helps you experience so what what I want to say is this that there are all these animals that have different sensory surfaces than we do and they can detect signals in the world that are that we that are not relevant to us because we don't have sensory surfaces for them and it reminds you first of all that what you experience as reality is really not in the world alone and it's not in your head alone it is in the trans action between the two you know your the neurons in your brain in in your nervous system are also part of the reality and so reality is the transaction reality are the are the features that are the transaction between signals in the world and signals in your brain and the parts of the world that some other animals experience that we will never experience they're not really part of our reality because they don't interact with any of the anything that we have but for those animals it's part of their Niche it's part of their you know Niche is just the word for the parts of the world that matter to you basically and I was thinking that if people read this book and you know maybe it will help them have empathy for other people who don't have Minds like theirs and who don't experience the world in the way that they do your description of what what um Oliver sax his what his um his actions were and his schools it did occur to me that this book by Edy would be a great tool for helping people to understand that the way that they experience the world it might be different than how other people experience the world and even a little bit of a window on that it would be a good thing so I'd like to ask you more about this word affect and then I'd like to discuss how things that we do or don't do might be useful for putting us in Broad categories of affect so that we might experience particular arrays of emotions um so this is my attempt to understand affect in an effort to think about some actionable items absolutely I love the word affect the way you described it setting up a potential or a series of potentialities for different emotions to occur you know I make it a point to get sunlight in my eye in the morning to try and wake up my brain and body because indeed it does that um uh broadly speaking I make an effort to get good sleep at night because that makes everything better absolutely and when I'm not sleeping well or enough it makes everything worse this is non-clinical non- nuanced language but I think most people when they hear affect and if they think about the examples I just gave kind of understand like yeah like when a kid is tired young kid they get cranky when we're sleep deprived we get cranky indeed there are times when I'm sleep deprived and Little Things Great on me they like a splinter just feels super annoying and maybe even painful but when I'm well rested things are going better it's not that bad so tell tell us more about affect because I think it's a really important Anchor Point for us to understand emotions in ourselves and other people neuroscientists think about the sensory systems for touch and proception which we call somata sensation as being in the service of motor move skeletal motor movements you really the our sense of touch and even Vision actually also works this way um and he and actually audition does too these senses actually serve in um the brain's ability to um control the movements of the body and the same thing is true uh for the um regulating the systems of the body so brains one of their fundamental jobs are to coordinate and um regulate the systems inside your body your heart your lungs your gut you know all the moving parts and the information the the sensory signals that that those um organs and and tissues and so on send back to the brain um as I said before those sensory signals are important to the brain's ability to regulate the body but we don't feel them directly we usually experience them as affective feelings these very simple physical sorts of feelings and then we elaborate them in various ways they they really when they get very intense that those are the moments when the brain creates a creates a motion out of them so the brain's regulation of the body the predictive regulation of the body is the technical term is allostasis but when I'm explaining this to the public I use a metaphor and you know all metaphors are wrong but some metaphors are less wrong and useful so the metaphor that I use is um your brain is running a budget for your body and it's not budgeting money it's budgeting glucose and salt and oxygen and water and all the nutrients that you need to stay alive and well and so you can think about withdrawals from that budget like burning glucose or using up oxygen um you can think about deposits like sleeping and eating um you can think about you know savings um so when you're with a friend who you trust and you know everything you do actually is just slightly less metabolically expensive right and you can also think about taxes um like if you are stressed socially stressed within two hours of eating a meal that same meal will cost you aund the equivalent of 104 more calories in the inefficiency that you will metabolize it because of that stress um meaning you'll burn more energy you'll be more inefficient in metabolizing the food so it's as if you had eaten 104 more calories oh so I had exactly backwards and so over the course of a year that's 11 pounds so when we say that people are taxing on us yeah we like it's literally true their language Works their language works so the way I describe it is that you can think about affect as a quick and dirty summary of the state of your body