'How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain' - Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett

i uh i want to start by uh thanking uh sir anand and professor neil quigley and professor allison kirkman and amanda till who organized all of us the school of psychology and particularly marianne gary for inviting me here to talk to you today it's really a wonderful honor and i'm i'm a little bit overwhelmed by the uh doctorate i'm very grateful it's it's a very wonderful honor to have um i should also do a little bit of self-handicapping before i start uh it's basically 12 30 in the morning for me uh right now uh and so uh i will um uh thank you for your patience if i seem to go blank in a moment it's just really because i'm probably searching for a word uh which is probably buried deep inside my brain somewhere but i do want to thank everybody for showing up today and uh for your enthusiasm uh about uh the work that that my lab has done and uh to reward you i'm going to give you a a fairly provocative talk or what i hope is a very provocative talk um and perhaps challenge some of your deeply held beliefs about emotion i think we all know that there are lots of examples of fictions in science we used to believe that the sun revolved around the earth we used to believe that the earth was flat and it turns out that many of our most cherished beliefs about emotion are fictions and so for the next 30 minutes or so we're gonna have a go at squashing three of these fictions and maybe put some uh real science uh in their place and the first fiction that we're going to take on this evening is the idea that emotions are expressed on the face in a characteristic way so the idea is that we're supposed to all smile when we're happy we're supposed to frown when we're sad we're supposed to scowl when we're angry everyone around the world is supposed to make these expressions and we're all supposed to be able to recognize smiles and frowns and scowls as expressions of emotion that it was the dominant view in science for the last 50 years and it's still a very very popular view around in many parts of the world um in in the popular um in in popular culture so let's consider the evidence and i should say i'm going to present a little bit of data to you this evening because i am a scientist and if i even in a public talk if i don't present a little bit of data you know they're going to take my phd away so so we're just going to consider a little bit of evidence and along the horizontal axis here i'm just going to show you the expressive forms on the face that have been proposed as universal and on the vertical axis uh we will look at the proportion of times that people actually make these expressions um in uh the proposed uh instances of emotion so how often do people actually scowl when they're angry how often do they smile when they're happy and it turns out not so much these data come from a meta-analysis which is a statistical summary of published research and what they show is a very consistent pattern so let's take scowling and anger for example approximately 28 of the time when we measure how people move their faces when they're angry they scowl that's above chance it's more than what you would expect by chance so that gets you a publication in a peer-reviewed journal but what it means is that approximately 70 of the time people are doing something other than scowling when they feel angry they might be crying they might be smiling they might be you know sitting with a very still face plotting the demise of their enemy this is what scientists would call low reliability meaning you don't move your face in a random way when you're angry but you rarely smile i mean you rarely scowl actually you might smile i don't know if you think about it when you think about actors for example how often do they win acting awards for scowling and anger it's not it's not a really common thing in even in uh you know western cultures uh where the the these expressions were supposed to have evolved we can also ask the question um well how often do people scowl when they're not angry this is the question of specificity so it turns out people scowl for lots of reasons they scowl when they're concentrating they scowl when they're confused they scowl when someone tells them a bad joke they scowl when they have gas people scowl for a lot of reasons when they're not angry which means that scowling is not a very specific expression of anger so people sometimes scowl when they're angry but not often and they scowl at times when they're not angry which means low reliability low specificity and this is true for every proposed expression um that has been um suggest where there's been a suggestion that they're universal that these expressions are universal but compare these findings to these findings these are the proportion of times that when test subjects are given these posed faces at with a set of emotion words and they're asked to pick the word that matches the face this is the percentage of time that people label these as expressions when i say people i'm first going to be talking about people who live in large urban settings as opposed to people who live in in very remote uh cultures so people typically label these faces perceive these spaces as characteristic expressions of emotion even though people don't actually make them very frequently that's what we're seeing here and when we look in people who live in remote small-scale cultures uh what what we see is uh even less evidence of universal emotional expressions so uh between the 1960s and 2007 um actually there's a map up there can you i think it's not it's on my screen but i don't think it's showing on the screen up here that's very strange well imagine a map of the world that's what you're that's what you're looking at and what i'm showing you here are the locations of four samples that were um collected where uh paul ekman and other scientists traipsed out to very rural parts of papua new guinea in the 1960s and showed people these posed expressions and asked them to match these expressions to little stories about emotion like bobby's dog died bobby is sad pick the expression that you know that bobby would make and in those studies um they found that that people in papua new guinea very remote uh cultures cultural contexts where people didn't have that much access to western cultural practices and norms they found that people matched the face to emotion stories at the same about the same proportion as uh occurred in the united states in in urban samples and based on these four based actually on three samples out of these uh four that were published in two peer review papers that constituted the strongest evidence for universal expressions until 2008 when these studies were published also you have to continue to imagine that i'm happy to actually show if any of you are real scientists you want to really see that there really is a map actually on the screen i'm happy to show you but um really in this period many many more samples were taken across many many more cultural contexts including hunter-gatherers in sub-saharan