5: Lisa Feldman Barrett
Welcome to Episode 5, where Neuroscientist LISA FELDMAN BARRETT and I talk about the nature of human emotion, and how misunderstanding emotion may be more consequential than you think. Lisa is one of the world's leading theorists of emotion—of what emotions are—and the conclusions she’s drawn from decades of research may surprise you—a lot. Her work so compelling and fresh that it's been prominently featured—along with Lisa herself—pretty much all through Season 3 of the popular NPR podcast INVISIBILIA, which is all about the invisible forces that control human behavior. Lisa and I spoke in Boston shortly after her recent book came out. It's called, HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE: THE SECRET LIFE OF THE BRAIN and I highly recommend it.
This book has got everything. It’s feature interest—human emotion—is compelling all by itself. But her exploration of the topic draws from a deep dive into neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, behavioral ecology, linguistics, philosophy, and on and on—following whichever leads help her find answers. And along the way, she accessibly addresses tough theoretical questions like, "what is a brain even for?” “How do brains work?” and “Why does this matter?” But Lisa also gets into why researchers might have gotten these questions wrong for so long—and that not only touches on a lot of contemporary controversies regarding the way science is done, but also grounds the doing of science in a historical and cultural perspective. This really highlights, among other things, the fact that science is a human activity, conducted by people who, just like you, sometimes have a hard time reconciling strongly held beliefs with conflicting evidence. Science is hard, friends. It requires cleverness, sure, but also courage and persistence. Lisa Feldman Barrett has all of that in abundance. * * * As always, remember that this podcast is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship. Plus, we're a member of the TEEJ.FM podcast network. AND... The music of CIRCLE OF WILLIS was composed and performed by Tom Stauffer, Gene Ruley and their band THE NEW DRAKES. You can purchase this music at their Amazon page.
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Jim Coan
From VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship, this is episode five of Circle of Willis, where neuroscientists Lisa Feldman Barrett and I talk about the nature of human emotion, and how misunderstanding emotion may be more consequential than you think.
Jim Coan
Hey, everyone, it's Jim Coan, and this is my podcast Circle of Willis. This episode features a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett, distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where she's also a professor of neuroscience in the departments of Radiology and psychiatry.
Jim Coan
I started- I started making a list here of her- her various fellowships and awards, and you know, there's there's a lot of them, so I kind of gave up. Just believe me now, she's- she- this one is at the top of her game. Lisa is really one of the world's leading theorists of emotion now, of what emotions are. And her answers, Her answers are likely to surprise you, a lot. Lisa's work is rooted primarily in psychology and neuroscience. But it borrows liberally from anthropology, Behavioral Ecology, linguistics, philosophy, and on and on. It's so compelling and fresh, that it's been prominently featured, along with Lisa herself, pretty much all through season three of that- that super popular NPR podcast, Invisibilia, which is all about the invisible forces that control human behavior. In which is just amazingly excellent, and very highly recommended by me. So uh, anyway, Lisa, and I spoke in Boston, shortly after her recent book came out. And so we talk all about it. In this this recorded conversation. This book, Lisa's book, is called How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the brain. And I, uh, I'm just going to say it, I really, I think, I think you should go and buy it, like right now and read it! Look, I'm not getting any money for that. I'm not, there's no secondary gain for me, if you purchase Lisa's book. I just love it is all, and I want to share it with my fellow persons of the world. Lisa's book has got everything. It's got a compelling topic, you know, human emotion. It's got a contemporary frame that brings the latest neuroscientific evidence to bear, as well as the latest theoretical views on questions like: What is the brain even for? How do brains even work? Why should Why should any of this matter to us? But Lisa, being Lisa, she, she takes it even further, she gets into why psychologists and neuroscientists might have gotten these questions wrong for so long. And that, that puts the science into cultural and historical perspective, which is, that's, that's interesting. I mean, I don't want to alarm anybody, but science is, after all, a human activity conducted by people. And people do the things that people do, including, sometimes, favoring strongly held beliefs, even in the face of conflicting evidence. And that friends, is one of the many reasons that science is so frickin hard. It can freak you out, when the data start telling you