but budget if things are going reasonably well then you'll feel okay you might even feel Pleasant if you're running a deficit in your body budget then you're going to feel fatigued or or distressed and that doesn't mean something is necessarily wrong like for example when you exercise you get to a certain point where you've reached your ventilatory load usually it's like you know 20 minutes in or 10 minutes in or whatever depending on how hard you're working and you start to feel unpleasant and fatigued but that doesn't mean that something's wrong that just means that you're working really hard and you have to push through it and then you know when you you know drink water and you know you eat afterwards and replenish and then you're fine right in fact you're better it's it's a a way of um building a better stronger future you so affect is basically you know when when things when you're feeling really worked up it probably means that something's uncertain somewhere so I just think about these as like quick and dirty ways of thinking about your your what your what Your affect means and um and then oftentimes as we've said before emotion regulation that is controlling emotion really actually is not so much about changing the meaning of affect it's changing the affect um and um so it's useful to understand that affect is tied to the state of your body or actually what it's tied to is your brain's beliefs about the state of your body your brain is modeling the state of the body and that's interception that's the technical word interception is not your awareness of your body it's your brain's modeling of your body what your brain believes to be true about the metabolic state of your body and that's how I think about affect that's how I think about my own affect that's and my daughter actually who um you know was depressed for so I should say depression is like a bankrupt body budget like you just can't move you you feel fatigued so fatigued that you can't move and you're very distressed it's like bankruptcy and actually if you I mean depression is a metabolic illness and if you look at the symptoms of depression they really are about metabolic um uh having metabolic deficits basically and it's interesting that one of the Hallmark features of depression subjectively speaking is lack of positive anticipation about the future which makes perfect sense from the perspective of a depleted brain body budget yes exactly you're and you're basically think about the fact that prediction error right so if you're feeling unpleasant you're not going to be anticipating Pleasant things and even if those things that are in the world could give you pleasure you won't notice them because learn learning from prediction error things that you didn't predict is expensive and if you don't have the resources you're not going to right so it's but anyways my daughter came up with this um after we had this very interesting thing that happened to us on another trip um we were in Sweden because I was giving a a keynote at The kolinska Institute and we went I took her to Sweden and this is when she was recovering from depression and like you know she is just one of the millions of young adults who you know adolesence young adults who were experiencing depression and uh we got to Sweden and she was very very jet lagged we both were it was like one of these like you know we had to like you know Planes Trains and Automobiles like it was just you know getting there and she woke up the next morning and she she looked horrible she felt horrible it actually seemed to me like she was about to enter another depressive episode and I said to her I basically got her out of bed I fed her a meal I gave her four ibuprofen and I put her back to sleep and she got up five hours later and she was absolutely fine her mood was fine now I'm not telling you that Ibuprofen is the an anti-depressant that you should take if you're depressed but what I'm telling you is that you know you said something Andrew that was so interesting at the beginning you said am I fatigued does my body do I have pain somewhere is my body hurt you know these are well right when basically what she was having was she was fatigued and she was having what I would call um it's called the technical word is visceral notion which means her stomach hurt her you know everything hurt and sure you know her muscles probably hurt too but it was really her innards really she just was distressed and the um the ibuprofen helped her get back to sleep and then she slept and she got up and she was completely fine and then we walked around Stockholm for the rest of the day talking about this experience which for her was like flipping on a light switch you know how emotions are made this book that I referred to I wrote that book for her I wrote that book for her but also for me because it was a way of putting down on paper all the things that I wanted her to know that and that I thought other people should know about their kids you know and maybe even their kids could read it but what she did with that was she came up with a New Concept called the emotional flu and the emotional flu is when you're having a bad body budgeting day and you're just like you didn't get enough sleep maybe or you know there's some stress at at at work or at school that you can't get rid of otherwise you know my husband likes to say well uh you know other people's opinions of you are just electrical activity in somebody's head which I love like that's just another way of categorizing it it's sort of like taking apart the taking apart the cup into pieces of light right and so whatever