africa by my lab and what we find is very consistently no evidence at all of any universal expressions so in these cultures people don't typically scowl in anger or label scowling faces as angry even necessarily above chance and i'll just give you one example because i think it's pretty interesting this is the stereotype the predicted expression of fear that is supposed to be universal i should point out that and many cultures actually have ideas about universal expressions if you compare them though in china in india um in the u.s also historically in france um in germany uh ev all of these different cultural contexts have their own set of expressions that are supposed to be universal and they actually don't look very much like each other this space is supposed to be the universal expression of fear and here what i'm doing is i'm just coding for you what are called the action units the facial action units the muscle movements of um widening of raising the eyebrow inner and outer eyebrows widening the eye and what's really interesting is in the trobriand islands um in papua new guinea this is actually um considered to be a threat face or an anger phase so in studies by carlos crevelli and his colleagues um 39 of test subjects in the tropian islands uh labeled this as a fear face which is more than chance um but uh 56 percent labeled it as an anger face and in another study uh 60 i think 69 labeled it as a threat phase and the reason why i pointed out to you is that uh the maori warrior face actually has the same action units um in the eye region as this um stereotypic fear face from western culture so i think it's a really good example actually of um of variability uh in um in facial uh expressions of emotion so the punchline here if we were to summarize hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies would be this if we look at this girl's face out of context she looks sad or grieving or maybe in pain but this actually is my daughter sophia from a couple of years ago when we were in cologne germany at the chocolate museum she's on her second chocolate drink and i would describe her emotional state as profound pleasure this little sweetie oh is also feeling profound pleasure and so the lesson here is that different instances of the same uh emotion um category can be expressed with very very different facial expressions and if we just look at this little guy's eyebrow region we can see that it looks very similar to this guy who is usually seen as absolutely enraged but actually in context you can see he's absolutely elated and in the u.s when i uh use this image i like to use this image because this is a picture of jim webb who in 2006 won the senatorial race in virginia and returned the us senate to democratic control so when i'm in the u.s i usually invite people to just simulate what that would be like for a minute um and without context his face looks angry because this is the symbol of anger western symbol of anger so not only do people move their faces in very different ways during instances of the same emotion category they also move their faces in exactly the same way in instances of different emotion categories we all do this and so what this means is that when it comes to emotion a face does not speak for itself when you see emotion in another person's face it feels to you like you're reading emotion in their face but actually your brain is guessing what the facial movements mean and this guessing occurs very automatically with very little effort on your part and even if you're someone like me who believes is very confident that you can read emotion in someone else really your brain is just guessing it's important to be humble about these things because this is how a single physical feature like the curl of a lip or the rays of an eyebrow or the tilt of a head can take on very very different emotional meanings in in different contexts the punch line for tonight is going to be that variation is the norm this is true when it comes to facial expressions of emotion and as we see it's actually true when it comes to any kind of measurement that we take uh related to emotion and so where do these like what's up with these expressions like where did they come from well i can tell you that they did not come from observing how people move their faces in everyday life these expressions were stipulated so some scientists got together and said we think this is what the expression of anger is universally and then built an entire science around these faces the majority of studies that are published on emotional expressions actually use these faces and what the data the pattern of the data what it shows us is that these are stereotypes they represent people's beliefs about how we express emotion on the face but not actually how people uh express emotion which is much more highly variable they're stereotypes so why does this matter why does it matter that that science has employed these these stereotypes well one reason is that if you walk into any preschool in north america and even in i'm not actually sure if it's true here it's certainly true in europe you will find games and puzzles and books and posters that teach children these stereotypes so basically we've been teaching uh little kids stereotypes as if they are the real phenomenon for the last 50 years not just and not just to little kids this represents what's in every introductory psychology textbook that's currently in print it's also what we teach to our patients so autistic children children on the spectrum people who are struggling with schizophrenia are taught these as the expressions of emotion um and also the media has been very puzzled to learn that these are actually not universal as claimed and also there's a growing economy right now of emotion reading gadgets apps and algorithms tech companies who are claiming that they can read emotion in people's faces just by electronic means there's this is a really serious issue because some of this technology is being rolled out in classrooms to determine who gets access to educational opportunities it's being used in hiring practices in companies around the world it's now also being used in legal contexts um and uh it's really serious because that we're basically those the companies who are claiming that they can detect emotion in people's faces are conflating the ability to detect a movement with what that movement means psychologically so the best technology right now under ideal conditions which means a full frontal exposure under perfect lighting conditions can do a really good job of detecting a scowl but not what that scowl means and so companies are making claims about detecting emotion when really what they can detect our facial movements uh uh not um not necessarily what the movements mean and i should point out i i actually think that from a scientific standpoint one of the most serious issues here in addition to the fact that it's maybe uh prematurely being used in these contexts with which can actually determine people's outcomes um is uh that we're missing a really important opportunity because companies are spending