something different than what you expect, you know. And Lisa's take on how emotions are made on what emotions are, let's just say that it isn't intuitive for most of us, but once it clicks, once you get it, it veers pretty quickly into mind blowing territory. I first encountered Lisa's work shortly after starting graduate school in the mid 1990s. I remember these articles she was writing, at the time, challenging in the most uncompromising tones. The idea that there were these five core sort of basic emotions that were what we call human universals, which is, which is to say that they were shared by all humans in all cultures around the world. That they were, in fact, independent of culture by virtue of being part of our biological constitution. These emotions were, let's see, they were fear, sadness, joy, anger, that's four, and disgust. And these basic emotions came with basic emotional facial expressions, stereotypical facial expressions that were more or less understandable by all humans everywhere, by again, by virtue of our innate biology. So, you know, Lisa is what we sometimes call detail oriented. She's a bit of a stickler for, you know, the internal consistency of an empirical argument. And in her survey of the literature on emotion, she started to realize that the dominant theories, this, this theory, especially of these sort of basic, human universal emotions, just didn't really fit well with the data that people were reporting. And anyway, we get into all that in our conversation. And, and really, Lisa is much better at talking about it than I am. But I do want to say this, the- the topic of emotion really goes to just about the core of what it is to experience a human life. So that I mean, this stuff matters. Emotion is essential for our survival, for creating our social worlds, for navigating our often uncertain and demanding life circumstances. But emotion is also largely what our subjective experience is made of, in this, this one life that any of us is ever going to have. And the topic of emotion raises all kinds of other questions. Which is why along the way, Lisa, and I talk about things like how the brain is designed to predict our moment to moment experiences, how our subjective perception is really a blend of these predictions and the feedback we get from our environments. You know, why all of us have to manage our body's metabolic resources like like little economists, and more, all kinds of stuff, heady stuff, but Lisa Feldman Barrett is here to help us all figure it out, to guide us sort of gently down the counterintuitive path as it were. So open your minds people, because here it comes.
Jim Coan
So I'm conflicted, in terms of what I want to talk about, because, you know, I've got Lisa Feldman Barrett in the room, and I want to talk about everything that you do. And I want to talk about your career! There's, I think there's real pedagogical value, in learning how you sort of grew up. But I think the place to start, really is to just ask you about this book that's coming out. So tell me about the book.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Well, a number of times over the last 10 years or so I've been approached to write a popular book, which I swore I would never do.
Jim Coan
Right, right, right. I just-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I'm just too, you know, I was just too captivated with the science and didn't want to take time away. And then in 2013, there was a journalist who was writing a feature piece on me and my lab, my labs work for Boston Magazine. And, she kept asking me, she was fantastic. She asked fantastic questions, she probably dug harder and read more papers, more of my scientific papers than my colleagues had, actually.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And one thing she kept saying is her editor kept pressing her. Why is this important? So we have the wrong theory of emotion? Who cares? Like why does it matter? You know?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And she kept coming back to me and saying, "I really want to do this article, but it's only going to fly if you can tell me why it matters." And my first reaction was kind of a knee jerk-
Jim Coan
"Eat shit, I don't want to tell you."
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, my first reaction was Listen, do we do you know, do we- do we require this of physicists to talk about, you know, strings vibrating in 11 dimensions? Do we talk about? Do we- do we require this of physicists who talk about the Higgs boson? This was before, you know, the evidence-
Jim Coan
Yeah!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-that came out of the Hadron Collider, or, you know, multiverses, or any of this other stuff? No, we don't we don't ask them to justify themselves.
Jim Coan
It's just interesting
Lisa Feldman Barrett
It's just interesting! So it should be really interesting.
Jim Coan
I agree.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
You know, how is the-
Jim Coan
God dammit
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-what is the brain doing-
Jim Coan
Yes!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-and what's happening in the body during a motion? Why can't we just be interested for science sake?