there are just these moments where you feel depleted and you could use that I mean the we usually we often use affect to as a as a indicator of how the world is you know if I feel bad something must be bad wrong in the world but you have to resist that sometimes because sometimes there's nothing wrong in the world it's just that you didn't get enough sleep or you know you need to have a little bit more you know protein or maybe you haven't gone for a walk and you're stiff or whatever you need to do some stretching are those sorry to interrupt but I think people are going to want to Anchor to a few of these um you positive steps that they can take to to I don't want to say replenish but to shift affect in Positive Directions sleep movement nutrition yes and I've heard you say before that we are essentially amino acid forging machines so I noticed you said protein you didn't say you need a bagel you said protein um we could go down that rabbit hole maybe maybe we do maybe we don't but I want to use this also just as a quick opportunity to say as you're saying all this one can immediately understand why alcohol and drugs of abuse are both so compelling yeah right you're not feeling well so take a you're feeling tired take a stimulant that releases dopamine and epinephrine but you're taxing your already taxed body budget yes in a way that then puts you in a more depleted State later or alcohol like you feel lousy alcohol never did this for me but friends I have who are recovered alcoholics will tell me that it was like a magic Elixir it made them feel right that's their language but then of course there's a price to pay later because then it drops your Baseline below where it was initially absolutely 100% but I just also want to say that so is serotonin like so are so is so are ssris maybe and when I say maybe what I mean by that is if you you really have a metabolic problem like say something's wrong with your mitochondria or you're recovering from an illness and you know that or or there's just some metabolic problem in your body that metabolic problem is real if you start to feel unpleasant you will I mean feel unpleasant it will feel your mood will be negative if you start taking serot if you start taking ssris which will leave more serotonin in the synapses your uh neurons before it's re it's taken up again that will juice the system you will be able to spend you'll be able to move you'll feel like you have more energy for a while but your nervous system is is a complex system and so it's going to make adjustments elsewhere to try to deal with that budgeting problem so exactly what happens when you take drugs of abuse and what happens on the short term can happen for some people with ssris on the longer term where at first it starts to work and then it stops stops working and you start to gain weight and you know and your because your metabolism is slowing because your brain is attempting to deal with that with that budgeting problem so it really matters what the you know what the source is it could be that your brain believes you have a budgeting problem but there really isn't one it could be that there really is one these things matter to how you treat it one thing uh to um just mentioned about ssris and I unfortunately for reasons of confidentiality I can't cite The Source on this but let me just say that somebody who's highly informed in the in the landscape of of pharmaceutical treatments for um psychiatric challenges has told me that there's an emerging Theory among psychiatrists is kind of a collective emerging theory that um one of the reasons why nowadays you hear about so-called treatment resistant depression but you did not hear about so-called treatment resistant depression prior to the Advent of ssris is that there's a growing body of thought in the psychiatric community that SSR eyes may over time as you're pointing out deplete the very neural systems that subserve enhanced mood so it's it's different than a drug of abuse that gives you a very acute effect like methamphetamine or cocaine or alcohol but that over time you may actually be pulling the very neural circuits and neurochemicals that would allow for positive affect deeper and deeper into the trenches um so to speak and so there's a growing number of people who simply don't respond to the drugs any longer or other treatments right so I wasn't trying to say the mechanism is the same I was basically saying the theme is the same and I'm agreeing with you what happens over the short term with drugs of abuse happens over the longer term with for some people with ssris because it hasn't been recognized yet that the that at the basis depression is a metabolic problem and when you have a metabolic problem like diabetes or obesity or like uh or um heart disease it's not that that causes depression it's that there's a common problem which is that somewhere in this very complex system of your metabolism there's there there's a drag and it produces negative mood and that's how you experience it sometimes it's good not to turn it's productive not to turn uh that negative affect into to an emotion sometimes you know sometimes a cigar is just a cigar sometimes you just need to deal with the affec of Problem by dealing with the physical your physical state and that's the tricky bit is knowing when is affect telling you something is wrong with the world and when is it telling you that there's something wrong with your physical state that you need to attend to I think everything to me at least starts with a good night's sleep on a consistent basis and and every psychiatric Challenge and indeed