millions of dollars and person hours of the cleverest people on this planet asking really simplistic questions with really powerful technology that actually could be used to learn finally something about the variability with which we all express emotion in our faces in different contexts the second uh myth uh uh is the idea that each emotion category comes with its own signature of physical changes in the body so this is the idea that um there's a signature of changes in the heart changes in breathing changes in sweating and so on that are distinguished distinguishable for each emotion category so again i'm going to show you a little bit of data this time again from a meta-analysis which is a statistical summary of published research so here i'm showing you an analysis that my lab did on over 200 studies coming using i think over 20 000 test subjects i'm asking the question whether there are patterns of changes in the physical in physical changes in the body that correspond or map to distinct emotion categories and so on the horizontal axis i'm showing you the average amount of change in the physical um signal compared to baseline a resting baseline so how much did a person's heart rate change how much did the amount of blood pump by the heart change how much uh resistance or um uh how much were blood vessels constricted versus dilated and so on so along this uh y um axis the vertical axis here we just list the measures of um the autonomic nervous system that are typically used and um so here the the um the shape here represents the average uh change for example in a neutral induction where we're showing people images or playing the movies or having them remember instances that are intended to keep them neutral feeling very neutral and so the size of the shape indicates the number of studies that were available to be summarized so for example for um heart rate what we see is that um on average it's less than uh a 10 change um but this the wings here represent the degree to which the findings vary across studies so for the scientists in the audience this is a 95 confidence interval and so what you can see is that on average uh heart rate goes up a little bit but actually in some studies it it goes down and and in general we would say this is not different from zero because it crosses the wings across the zero line here um in fact in all of the neutral in all of the studies which use a neutral induction on average you know there's no real um physical change although sometimes in a given study a person's physical changes might um might be higher than baseline and sometimes might be lower and so if there's actually a pattern here that's distinct for each emotion category what we would expect to see is that this that um the shapes don't overlap and neither do the wings so we want to see real distinctiveness but that is actually not what we see so here are the findings for anger so what this means for example is on average blood pressure goes up about 34 35 of the time um or actually sorry not percent of the time it's actually that's a percent change over um over uh baseline so on average blood pressure goes up but sometimes it goes up a lot and sometimes it goes up a little and here are the findings for fear and disgust and sadness and happiness there's complete overlap this doesn't mean that your body does random things in emotion what it means is that sometimes when you're angry your blood pressure goes up a little and sometimes it goes up a lot sometimes when you're sad your heart rate goes up a little and sometimes it goes up a lot sometimes when you're fearful your heart rate goes up a little and sometimes it goes up a lot basically there's nothing predictable here about an individual physical signal or a pattern so even if you use machine learning techniques there's really nothing distinctive here and if you think about it again variation is the norm think about when you're happy for example what are some things that you might do you might take a walk in the woods you might lie on a beach and relax you might bake cookies for your friends you might do yoga you might gossip i mean you might chat with a friend uh having coffee you might garden in each of these cases your physical the physical changes in your body are going to track your actions or your prediction actions this is something that has been known in physiology since the 1970s and so if you engage in different actions during instances of the same emotion happiness then your body will be doing different things as well in those instances and similarly um it's not just the case that your body will do different things in instances of the same emotion category it's also the case that your body can do the same thing in instances of different emotion categories and sometimes even um in instances which are not considered uh to be emotions for example it's very common for people particularly women to have a racing heart and make sense of those sensations as anxiety go to an emergency room the physician in the emergency room will interview the woman determine that she is anxious send to her home and then she dies of a heart attack later this is actually more common women actually over the age of 65 die more frequently than men from heart attacks because when a man is uh you know appears in in the emergency room um there's more uh interrogation about whether or not uh he is having a uh whether or not the his um anxiety symptoms are actually authentically uh a predictor of an impending cardiac event and this actually happened to my publicist in the uk from my book her mother died this way and there's a really interesting story that my friend jim cohn who is a psychophysiologist i might add what happened to him was something very similar to this and he tells the story i should say he tells a story much better than i do on his podcast circle of willis um in uh i think last year's uh halloween version uh or story he tells the story but basically he was having a racing heart and ver and sweating a lot and having what he what his brain was making sense of as anxiety symptoms and he went to his doctor and his doctor said oh you're just feeling really anxious and so he went home and laid down at with his racing heart and his um sweaty palms and as he was drifting off to sleep he remembered a conversation that he and i had had about this idea the findings that a physical signal like a racing heart doesn't have inherent emotional meaning it can be made your brain can make sense of it as part of many different emotion instances and sometimes even be mistaken for it's exactly the same physical signal but it's indicating an impending cardiac event and so on his podcast i was telling him the story about my publicist mother and he was stripping off asleep and realized maybe i should go to the hospital and just have this checked out um and so you know if they send me home we can have anxieties i'll be a little embarrassed but at least i'll have some peace of mind and so he went to the hospital and they checked him out and he they couldn't find anything wrong and this is the point at which they would have sent him home if he