How to Master Your Emotional Life—Lisa Feldman Barrett

[Music] Lisa welcome to the show um a question I'm curious to ask to get started would be you know what is your theory of emotions and how does does this conflict with the classical view of emotions sure I'm really happy to be here so thank you um I should say at the outset that when I when I talk about a theory I'm not really talking about just a set of ideas I'm talking about a set of ideas that have a lot of scientific evidence to back them up so um so but let's actually start with the classical view because I think that's a little easier for people to understand it's probably a lot of people's to intuition um which is the idea that each of us is born with a set of circuits that are pre-wired um that come you know from some long evolutionary History either from you know our hunter-gatherer of past or even much further back than that um uh so we one for anger one for fear one for sadness and so on and that something happens in the world and it triggers a circuit safer fear so you see a snake or you see a horror movie or something it triggers your circuit um uh for fear and you have a set of physical changes in your body you make a very diagnostic facial expression like a wide-eyed gasping face like you know that's the general idea and it's an idea that is very consistent with the broader view of how psychology theorizes and understands mental life right so the idea that there are these modules in your brain that are very separate for different categories of psychological events for for thinking for problem solving for decision making for attention for various kinds of attention for various kinds of memory every word corresponds to a module in your brain with its own circuit um that produces its own set of outcomes um and you know there's not a lot of evidence for that view and I will say that in the history of psychology people have been pushing back against that view really since psychology became a science in in the mid to late uh 18th century so the great William James you know who's considered one of the founding you know um parents if you will of American psychology really pushed back against that view um and he lost that battle and actually sequentially throughout history the history of the field you can see people pushing back against that view because the data never support that view and that was a really surprising thing to me actually is to realize that this whole journey that my lab and my collaborators and I have been on about the science in the signs of emotion not only has been traversed before but also in other fields like subfields of psychology um and so instead you know our view um is really one that's very data driven it's very because we're taking our lead from the century or so century and a half or so worth of evidence um which suggests that emotions don't happen to you they're not um something that's just triggered in your brain and perfunctory they're made by your brain they're made by you they're constructed by you um out of um you know mechanisms that are what we would call domain General meaning that the mechanisms that construct emotion also construct your thoughts construct your memories they construct your perceptions they're really kind of all-purpose computational mechanisms and the general idea is that your brain is always first of all your brain doesn't react to things in the world it's predicting it's always using past experience um to try to guess what's going to happen next actually what you perceive and experience is a is a consequence of those changes so another difference right is between you know our work and the sort of classical view is a classical view assumes that there's a stimulus a stimulus occurs and it triggers something in you and then you produce a response but actually what the evidence suggests is that your brain is using past experiences to make a guess about what to do next so it's preparing the response first and then the there are copies literal neuronal copies they're called efferent copies or corollary discharge they have a couple of names in the Neuroscience Ledger that the neurons that prepare your physical changes for the in the next moment actually send collateral axons to the visual the parts of your brain that are important for vision and for audition and for right and so what you so your brain is basically guessing like well based on what's happened in in a similar situation in the past when I prepared this movement what did I see next what did I hear next what did I smell next what did I feel next that's actually right so your experience is a consequence of your brain's regulation of your body it's not it doesn't come first it comes second in preparing for this you know whenever I did start to sort of grasp the idea even slightly sort of the sense that my word was sort of being turned upside down a little bit you know this is this is a serious implications this this idea and um a sentence in the book that really helped to sort of help me grasp it was it was along the lines of you know um emotions are your brain's construction of what bodily Sensations mean in a specific context and in the book you use an example of when you were I think when you were a postgraduate student or whenever you were younger you went on a date in a coffee shop and you want to tell us about that true story that really helped for me to understand and so if you maybe could you tell us about that example I think that could be helpful helpful for people sure sure um so the important thing to understand is that physical signals in your body like a change in heart rate or change in breathing or an increase in cortisol or you know these changes have no inherent psychological meaning for me that a really good example was um you know there was I was a graduate student and there was this guy who kept asking me out for coffee and you know I just wasn't that interested and um but he you know he persisted and finally I thought well okay I'll just go out with him once and you know get this over with and then maybe he'll leave me alone and so we went out for coffee and as we were having coffee I noticed that I you know I started to feel a little warm like my cheeks were a little flushed and I felt kind of warm and also I felt kind of jittery you know like like a little like worked up a little on edge you know like a little fluttery and also I was you know having I was having a little trouble like I felt kind of foggy headed a little bit not a lot but just a little bit and I thought so what I start what I wondered was I thought well it might not maybe I'm attracted to this guy actually like maybe I do like him you know like maybe what I'm feeling is you know so this situation where I wasn't like really sure well what were these Sensations that I was experiencing and I thought well okay you know I'm on a date right so maybe I maybe I am really interested in this guy