Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2018. Also drawing on her conversation with Ezra Klein. [[2020-06-12]] Classical view (eg Paul Ekman) says there is a unique physical fingerprint for each emotion. This fingerprint can be detected in our facial expressions, our physiological responses, and our brain activity. The constructed theory of emotions is that the brain predicts how one should feel, and then constructs the emotion. Can people tell the difference between anxiety and depression? Most of us think we can, but in actual fact, we can't. Human face has 42 muscles on each side. The brain evolved to regulate our bodies. We think and feel in service of this regulation. (The brain did NOT evolve to think and feel.) The brain runs a budget for the body (glucose, salt, oxygen, etc.) Our brain allocates these resources to different cells in the body. Our body gives feedback to the brain constantly. The resolution of this information is like a 1950s black and white TV compared to the high-definition of vision or hearing. The reason is that if we had too much information from inside our bodies, we would never pay attention to anything outside. We experience this internal feedback as feelings. It's our barometer. Like any budget, we can run a surplus or deficit. If we run a deficit for too long, we will go bankrupt. This will lead to depression and other illnesses. How does the brain know the cause of a feeling in the gut or anywhere else? It uses past experience and memory to guess. A predictive brain is much more efficient than one that doesn't predict. A non-predictive brain is actually autistic. Concepts are tools for regulating the body, because they categorize experiences into classes, which allows the brain to predict. We help regulate each other's body budget. When someone close to us dies, it affects our body budget negatively. Some cultures interpret this as grief. Others interpret it like a flu. It's the concept (the predictive act of the brain) which determines our interpretation. Cortisol is not a stress hormone. Cortisol is a hormone for controlling how much glucose gets into the bloodstream. If I wanted to negatively affect a colleague's body budget, I could spend 30 minutes showing him horrific pictures, or I could simply insinuate that maybe, just maybe, I have a negative evaluation of him, and I can achieve the same effect in 5 minutes. [[2020-12-04]] Degeneracy - the ability of different neural circuits to produce the same effect. It's a many to one relationship. For example, it was thought that the amygdala was responsible for producing fear (Heinrich Klüver and Paul C. Bucy in the 1930s). But then later research showed that fear could present itself even when subjects had a damaged amygdala. Core systems - a single brain area or network can produce different mental states. It's a one to many relationship. Feldman's team did a meta-analysis of nearly 100 published studies involving 1,300 test subjects. They could not find a neural fingerprint for emotion. [[2020-12-24]] The brain's primary mode of operation is prediction. It is constantly simulating the world and making predictions about which past experiences best explain current sensory input. The neurons that do this work are called intrinsic networks, and they are a good example of degeneracy. Intrinsic networks are firing all the time, not just in reaction to external stimulus. Such stimulus mostly serves to "tune" the predictions. > Right now, as you read these words and understand what they mean, each word barely perturbs your massive intrinsic activity, like a small stone skipping on a rolling ocean wave. >You might think that your perception of the world are driven by events in the world, but really, they are anchored in your predictions, which are then tested against those little skipping stones of incoming sensory input. The primary visual cortext (or V1) contains a map of our visual field. Only 10 percent of the connections to V1 are from the eye. 90 percent of connections carry predictions from elsewhere in the brain to V1, and V1 itself transmits as many predictions to the thalamus: ![[connections to visual cortex.png|400x600]] Another form of intrinsic networks are the brain's interoceptive networks. The most important prediction the brain makes concerns our energy needs. Interoceptive networks help the brain predict what's going on inside our bodies. These networks consist of two parts. One part is a body-budgeting region. It sends predictions to the rest of the body to control heart rate, breathing, hormones, metabolism, etc. The second part is the primary interoceptive cortex, and it represents sensations inside the body. --- Books recommended by Lisa Feldman Barrett: Searle, John R. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995. (downloaded) Danziger, Kurt. Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language. London: Sage Publ, 2008. (downloaded) Marcelo Gleisner, The Island of Knowledge Gee, Henry. The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2013. (scribd)