had been a woman but he was he was it was the pain was getting worse his chest was the anxiety was intensity less and becoming more intense and so the emergency room doctor said okay just wait a second i'll go get the cardiologist and as the cardiologist was walking into the room he had what doctors call the widowmaker he had a massive coronary and if he had been anywhere else he would be dead the moral of the story here is that emotions are not written in your body they are constructed by your brain so the body does not keep score your brain keeps score and it directs your body and it makes sense of the sensations that come from your body and this is the way that an ache in your stomach can be anxiety if you're waiting for a test result it can be hunger if it's dinner time it can be longing if you miss someone who's close to you and it can be a gut feeling that somebody is guilty if you are a judge or a juror in a trial your brain is baking basically making physiological changes meaningful as emotion and if we think about how the brain works we can see that this these findings make a lot of sense basically your brain's job really why i mean brains evolved for many reasons but the main reason that brains evolved is to control the body so your brain's main job is to budget the internal resources of your body like water and salt and glucose and hormones and so on to keep you alive and well so you know you can do nature's most important job which is to pass your genes on to the next generation and this continually continually budgeting is largely invisible to you it continues day and night from the moment that you're born until the moment that you die but you are not wired to perceive it so right now each of you is sitting there just enraptured by my words and you are largely unaware unless you're very hungry because it's dinner time you're largely unaware that there isn't a whole drama going on inside your body you're just not wired to perceive it because which is good actually because if you were you would never pay attention to anything outside your own skin ever again and so what what evolution has fashioned you with is not exquisite um sensitivity to the internal the sensations that come from budgeting this budgeting process but but something like more general so basically if if vision seeing is like high definition television then the your ability to detect your sensations inside your own body is more like black and white 1950 you know black and white television 1950s you know reception during like a bad rain storm it's just you have this fuzzy sense of feeling um pleasant or unpleasant feeling worked up or feeling calm it's basically like this general barometer that everything is you know copacetic and good with your body budget or maybe you are running a deficit and you're feeling uh kind of crappy and we have a very fancy name for that we call it mood so mood is again you know your brain is always running a budget for your body it's always calculating what to spend and what deposits will come and so mood is always with you as well because it is the way that your brain makes available to you this the state of your body budget and so sometimes you feel really calm and good and sometimes you feel really crappy sometimes you feel really worked up this is basically like a very quick kind of back of the envelope signal without much detail actually scientists call this affect so affect and mood are are really the same thing because you know you know something is really important in science uh when it has more than one name and your brain basically so when you feel crappy what what do you do well probably lots of things right it depends on the context and so the point is there's really not enough information it's not like you know affect your mood it's not like a um not like a smart watch you know that tells you uh whether you should eat or whether you should have coffee or whether you should have a nap it doesn't really tell you anything other than something is wrong and i should probably do something about it so what your brain really has to do is link those sensations that that it's experiencing as affect to the context to try to figure out what caused them and that really is what results in an emotion but not always sometimes your brain makes sense of those sensations and that that mood in in a different way and so understanding that is important particularly the next time you visit the doctor the third myth that we'll tackle today or fiction is the idea that there are dedicated uh circuits in the brain for emotion so emotions feel like they happen to us like they're taking over our behavior and uh causing us to do or say things that we probably wish we hadn't a lot of the time and so this experience of being taken over really makes it seem to us like we have these we have some kind of inner beast you know that is like these circuits for emotion that are just baked into our brains at birth and that something in the world will just trigger one of these um circuits and then an emotion will erupt uh and take over our um over our thoughts and our actions but if there's one thing that we know about the brain after all this time it's that our subjective experience doesn't really reveal to us how a brain works how your brain works or really how any brain works so let's take one example we're going to just talk about the amygdala so here what you're looking at is what's called a coronal slice of the brain so this is the top of the brain this is the bottom and so this is the image if you took a slice of if you sort of sliced into the skull like this and you just popped open the front and you looked in a mirror and you wiped away all the blood that's come on that was funny oh i mean you got thank you that's what you would see and you actually have two amygdala which are clusters of neurons on each side of the brain the amygdala how many of you here have heard of an amygdala yeah it's like the rock star of the brain everybody you know if you read in the newspaper an article about the brain the likelihood is over 70 percent of the time it's usually a story about the amygdala and the amygdala is supposed to contain uh or many people many scientists thought for a very long time that the amygdala contained the circuitry for fear so again a meta-analysis this time we're looking at the proportion of studies uh which show an increase in amygdala activity during instances of fear and what we see is about 30 of the time in experiments where people are experiencing fear while having their brain scanned we see an increase in activity in the amygdala over baseline so again that's better than chance right that will get you a pna sort of an article in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences in the us but that means 70 of the time there's no change in your amygdala when you're feeling fear if these studies generalize to the public and that means that's really much more than we would expect by chance and actually so low reliability and actually every uh emotion that's ever been studied in a scanner shows an increase in amygdala activity some proportion of the