and so we um so you know he took me home after this coffee and um we made plans to see each other again and I literally I like I opened the door to my apartment you know close the door put the keys you know down and ran to the bathroom and let's just say pray to the porcelain Gods as it were you know like I was and then I was in bed for a week with the flu so probably the source of the biological source of those sense data were a virus that was starting to infect my system but my brain made sense of that those Sensations as attraction and lust and you can say well your brain was mistaken but my brain wasn't mistaken because my brain is doing my brain did what it always does which is it makes sense of the um experience it made sense of the sense data to create an experience so the experience isn't a mistake it's the experience right and I ended up dating this guy for about nine months and in the end we broke up and I probably could have saved myself you know like uh nine months of misery I think if I had realized that our brains just do this kind of stuff automatically this is this is the stuff that um where actions come from and where experiences come from so earlier you mentioned that you know our brain is essentially locked in a dark skull and it's it has to guess what's going on the outside world and it does that through past experiences and uses those past experiences to make predictions and what this I can't wrap my head around this but it's just the idea that everything that we're seeing is a concept based on what we've previous previously seen and experienced and we had a talk from I don't know if you're aware of his work uh Ian mcgilchrist do you know him I don't know him personally but I know his work and in his talk he said the left hemisphere or pretty much everything that we see is a is a representation and he the way he slowed it down he said everything is a a re-presentation of something that we've seen before so are we walking around we're not actually seeing what's there we're seeing our brains concept of what's there and yeah could you maybe expand upon that sure so um the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman coined a phrase the remembered present which I think is a beautiful phrase because it really captures the um one of the basic kind of computational aspects of brain function which is that when you see or when you hear or when you have any experience at all when you move your body in any way It's a combination of the sense data from the world the sense data from your body and some signals that are reconstituted in your brain from the past so I have this image in the book and I I've done this in my TED Talk also I do it very frequently with audiences because it always gets a gasp like people are always surprised like I just show a Blobby image right now there are wavelengths of light coming from the screen hitting your retina and so most people what they see are black and white blobs so what what do you see there do you see an image of an object or do you just see black and white blobs I see black and white blobs yeah and your brain is is is really trying using it's trying using past experience to come up with a concept which is a you know a set of um neural pattern of neural firing from from the past to um to make sense of this but right now mostly what's happening is you've got these sense data coming from the world and only from the world all you see are black and white blobs if your brain can't come up with a good representation from the past to make sense of these blobs then all you see are um you know these this Blobby image and what you're experiencing is something called experiential blindness so what philosophers call the experiential blindness and so I'm going to cure your blindness now I'm going to do it again well what do you now see Niall what do you see when you look at this image I'm seeing a b you see a b and Y because now your brain has new knowledge to create a to create these prediction signals which have create a concept thanks to the color photograph that I just showed you and those signals in your brain change how you experience those blobs on the screen right now so your brain is constructing the image of a bee so that you see a b even though there actually is no B present on the screen so that is how your brain really works so the idea here and again idea backed up by a lot of data is that everything that you see is a combination of what's out there in the world and what's in your head everything you hear is a combination of what's outside in the world and what's in your head you know that old um that old um puzzle you know if a tree falls in the forest and you know and no one's there to hear it hit the ground does it make a sound the answer is no it doesn't it doesn't make a sound it it changes the the tree falls and it hits the ground and that changes the vibrations in the um in the you know of the airwaves but you needed you need some kind of transducer to make it into a sound and you need a concept of a tree falling in order to make it into the sound of a tree falling right otherwise to you you're just experientially blind to you know let's say you don't have that concept but you have an ear then you're experientially blind to the meaning of that sound and if you don't have an ear you don't even hear the sound right so when you're listening to somebody else talk in a language that you don't speak and to you it just sounds like you know a bunch of sounds that have no meaning you're experientially blind to because you don't have the prior knowledge to make sense of those sense data so when Ian mcgilchrist was saying is that everything you experience in your whole life has to be a combination of what's happened in the you know signals in your brain that your brain is reconstituting from the past not just in your left hemisphere um and uh but you know that's my pieces it's not just it's not just in your left hemisphere it's happening in your whole brain um and um and the sense data coming from the world and the sense data coming from your body are also important in that equation as well thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed the show if you'd like to hear the full version you can do so with the weekend University premium membership this gets you access to your master library of over 230 talks and interviews with the words leading psychologist professors and authors as well as transcripts CPD certification quizzes and unlimited access to the recordings from our annual conferences more information please go to the weekenduniversity.com forward slash membership

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 20,137

Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, psychology talks, psychology lecture, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Emotions, Emotional Intelligence

Id: q9nnB-EONnQ

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023