Jim Coan
Right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But she really was persistent. And so I thought, all right, I'll- I'll grudgingly spend, you know, a couple of days thinking about it. And when I started to really think about it, and do a little bit of reading, I realized, actually, people are really harmed in many spheres of life by using the wr ong theory
Jim Coan
Of emotion?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Mhm. In politics, in security, in mental health and physical health. There are a number of examples that I give throughout the book actually, where the- having the wrong ideas about how emotions work, what they are, how they work, leads people to make decisions that are really harmful. Sometimes financially harmful, and sometimes harmful in terms of losing their lives.
Jim Coan
Woah, can you give me some examples?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, sure. So one example is that when, uh, women present themselves in the emergency room with symptoms of what could be a heart attack, those symptoms are very similar to the symptoms that you experience during an anxiety attack.
Jim Coan
Right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And over the age of-
Jim Coan
Classical example.
Jim Coan
Wait, they're not? Just Kidding.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, over the age of 65, more women die from heart attacks than men do. And the reason, one of the reasons why - it's not the only reason - one of the reasons why is that they are routinely sent home, because they are misdiagnosed as having anxiety, instead of having a full workup and detecting that there's actually a problem with the heart. The women themselves and their and the emergency room doctors have a classical view of emotion with the idea that there are very definitive fingerprints for things like anxiety and fear, and that these are somehow biologically separate and very distinguishable from physical symptoms of illness. And that combined with the mistaken belief that women are more emotional than men, which is also an interesting part of the-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
No, I know you are. You know, leads to, to people losing their lives. And before, you know there are a couple of times when I've been interviewed about this, you know, when your readers will say, "really, come on, really?" You know, one of the publicists that have worked on my book, this happened to her mother.
Jim Coan
That she was diagnosed with anxiety? And had a heart attack?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
She went to an emergency room with symptoms of... heart, that were, there was an impending heart event about to occur, and she was sent home with anxiety and she died.
Jim Coan
It's a myth?
Jim Coan
Holy shit. You know, you think commonly, if you ask lay people about the link, to the extent that lay people are going to know about the link between panic attacks, anxiety attacks and heart attacks. They're going to say that the problem really is not what you're saying. The problem is that so many people think they're having a heart attack when they're really having an anxiety attack.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
It's a myth. There's-
Jim Coan
That there are, that there are physiological fingerprints for an emotional state.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Sure, you can pick apart any single, you can pick apart any single example that I'm giving you. The fact is, though, that what your body, the idea that there is, uh, an objective physical fingerprint for each emotion and that somehow it is distinguishable- distinguishable in a biological sense, from physical symptoms, is a myth.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
There is no evidence that there is a single fingerprint for anxiety-
Jim Coan
Now that seems an important qualifier.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right, so well, that's what, that is what the classical view is- rests upon, and that's what you know, currently, industry technology... technology related industries are spending billions of dollars trying to develop emotion- objective emotion reading technology-
Jim Coan
AI
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Mhm, you know, a space doesn't speak for itself, when it comes to emotion. The physical state of your body does not conform to a fingerprint that you can use to diagnose, independently, of all sorts of other information.
Jim Coan
Right. So we want, we want a device -or we- somebody wants a device that can- say a physician wants a device that can say when you come in and your fingertips are cold and your heart is racing, you're having anxiety-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, or marketers want a device where they can just look at your face or just take a couple of readings from your peripheral nervous system and then know how you feel. And the classical view has lent credibility to the notion that such fingerprints exist, but they don't. But I'll tell you, the one that really got me, the one that was for me, the tipping point, for writing this book was actually the training of children diagnosed with autism to read emotion in facial movements.
Jim Coan
Oh my God
Lisa Feldman Barrett
For me, that was the one-
Jim Coan
That was the last straw.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
That was the last straw. So there's all of this research that's being done with children who've been diagnosed with autism. So in autism, there are a number of difficulties that that these children face, but one of the difficulties is they don't understand social signals. They have a hard time understanding what physical movements mean. So in a neurotypical brain of the sort that you know, probably you and I have
Jim Coan
Speak for yourself.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
When we see physical movements, like right now, you know, we're, our heads are moving, our facial muscles are moving, our bodies movements are you know, we're leaning in or leaning back or what have you.