time which is more than chance and actually we see amygdala activity increase all the time in the scanner in studies that have nothing to do with emotion at all so for example if i just stick you in a scanner and i show you images of faces or just scenes that you've never seen before your amygdala will go nuts in fact shortly i'm going to show you an image which i would love to i'll have importable brain scanners to scan all of you while i show you this image because this is anytime your brain doesn't know what it's looking at doesn't know what it's hearing can't identify either because it's ambiguous or it's uncertain your amygdala basically is like a sentinel which signals to the rest of the brain please learn this please take in this information so that i can better predict and better understand what this signal is the next time and every study that's ever proposed a specific brain region as the home of an emotion circuit we see evidence like this which is lack of specificity and low reliability again that doesn't mean that emotions don't live in the brain and it doesn't mean that that all of this is random what it means is again that variability is the norm and this is true whether you're looking at brain imaging studies or even looking at um structural studies of people with amygdala lesions so here what you're looking at um are um two structural images of the of of the brain these are two sisters who are identical twins so they have 100 of their genetic material is the same and both of these sisters at the age of 12 their amygdala's calcified so what you're looking at here is what's called a horizontal slice which is if we slice the brain that way and we pop off the top and look down this is what we see without the pretty colors this is the front of the brain here and this is the back so and the the colors are really where the amygdalas used to be before they were were destroyed sister bg has difficulties experiencing fear except in the most extreme circumstances she can experience fear but in average everyday experiences are she doesn't experience fear and she also has a hard time seeing fear in the faces of other people but her sister who has exactly who has exactly the same i don't know what happened there who has exactly the same damage and exactly the same genes and very very similar experiences has no problems experiencing or perceiving fear at all her brain has learned to make fear in a completely different way which brain imaging studies of her have have confirmed so what this means is that you when you feel fear your brain does different things at different times just like you will express fear differently on your face at different in different contexts and your body will will have different changes during fear depending on uh the actions that you take and the situations that you're in and if we oh and there's a spelling mistake because i added this slide last night when it was much too late for me to be working on my talk um uh and if we look at brain imaging studies um uh which use pattern classification so that is we're using machine learning to try to find the pattern for fear um here is a lateral view of the brain which is blown up so like a balloon so you can see all the parts of the cortex so the cortex usually is very foldy and so this is just blown up so you can you can see all the gyro and sulci and so this is the lateral view so you would be looking on the outside like this with the front of the brain here and the back here and this is a medial view of the brain so if you take the two hemispheres and you crack them open like an egg you're looking at the inner surface of one um inside surface of one hemisphere so this is the front and this is the back in my lab we did uh we took that meta-analysis and we used machine learning to try to find the pattern for fear in all of the studies actually for fear and anger sadness i want to hear i'm just showing you the pattern for fear and here's another pattern from another study and here's another pattern from another study now it's tempting to think that this is just a lack of replication but really what it is is evidence that variability is the norm and not only that but each of these patterns is not a brain state it's actually just a statistical abstraction meaning nobody necessarily has to show this pattern of activity during fear in order for this pattern to classify that person's experience as fear 100 of the time basically these are like averages that don't apply to any specific individual they're they're just a summary so an analogy would be if there are 3.13 people in the average family you know in a country that doesn't mean that every family has 3.13 people in it in fact probably no family has 3.13 people in it because it's a statistical abstraction and that's what these are too these are not brain states they're statistical abstractions and this is actually a finding that's very consistent with what we understand about how variability works actually which comes from darwin so emotions are complex constructions in the brain that vary by context they are not simple circuits you do not have mythical emotion circuits buried deep inside some animalistic part of your brain even if it feels that way sometimes your feelings are not a guide to how your brain works and furthermore the brain is not a battleground between reason and emotion so there's been this recurring sort of like one of the most cherished narratives in western civilization is that the brain uh is a battleground between thinking and feeling and that the two kind of belted out in contr you know control of your behavior and so there are parts of the brain for emotion and parts of the brain uh for uh reason or rationality and the two are constantly in battle with each other that's just actually a complete fiction complete fiction um so how many of you uh have heard that you have a reptilian brain like our inner reptile yeah uh and maybe also a limbic system which wraps around that reptilian brain so the idea is that you've got these um urges that are in your reptilian brain and that's enrobed by emotion in your limbic system and so the limbic system uh was supposedly evolved in mammals and then there's this prodigious neocortex which is all new and the home of rationality and very very big in humans that is a story that actually we can trace all the way back to plato and what's really interesting about this story is that it was popularized um by carl sagan in the 1970s in the pulitzer prize-winning book dragons of eden at exactly the same time that neuroscientists who were using molecular genetics that is typing of neurons by their genetic profiles we're demonstrating that this is false but if you look in books about emotion like popular science books if you read the newspaper if you ever take a like a leadership training course in industry if you read anything about emotional intelligence other than what i've written you will you will learn that uh your neocortex is controlling your inner beast um and what about system one and system two these are um you know uh uh tweedledee and tweedledum uh talked about uh in the uh