suicide itself um is seems to be associated with and often preceded by challenges in sleeping changes in in in circadian rhythm so I think um that's why to me sleep is the foundation of mental health and physical health yep absolutely and so when I tell people when they say well what can I do I was like well if there's only if there's only one thing that you could pick I would say get get a good night's sleep on a regular basis if you could pick two more I would say eat healthfully like stop eating pseudo food don't get me wrong like I love french fries I love french fries they're like that's like God's most perfect food I mean really but eat healthfully like eat real food and get exercise and if you do those three things I know I sound like a mother and so feel free to roll your eyes at me but as a neuroscientist those are the actually before you start with all the you know mentalizing Jedi tricks you could just start with this and that would actually take you pretty far and and um and that will resonate very well with our audience um the basics of sleep exercise food sunlight and social connection are the ones that we just anchor those five are the ones that that we just keep returning to over and over again and I think people will say oh it's just simple uh motherly advice but I would I think that those five things even just the one thing around sleep there's some work that's required to get that done so it's not as simple the categories are simple but the work that's required to get great sleep as often as one can on a consistent basis if you're raising kids have a career live in the world um there's a lot there and so that's where I think there's there's a there's an elaboration of of things and one needs to learn to be be flexible like when you're traveling how do you do that when you know friends are visiting how do you do that when weather's off and so on the the relationship piece is something I was just going to I was just going to say I'm so glad you mentioned that I'm so glad you mentioned that because You' said before and and this was another one of those moments I listen to you I've listened to as many of your podcasts as I possibly can but I think it was the first or the second one with Lex fredman um where you said you know we are regulating each other's nervous systems I will never forget that and you know I imagine that you married your husband for a number of different reasons but um when people pair up with romantic partners with friends with co-workers the ideal situation is one in which we are not tacked where maybe even people and just being around them or just knowing that they are in our lives provides a sort of deposit to yeah it's a savings it provides a saing for sure and and I think that's a lot of what emotional resonance to put kind of Pop language on it is is all about who who feels good to be around who doesn't feel good to be around I would say the best thing for a human nervous system is another human and the worst thing for a human nervous system is also another human and so you really want to be around the people who make you the best the best version of yourself that you could be and that doesn't mean that you always get a savings like sometimes you're sometimes you're taking care of that person and so you're you're absorbing some of the their burden right and vice versa but I would say the research on you know social isolation and loneliness and so on shows us that that you know well along with research on synchrony and there's just a whole bunch of research to to suggest that um we are the caretakers of each other's nervous systems and it doesn't matter what your opinion is like it doesn't you know it just but we just that's how we evolved as a species and so you get to decide what kind of a person are you going to be you know are you going to be uh are you going to be a savings or are you going to be a tax and in general it seems that people who decide that they're going to be a savings um tend to because people gravitate towards that and want more of that yeah and hopefully would provide that also I mean I think the reciprocity piece here feels really really strong well that's a really interesting thing about um about the synchrony work right so there's work that if you research that if you put people together who don't even know each other but if they if they like each other and they they have a sense of trust even after a couple of minutes they start to synchronize their physical signals their heart rate starts to synchronize their movements start to syn their heart rate probably synchronizes because their breathing starts to synchronize right and it's really interesting to see what you what you typically see is that who is pacing and who is leading like one person is the leader and then the other person is the Pacer um and I got that language from when I learned hypnosis by the way and um but it switches back and forth like who's the leader like in a in a good in a in a what would we say good like in a in an interaction that looks productive it it's switching all the time who is who who is pacing and who is leading it's not that always one person is is um is in charge so to speak physiologically speaking we did a series recently on Mental Health with Paul kti who's a um psychiatrist and the word narcissism came up a few times because people have a lot of questions about that you know and he um emphasized that narcissists are not confident they they operate from a place of of a deficit of pleasure It's never enough and an intense Envy although that's not how they present and they're often usually not aware of it