Jim Coan
Right right right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
We are, our brains automatically guess at what the mental, uh, state is that corresponds to-
Jim Coan
And we're pretty good at it. We're pretty accurate.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, well, I wouldn't- Yeah.
Jim Coan
And it accounts for the fluidity of conversation, right?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
We're accurate enough.
Jim Coan
Accurate enough.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, there's an optimal level of accuracy. If you think about accurcy as coordination between what's actually in your head and my guessing what's in your head.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And we can talk about that later. But so the idea, and it makes sense, right that, then one thing that you could do with these kids is train them to recognize a scowling face as a signal to anger or a pouting face as a signal for sadness, and so on. And this is based on the assumption that each one of us has a diagnostic expression that we make when we are in an emotional state, and that everyone around the world makes these expressions and that we can recognize them, you know, as easily as we can read words on a page. So all you have to do is teach kids to read these facial- to recognize, identify these facial configurations, and, because they're universal facial expressions. The problem, though, of course, is that these expressions were stipulated by Darwin. They're not the only set of stipulated expressions that have ever existed in the history of human evolution-
Jim Coan
They were stipulated by Darwin.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
They were stipulated by-
Jim Coan
What do you mean, what do you mean by that?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I mean, he said, these are the ones.
Jim Coan
These are the ones.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
These are the ones.
Jim Coan
I mean, an expression of emotion in man and animals.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly. And then scientists, rather than doing very careful studies of people, how people actually move their faces, in everyday life, they adopted these expressions because Darwin said so. And, and we have, and really what these faces are, are stereotypes, Western stereotypes, for facial expressions of emotion. Because in the data that does exist, from measuring people's, actually measuring people's facial muscle movements, facial EMG. And in a number of studies that observed people in everyday life, it becomes really clear that you don't, your face doesn't just conform to a scowl when you're angry. People do all kinds of things in anger, right? They cry in anger, they laugh in the face of anger, they might withdraw in anger, they might look away. They don't always scowl and people scowl at times that have nothing to do with anger.
Jim Coan
Yeah, I know, It's true.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
My husband-
Jim Coan
Yeah, go ahead. What does your husband do?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
He scowls when he's concentrating.
Jim Coan
Yeah, well, so do I. Right. So do you ever do that?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah. No, I- well sure. I mean-
Jim Coan
Is this related to what is it? Resting bitchface? Is that like-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yes that's exactly realted to resting bitchface!
Jim Coan
It is? Well that's lucky.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, yeah, absolutely! Anyways, point my point is that with, so you can train these kids, right, to recognize these faces?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And they work really hard to do it because it's hard for them. And they do it, they struggle, and they do it. And as a parent of one of these kids, you might be thinking, this is going to really help my kids socially connect with me and other people.
Jim Coan
Right because they're gonna be able to read my face and respond appropriately.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And so you full of hope-
Jim Coan
We're gonna hack it.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-and you watch your kids struggle, struggle, struggle to learn these faces, and they do learn them. And then it generalizes not at all, to the real world. So it doesn't help at all in the real world. And but think of yourself as one of these parents.
Jim Coan
You've invested all this in this... theory.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Think about the- think about the disappointment that you would feel after watching your kid for months, try to learn to recognize these faces, and then realize that it hasn't helped them a bit. And then, how would you feel? You would feel deflated, you would feel demoralized, you would feel tremendous disappointment. And then imagine knowing learning that actually, there's a tremendous amount of science out there, which says that, which shows that this would never have worked in the first place should never have.
Jim Coan
It shouldn't have worked.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
It shouldn't have worked in the first place. I would be beside myself, really. And I thought, okay, you know, I just had such empathy for parents, actually, of these kids, that I just thought, well, you know, what, I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna put the evidence out there and I'm then people can decide for themselves what they think.