award-winning book uh thinking fast and slow by uh nobel prize winner danny kahneman the idea here is that system one is this really quick automatic emotional system and system two is this more deliberate um rational system well if you actually look in thinking fast and slow danny kahneman is really really clear that this is a metaphor it's a metaphor uh for the fact that sometimes we do things on autopilot and sometimes we do things that have a sense of effort but he never really meant to say and in fact he's very clear about this expressly in the book um i want to say it's on page 11 but i don't that might just be i'm not sure actually but anyways at the beginning of the book and uh in my book i actually list the page number where he basically says this is just a metaphor nonetheless many neuroscientists and many many journalists talk about these as actual systems in the brain when in fact what they are are modes of processing in the brain this um is important because still in the law and economics there's this idea of this battle between um the you know more reasoned rational and the more flighty emotional systems uh and uh that really has to be modified to be accurate um with the neuroscience that we know so what what do we know about emotion well we know that emotions are not built in to the brain from birth they're built by the brain as we need them and i'm rather than show you a ton of evidence which you know is to some of which is described in the book and also in web notes that go along with the book i'm just going to give you an experience that hopefully will give you an intuition for this so take a look at this right now your the ner actually your amygdala should be going crazy even though you can't sense that because your brain is trying to guess uh what this might be like what is it so what do you see here anybody anything okay a simpson character yeah sorry snowman and eyes so basically your brain is searching through your lifetime of past experience issuing thousands of guesses weighing probabilities trying to answer the question what is this most like not what is this but what is this most similar to in my past experience now in psychology a group of things which are similar to each other is what we call a category and a mental representation of a category how your brain represents a category is called a concept so what your brain is doing right now is it's looking at these blobs and it's trying to form a concept so that you can see an image instead of black and white blobs it's asking what is this similar to in my past and what was it the last time i saw it or something like it but of course you've never seen anything like it most of you unless you've watched one of my talks on um on uh on youtube um and so what you're experiencing if you can't see anything other than blobs is called experiential blindness and so now i'm gonna cure you of your blindness are you ready to be cured of your blindness are you ready to be cured of your blindness come on i want to hear it [Applause] okay here we go i'm going to do it again all right now how many of you see a b or part of a b yeah because now when your brain searches through your past experience there's new knowledge there from the color photograph and that knowledge that is in your head changes how you experience these blobs the blobs the visual input from this image is exactly the same as it was before but what you see what you literally see is a combination of the information from the screen and the information that is now in your head because your brain is making sense of this uh information so that you see lines that aren't there to see an image that actually is not present so when you experience an increase in heart rate as anxiety or as determination like i'm going to get my butterflies flying in formation and you know knock this test out of the park your brain is categorizing making a concept that will make sense of the sensory inputs just like it's making the sense of the visual inputs from this uh image to see something that actually isn't physically present and this kind of a hallucination is um actually how it's like business as usual for your brain and we need a very special set of examples to demonstrate this to you but basically this is what your brain is doing all the time it's making sense of sensory inputs from the world and from the body to basically construct your experience and guide your actions and this is how your this is business as usual for your brain this is really how your brain makes all your experiences and uh basically guides all your actions when your brain so for example now that you can see this as a bee if i had you hooked up to monitors if your brain was drawing on past instances of fear because maybe you were stung by a bee then your heart rate would go up it would speed you'd start to sweat even if i just showed you this image like this however if your brain was drawing on past instances of say interest because you were a beekeeper or maybe pleasure because you're a gardener then you would have a completely different physical reaction because your brain is making sense uh it's constructing a cons a concept to make sense of those sensations that come from that image and make it meaningful so that your brain knows what to do um how to control your body and what you you know what you should do next so physical changes in your body have no inherent emotional meaning uh your brain basically makes a physical changes in your body meaningful as emotions um uh by constructing a concept for emotion which is tailored to the specific situation that you're in in a in a given context so your emotions are not your reactions to the world they are your constructions of the world or more precisely their their constructions of what your bodily sensations mean in a specific context or situation that you are in so your brain is creating a motion when it links or explains the internal sensations of your body to what is going on around you in the world so that you know your brain knows how to keep you alive and well and so the bottom line here is that the emotions that seem to happen to you are actually made by you they're made by your brain pretty automatically without any sense of effort or agency on your part and the emotions that you seem to read in other people are actually coming in part from inside your own head when you see a smile as anger or happiness it's because your brain is guessing what that physical signal means in context and that context includes not just the surrounding situation but also your own body because your body is basically a context for your brain that you carry around with you everywhere you go you are in in more than just a metaphorical way you are a an architect of your own experience and that means you don't have a 100 control over what you experience and you don't necessarily have a modicum of control in the moment you can't just snap your fingers and change how you feel that's really hard but you do actually have more control over uh constructing your experience and being the architect of your experience once you understand a little bit about how