- There are a lot of misconceptions that people have
about emotions and how they work.
One myth is that emotions are hardwired
into the brain at birth and universal across all humans
and maybe even shared with other animals.
Another myth is that the brain produces emotions
in a very reactive kind of way.
It's based on this idea that you have this animalistic part
of a brain, and when the rational side
of your brain wins, you are a moral, healthy person.
And when the emotional side of your brain wins,
then you're either immoral
because you didn't try hard enough, or you're mentally ill
because you couldn't control your emotions.
It can certainly feel like emotions happen to you:
that they bubble up and that they cause you to do
and say things that are maybe ill-advised.
But that explanation doesn't really capture
how your brain is making emotions.
My name is Lisa Feldman Barrett.
I am a university-distinguished professor
at Northeastern University,
and my latest book is entitled
"Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain."
I've been studying emotions for about 30 years.
So, right off the bat,
I should tell you scientists don't agree
on how to define emotion.
Like, everybody agrees that we have emotions,
but nobody can agree
on the definition of what an emotion is.
So, there's great variability in emotional lives.
Some people float in a sea of tranquility.
They're kind of mild, and easy to deal with.
Other people tread water in a tumultuous sea of emotion.
They're constantly having intense experiences.
They feel as if their emotions control them instead
of them controlling their emotions.
But all of that experience-
that emotions are events that happen to you
that you have to deal with-
is an illusion that the brain creates.
So for example, something happens in the world:
It triggers that ancient inner part of the brain,
emotion circuits deep in our inner beast,
and then we react to what's occurred in the world.
But that's really not what emotions are-
and that's not how they work.
- [Director] So, how would you define
an instance of emotion?
- The way that I would say it is like this:
Your brain is always regulating your body.
Your body is always sending sensory information back
to your brain, like how much glucose,
how much oxygen, how much salt?
What's the status of almost every metabolic factor
that keeps you alive and well?
And your brain isn't wired in a way
for you to experience those sensory changes, specifically.
Instead, what you experience is a summary-
and that's where those feelings
of pleasantness or unpleasantness, comfort, discomfort,
feeling worked up or feeling calm and quiescent,
that's where those simple feelings come from.
- [Director] So, is that an instance of emotion?
- Not exactly.
Feelings are properties or features of emotion
of an episode of emotion, an instance of emotion-
but they're not synonymous with emotions.
Just in the same way that you would experience sound
as quiet or loud.
You can experience feeling very activated or very calm.
And what your brain is doing is telling itself a story
about what is going on inside your body
in relation to what's happening in the world.
And it's creating this story using knowledge
about emotion that you have learned from your past
to predict what you’re going to see and hear and feel.
That's what an emotion is.
That's what an instance of any emotion is,
but it's also an explanation
for how every thought, every feeling, every decision,
every action that you ever take in your whole life is made.
So, why is it important?
When something goes wrong,
you need to use your explanation
as a tool to figure out how to fix things.
For example, in depression, your metabolically compromised
because your brain believes there's a metabolic problem
in your body.
And the symptoms of depression are the consequence
of the brain's attempt to cut costs.
So, you feel fatigued or you feel unpleasant.
You feel like you can't concentrate, you can't move
because moving your body is really metabolically expensive.
That's where depression comes from.
It doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong
in the world or with you,
although sometimes it does mean that.
So, part of managing your emotions is figuring
out when unpleasant feelings are diagnostic about something
in the world, and when they're just simply an indication
that things are uncertain
or that you're doing something really difficult.
If you understand
that the brain's most important job is regulating,
coordinating the systems of the body,
then you start to think about the treatment differently.
The fact that emotions don't happen to you-
that your brain is making them-
and that your brain is using your past experience
as fodder for predicting
what's going to happen, has really big implications.
The first really big implication is
that you are an architect of your experience,
and that doesn't involve breaking predictions.
It involves seeding your brain to predict differently.
You're not necessarily a prisoner of your past,
but your past experiences, as they are reconstituted
in your brain, are a fundamental ingredient
of your present experience in your present actions.
It's really hard to reach back
into the past and change what those instances meant,
and how you experienced them;
that's what psychotherapy is for.
But if you understand
that every experience you have now becomes part
of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize
that the best way to change your past is
to change your present.
So, just in the same way that you would exercise
to make yourself healthier, you can invest energy
to cultivate different experiences for yourself.
You can learn new things, watch movies, read books,
even maybe act in a play that would require you to have
different experiences that get you outside
of the normal range of what your brain would predict.
Because if you practice these things that you learn,
they become more automatic,
and then your brain just uses these new experiences
to predict differently in the future,
and for you to act differently in the future,
which gives you the opportunity to be different
than you are right now.
Not everybody has as much control as they might like,
but everybody has a little more control
than they think they do.
When you enter this world as an infant,
you're not wired full of memories
that your brain will use to predict.
Other people cultivate your world
and as a consequence, they are wiring your brain full
of experiences that your brain will then use to predict.
You didn't have a hand in creating that world,
and you are not responsible for it.
But as an adult,
you can make decisions about what you experience now.
You can make choices about how you act,
and those decisions and choices
either reinforce the predictions that your brain makes
or it changes them.
Sometimes in life, we are responsible for changing things,
not because we're culpable or to blame for those things,
but because we're the only ones who can change them.
And that can feel unfair, and it is unfair,
in a certain way.
But it's also helpful because it means
that you always have tools available
at your disposal to heal yourself, to act differently,
and to feel differently.