Jim Coan
We've talked about a little bit of this stuff before. I mean, in many other contexts, and I've told you already that I sort of grew up in the- in the tradition of the, th-the Darwin expressions, right? Th-the Ekman stuff working with Gottman and Levinson and, you know, doing all of these kinds of things. Sorta grew up in that environment, and started having a lot of the same kinds of misgivings that you have. I mean, I started reading your work, I think, in earnest in the late 90s, probably somewhere around there, because I was trying to sort of work out some of these observations for myself because I was learning about measurement theory and all these things. But the hardest part for me has always been the expressions. If for some reason I always get stuck on the... I definitely understand that the establishment of a sort of physiological fingerprint has not been successful. You know, as I've become more of a neuroscientist and gone into- that direction. We'll talk about that in a second, as well, I want to talk about the brain and all of this. You know, that's not been as successful as one might have hoped, although we all thought that the amygdala was the seat of fear for a long time.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Speak for yourself.
Jim Coan
And- but the expression part, I mean, I just, I still sometimes wonder if it's, if it's really a question of sensitivity and specificity. Right? So, so if we ask the sensitivity question, are we going to catch all instances of anger, for example, with a scowl. But the problem then is specificity. Right? So, so-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I think it's sensitivity and specificity. So I would say, first of all, and let me just be really clear, am I saying that there's no meaning in facial movements? Of course, I'm not saying that at all. I'm not, I'm not-
Jim Coan
That's a relief.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I'm not in any way claiming anything like that. Well, but sometimes-
Jim Coan
But if I went to, if I went to, you know, some place... faraway
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Well, we have gone to someplace faraway.
Jim Coan
Ok, yeah. And I'm going like this all time, you know, baring my teeth and scowling at people, they're gonna not know what have any idea what I'm intending?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Correct. They might think-
Jim Coan
Really?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, they might think that you have to go to the bathroom.
Jim Coan
Maybe I do.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I mean, I look, you know, we have sent expeditions to Tanzania to study the hodza, who are the... really the last hunter gatherer culture that's been continuously hunting and gathering since the Pleistocene. So they are the people who are... Studying them is-is really the best kind of population to study to evaluate the classical view of emotion because according to many of those theories, basic emotion theory and evolutionary psychology theories of emotion, emotions, and their expressions evolved in that context, you know? In that cultural context. So, those people should have done beautifully on the classic kind of paradigm that we use in psychology, that people have developed-
Jim Coan
Where you show pictures-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
You show pictures-
Jim Coan
You tell a story of the pictures?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, or you show- Well, first, what you do is you, you tell a story of an emotion. And then you show two faces, or three faces, and you say-
Jim Coan
Which one?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-take the face. And, or, you, though that's the standard way to do it. And with with more westernized cultures, you show a face and you give a set of words, and you say pick the word that matches the face. And there's an interesting story there. I think about the, about the methods and what's going on in those methods. And because you know, the methods are really tied up with when you see evidence for, that supports universality and when you don't, but my point here is that even when you use those methods, unless you use a very specific manipulation check, that is a check on whether or not your subjects understand the Western culture, the Western cultural concept of anger, if you do that, and you sort of teach well, I'm sort of getting ahead of myself. Let me just say it this way. When you show people those faces, you show people a scowling face and you say, how does this person feel? What's going on for this person? You don't see any evidence that people routinely see scowls as anger in the hodza. And also in the Himba who are semi pastoralists who live in rural Namibia, Western Namibia at the Congolese border. So- or Angola border actually, I'm sorry, it's that they Angola border. So no, you actually it's not the case that that all around the world, people see a scowling face and they think that you're they think that you're angry.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Do they ever pick something that we would typically consider like the opposite? Like a smile? I mean, I mean, are there are there are there degrees? Or they're like, sort of-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Well, sure. So let me just say this, first of all, are there there are some smiles that they do pick? Yes. But more routinely, what seems to be universal, more universal anyways, is Valence: is the person- is distinguishing a pleasant from an unpleasant expression, an expression that indicates that someone is feeling pleasure versus feeling distress. So that's actually harder to disrupt, although it's very easy to confuse people, when you start to give them context along with the faces-
Jim Coan
Yeah, sure, sure.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But these- we're now here talking about-
Jim Coan
Because they could be happy about a bad thing or unhappy about a good thing, or you know...