your brain works and so if you want to learn more about this you can see my book or you could see my new book which is coming out in november which is a little set of essays about the brain or you can go to my website which is i have an academic website where all my publications are but this is a popular website where i have articles that i've written in the new york times and for lots of magazines and videos and things like that um and before i end i i just have to actually thank the real heroes here who are not the funding agents well they partly are the funding agencies that support this work but really um it's my it's my lab that i co-direct with dr karen quigley who is a psychophysiologist so she she sort of handles everything below the neck and i handle everything above the neck so together we're like one person um and our fantastic team of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who actually are the real heroes here they're the ones um who do all the hard work i just get to have the fun to stand up here and tell you about it and uh and thank you very much for your attention [Applause] hello everyone i'm mary ann gary from the school of psychology and uh just before we get started thank you very much for that terrific lecture also psychology is the coolest subject so send your children to the school of psychology it is am i right it's totally thank you very much uh lisa is uh happy to take some questions i really have a lot of trouble seeing right now so if you would like to ask a question please do just yell yes oh yes hello yeah really it doesn't work from an angle you have to you have to actually see it uh head on really in order for it to work but let me tell you a different let me let me give us i mean that actually is the real answer but let me give you a different kind of answer so i have a lot of these images they're called mooney images and they're um they're basically blobs and then you know it's very hard like they have them online you know there's like one of a dalmatian in a snowstorm and a cow that should be you guys should like that because cows are big big news around here aren't they i mean i mean stereotypically i have to tell you i was expecting sheep but um but now i've learned better that this is the dairy capital um but my point is that um so i have one that uh we made we we do experiments with them um and it it was actually um a snake it's a snake and so uh i you know i did the thing like i showed the blobby uh image and no one knew what it was and then i showed the snake and then um and then people could see the snake uh and then this woman came up afterwards and she said can you tell me what's wrong with my brain and i was like i don't know i don't know if i can tell you what's wrong with your brain and i said well what's the problem and she said well i saw first you know in the blobby image i saw a louisiana swamp and then when you showed the snake image and then you took it away i saw in the blobby b and the blobby images i saw a snake for like one second and then it went back to being a louisiana swamp what's wrong with my brain and of course at that point what i wanted to say to her is how is it that you're from louisiana and you have no accent but i did not ask that question instead what i said is well how long have you lived in louisiana and she said my whole life and i said well here's what's happening you what we would call your priors your prior experience for seeing a swamp is very strong and what i i just showed you an image for like what like 10 seconds if that and so it's it's prior is very weak and so the point here is that your brain doesn't just isn't just constructing representations from past experience it's also weighing the probabilities or the likelihood that you will that that that uh that concept will actually explain those sensations um and that's true um pretty much uh no matter what you're looking at or hearing or smelling uh it doesn't you know or what you're feeling but the the real answer here is that um uh you probably from the side that image is meant to be viewed um uh really um head-on and probably from the side it's it's actually very difficult for that illusion to work but what i would suggest is we should try it like when you uh when we're done you should go to the back there and i'll do it again and you'll see if you see it i mean you know i'll believe you if you tell me that you sometimes people can't see the whole image but they can see maybe the the bomb like the you know like the what do you call it thorax or they might be able to see um the wings or they might just be able to see the antenna sometimes you have to leave it up there for much longer than you have when you're under a time limit and you only have and you're already running late so it could just be that actually as well yeah yep does having a good memory contribute to um recognizing emotion others or making it easier for you to um well so what i want to say is what that means what having a good memory means colloquially is not what i'm talking about here when i talk about memory so um usually what we say having a good memory means that you consciously uh either have some sense of familiarity with what you've seen or you consciously uh acknowledge that you've seen it before you make a judgment that you've seen it before and that's not really the same as what i talk about when i'm talking about memory basically your brain is always using the past using past experience in order to make sense of the present that's actually how your brain works so uh and you're so your brain is always remembering in a sense um but you don't have an awareness of that happening so i guess the better way to say it is that you know memories aren't stored in your brain and we don't pull them up when we remember really what your brain is doing is it's reconstituting past experience in the connections between neurons and as far as i know no one's ever tested memory in that way to answer your question it's a great question what i can say is that conscious recollection has no relationship to um the facility with which or flexibility with which you experience emotion or a range of emotions which we call emotional granularity or or um perceive emotion in others but what you're talking about or the way we would understand memory in the way that i just described it i think that's an open question actually it's a great question oh well you have to read my new book actually so um so but you know here's the thing um the uh i do talk about this in in uh how emotions are made actually a little bit and then part of the reason why i wrote seven and a half lessons about the brain is that there's a lot of really good stuff in how emotions are made i think really good science not my science like other i'm writing about other people's work like really cool stuff which largely doesn't get a lot of attention um because uh you know because there's a lot of stuff in that book and one thing that got really overlooked which was driving me kind of nuts um was this idea that we have uh you know sedimentary a brain like is like sedimentary layers you know with