themselves but it's what leads healthy people to feel as if the interactions with those people narcissists often can be very compelling in the moment but they feel very taxed afterwards and kind of confused by what happened and it sounds like it uh ties back to this lack of synchrony um on the positive side of things um it's also clear from what you just said that when people regulate each other's nervous systems in a way where people are making little deposits and providing savings for each other or maybe things are just neutral that um those nervous systems are then in a position to like pay attention to other things too and and and not just try and work out the Dynamics oh for sure oh and that's very true at work so there's research showing that um especially in the creativity you know sector Innovation sector of the economy the best predictor of performance on the job is the extent to which people feel I mean after you account for sleep and and you know watering and sleeping and feeding right like the that um the best predictor is the amount of trust that you have in your team and in your managers because if the world is predictable it could still be things could be hard even when things are unpredictable you have people you know who have your back and so basically what you're doing is you're you're um they're making you know deposits or savings they're causing Savings in each other's body budgets so their their resources can be spent on the harder things which is you know failing and you know call having to pick yourself back up and try again which is you know partly what you do when you're an innovator so I think that there's also research to show that in your personal life when you do random acts of kindness for people or when you're kind in general you derive also a body budgeting benefit from that um you know so for a while had a friend who um we would meet each other for lunch once a month and you know we would take turns paying I mean we could both pay for ourselves but we kind of got a double hit you know he paid for me one month and then I would pay for him one month and then you know so we get the double hit of uh you know being kind to someone else and uh you know and also they got the you know benefit of someone being kind to them and I'll just say I think kindness is a I don't know that we have so many conversations about that in our culture right now but I think kindness is very very underrated and should be you know like when I'm when my when I feel like I bake bread for my neighbor who's in his 70s him and his wife that's what I do when I you know when I'm not feeling good and you know if I I mean after I've taken care of the physical the possible uh physical cause is I and then I feel great because he's always so he's always so grateful and and then I felt like I made his day better and then also he helps me in other ways like with my garden and stuff because he's just like a Master Gardener and so I feel like we have this relationship where we help each other and I know it sounds really sappy but and even though all the research backs up what I'm saying I it doesn't quite describe the feeling of when someone is just really happy because you just gave them a little surprise and they're you know like that's that's there's just some juice in that I think in some culture out there there's a word for that and someone will tell us I'm sure there is I'm sure there is well I have to say um I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation oh me too I I've been looking forward to it for a long time and you've provided us with a really Broad Arc but also a deep dive into not just how emotions are made not just about affect but as you mentioned earlier you know really how the nervous system works and I I'm certain in fact that our audience is taking this in and realizing that that knowledge is incredibly powerful the the addition of nuance both to language and to sort of self-reflection States um as extremely valuable often times when one gets into into a conversation that has some level of reductionism and you get into gnomen clature and things like that it can really pull away from the the real life experience of something but this is exactly the opposite what you've done for us today is you've provided such a rich array of information that adds richness and depth to the real life experience and um and that is really invaluable so on behalf of myself and all the listeners and the people watching this I want to say thank you for for today's discussion thank you for the books you've written which we've provided links to in the show note captions thanks for showing up on social media despite the um the the the challenges that exist there sometimes you always handle yourself uh so well there and we'll refer people to your uh excellent social media accounts as well and and just for all the work that you're doing and that your laboratory and you're now director of various things and related to Ai and more and we'll talk about this hopefully in future episodes but uh just a really enormous thank you thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion about the Psychology and Neuroscience of emotions with Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please 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Channel: Andrew Huberman

Views: 918,145

Keywords: andrew huberman, huberman lab podcast, huberman podcast, dr. andrew huberman, neuroscience, huberman lab, andrew huberman podcast, the huberman lab podcast, science podcast

Id: FeRgqJVALMQ

Length: 159min 4sec (9544 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023