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Well, I think the thing to consider here with these experiments is that you're presenting a face outside of any kind of context. And when this happens, a smile usually is indicative, not always, but most of the time as something pleasant. And a scowl is usually indicative as something unpleasant. But when you add context in to, so you place a face in context, you can make a smile look negative and you can make a scowl look positive.
Jim Coan
How about that!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
There's so there's really nice evidence actually-
Jim Coan
So, in zooming out from based on what you've you've just said it's sort of in there is, is at least the idea that there's a kind of a, maybe, a kind of a facial signature, if you will, for positivity and negativity?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I wouldn't go so far as to say there's a signature, I think a signature is really the wrong way to think about it. That's just in my book, I talk a lot about essentialism, the idea that there's a one to one relationship, a signature for, for any kind of mental state. There's no signature. What there is, you know, in when you are happy, or when you're angry, or any other emotion, there is a variety of things that you feel that you do with your face th-that your brain is doing. Each emotion is a category of highly variable instances. Variability is the norm when it comes to emotion. So there are no signatures. That being said, it's very possible that if Jim, if I measured you across many different situations in your life, I might discover that you have a vocabulary of five expressions that you make for anger, and maybe one for you know, depending on what the context is-
Jim Coan
And may be more or less reliable in terms of indicating my interstate?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Sure. And maybe I have, you know, three, and maybe you know, your wife has eight, and maybe my husband has seven. And maybe there's some overlap, because we're all North Americans. And we've all grown up, you know, relatively speaking in the same culture. But even with people within the same culture, for example, you know, you- think about your wife, think about when you first met your wife. Think about how well you read her face, so to speak, when you first met her and how well you read her face now. There is- we do perceptual learning with people.
Jim Coan
Sure.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
We learn-
Jim Coan
We get lots of feedback, lots of information...
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, right, we have- first of all, we have a lot of data to work with because we have a lot of interaction. And we usually if we're close with the person, get some feedback about when we are correct and we are incorrect.
Jim Coan
Right, right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And so, of course, we have tells, of course, you know, my husband reads me extremely well.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Sometimes he is aware, he can predict that, for example, I suffer from migraine headaches. And he can usually predict when-
Jim Coan
When one's coming on?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
When one's coming on before I even feel the aura of it.
Jim Coan
How about that!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And it's because I do actually take on a sort of a physical demeanor when this happens because I'm starting to feel discomfort-
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-but I'm not, it's not, I'm not aware of it yet. I'm conscious of it. Obviously, I'm consciously feeling it, but I'm not quite aware of it yet, but he's become very sensitive to it. And, you know, there's one really funny story that I relay in my book about this. It's- it's sort of heretical, actually, if you're a woman to sort of say this, but, you know, there was one a couple of years ago, I guess now seven years ago, I was moving from one university to another, and I was moving my lab, which is very complicated-
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-procedure as you know.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And it's not just moving people and boxes. It's also moving hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, and data, which has to be kept secure.
Jim Coan
Right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And so it's very serious. It's very serious and very challenging.
Jim Coan
Yes.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And I was under a deadline to you know, I had two weeks to make this whole move with- I was moving more than 20 people, all this stuff. And there were there were snag after snag after snag. I should say, you know, things were... did go kind of relatively smoothly. But when those things happen, they were really big snags, right. And there was-
Jim Coan
Ah, sorry.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, well, no, you know, it was relatively, relative to other people's war stories, this is really not so bad. But my point is that, you know, there was a lot going on, I kept my cool through every single one just dealt with the problems. And then a really big snag hit on a Friday afternoon at five o'clock. I had a grant deadline at 6pm. I was supposed to be going on vacation the next day with my family who had been, you know, incredibly patient with me. And then at about 5:45, I'm sorry, 5:50 it was five- yeah, 5:45 my computer died.