the cortex which is like icing on an already baked cake so the actual story is way more interesting and cool um than than that narrative which is false i mean that narrative is basically plato tattooed on the brain right that you have um you know you have urges and instincts you have emotions like two wild stallions and then you have a charioteer who's like trying to control them that's plato that's what you that's really what that what the triune brain is but what really is true is uh seems to be something more like the following every well certainly every mammal that's ever been studied every mammal brain and probably every vertebrate brain on this planet has exactly the same kinds of neurons exactly the same but as brains get bigger they reorganize so a bird brain for example doesn't have a cortex cerebral cortex but it has neurons the same neurons that we have but our neurons are arrayed in a cerebral cortex theirs is not but still there are birds that who can do really who have language uh rudimentary language who can do pretty complex uh problem solving and they are their neurons are wired and function to some extent like parts of our cerebral cortex so the the really cool thing is that if you this is work by uh barbara finley who's a neuroscientist a developmental and evolutionary neuroscientist and what she has shown pretty remarkably is that over 200 instances in brain development from from an embryo all the way um to past birth are occur in exactly the same order but in some species certain stages run for longer which means more neurons are born uh at the end so the brains reorganize and so it looks to us if we use a naked eye like a reptile like a lizard doesn't have a cortex but actually a lizard has every kind of neuron that you have in your brain it's just organized differently um and i'm not saying that that means that um that you know lizards have exactly the same uh functions that we have that we can do um but what i am what i am saying is this idea that you have some kind of inner beast which is preserved and that rationality your ability to rationally control uh that inner beast that is a myth rationality has nothing to do with controlling an inner beast it has to do more with how your brain is running your body budget just to put it really simply um you know depression which you can think of as kind of a bankrupt body budget is incredibly rational what do you do when you're running a deficit in your budget you stop spending what are the two most expensive things a brain can do move your body and learn something new which is what you stop doing when you're depressed it's actually very rational so i just think what what what this means is we have to kind of reconsider what what it means to be rational actually but that myth just needs to needs to go away i think one more question yep wow what a great question you need to come to my talk tomorrow in the department um so here's what i'm going to say which is going to sound a little preposterous maybe because there isn't really enough time to fully develop it but here's what i'm going to say the idea that variability is the norm actually comes from darwin not darwin's book on emotion which is basically a very anti-darwinian book frankly which also i explained in my book but from on the origin of species so darwin did this really remarkable thing everyone thinks the remarkable thing that he did was discover natural selection and that is remarkable but what he really discovered is that variation is real and that's what natural selection acts on so what darwin did is he he observed he was incredibly observant and he observed birds and he observed mollusks and any observed variability in all these animals and before darwin a species was considered to be like a perfect platonic type and any variation in the individuals was considered to be irrelevant error right so you take like a cocker spaniel and it can vary in its size and in its coat thickness and his color and so on and before darwin all of that variability was considered to be error and after darwin that variability became important to explain and in part biologists realize this because he did the super careful observation and mapping of the variation but in psychology we never did that and we never did it for a lot of reasons partly because we didn't really have the methods to do it and now we do what we know what we don't have is money and if that sounds funny and i kind of mean it to be a little cheeky but only a little because the point that i want to make is that the kind of science that we have to do is actually do very big like use big data observation and data analysis on individual people across time in different contexts and that is orders of magnitude more complicated and more expensive than what we currently do now if physicists so basically and what i'm going to tell you is that your brain works like a complex system and your body and where what we know about complex systems the best information that we have comes from physics and chemistry if physicists were funded at the level of psychology and neuroscience that is related to psychology no one ever would have discovered the higgs boson ever so the question is really what could psychologists do with that kind of funding could we actually study emotion and learn something about the variability um and so could i learn in you for example that you have a vocabulary of 10 facial expressions that you make in various contexts when you're angry and maybe you have three for fear and maybe you have you know eight for gratitude and maybe i have you know 12 for anger and maybe some of them overlapping maybe they don't maybe they overlap because we're both women and we're both you know speak english and but you know so my point is that we have to do this kind of like really deep observation respects and maps variation and we have the technology to do it and we have the math to do it now what we don't have is the money and like i said that sounds cheeky but it really isn't if this is a question that that the public wants an answer to then you know scientists have to have the ideas and they have to have the will to execute those ideas and they have to have the money to do the studies properly and currently we have two of those things but we don't have the third uh lisa philbin barrett you are a rock star warrior scientist changing the face of behavioral science it has been a real thrill to have you here i'm so happy uh my students are walking around saying she's amazing she's much more amazing than you are no uh i want to thank you for everything and thank you all for coming you can pick up a copy of lisa's book outside um she won't be here to sign it for you but you could bring it to wellington on friday where you can see her as part of the new zealand readers and writers week or you can bring it to my office tomorrow and i'll sign up for you in a purple pant yeah yeah anyway thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: University of Waikato

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Length: 73min 54sec (4434 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020