Jim Coan
I would have shit my pants.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I basically sort of sank to the floor, in tears, just in tears, and I just sat down and I started to cry.
Jim Coan
Oh no, oh Lisa.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
My husband walked in and he said, are you premenstrual? Well, I mean, I tore him a new one. I was like, "How dare you?" I just you know, I basically exploded at him. I was so... I was incensed. I mean, I was
Jim Coan
Oh shit! Dumbass.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But I need to say, that three days later, um, I got my period, unexpectedly! Unexpectedly, right?
Jim Coan
What are you talking about, really?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah. So no, he totally read it. He read it, he read it correctly, he read it correctly. He was able to use his 20 something years of experience of having been with me to know, right, even-
Jim Coan
Even with all of that other stuff happening? I mean, you know-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But with all of that other stuff happening, I-I don't normally completely lose my sh-
Jim Coan
You don't normally lose it quite that way?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
No, no, I normally don't lose it.
Jim Coan
You know, it's so funny to hear- because my wife has this ability to tell, kind of the nature of my upsetness, when I'm upset. She knows whether it's something that she has to be really concerned about, or whether it's because I didn't sleep very well last night.
Jim Coan
My husband is exactly the same way. But how did, how did your wife learn that? How did my husband learn that? Through a lot of preceptual learning-
Jim Coan
Hard- hard won experience
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right. So each of us has a vocabulary, a repertoire?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
You know, of what we feel in certain circumstances, and also how we express what we feel in those circumstances. And our spouse has learn that. And we learn that about our children, and we learn that about each other. And so all of that learning is what allows us to, you know, very automatically, and usually, without tremendous effort, make guesses about, you know, our brains are guessing, about what each other are feeling and what-what, you know, we're going to do next without very much awareness or even consciousness on our part.
Jim Coan
You know, this is a really important idea. And I-I don't know... if, I just want to make sure that anyone listening would, can get the implications of this. This is important implications for policy, for AI development, for research, because what you're really suggesting is that, although there may not be the sort of broad normative patterns that we can rely on generalize-ablly, to everyone who walks through our door, there may be relatively fixed reliable patterns within individuals across time.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But think about... just think about something really simple, like you're in a negotiation. Let's say you're in industry or you're in government, and you're in a negotiation with someone who happens to nod their head when they mean "No," shake their head when they mean "yes."
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
That would be slightly problematic.
Jim Coan
That would until you got to know them, right? And then the, th-the idiographic story comes to play.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right, think of mistakes- Sure, but think of- So there are two messages here. I think one is that, you know, in my book, I discuss how some fairly large and disastrous errors have been made by assuming that expressions of emotion are universal, when they're not.
Jim Coan
Right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And second of all, that the science really needs a person, some person specific observation over time. Which you use the correct scientific term, which is idio-
Jim Coan
Idiographic.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And that... one of my concerns about the technology wave of, you know, emotion, you know, the emotion-
Jim Coan
Emotion recognition gear for gamers, and for law enforcement, and for... teachers.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, is that what's gonna happen is all of this money, and this incredible ingenuity, and innovation is going to be directed to trying to find these diagnostic facial expressions. And then when that, you know, as evidence is continuing to come out that it doesn't work, they don't work to do that, that people will throw away all this technology, instead of realizing that the real innovation here is the ability to be able to study people in context in their own lives over time. And that this would actually not only provide the marketers more with what they want, and the security agencies more with what they want, but it would actually revolutionize the science.
Jim Coan
Are you talking with-with Google yet? Can you say,
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I can say, I can say that Google has thus far not contacted me. And not, not responded. You know, I do get... there are many companies that have contacted me.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And they're, you know, they are they usually take one of two tacs. One is they want to talk about what the science really looks like, not what the hype is, but what the science really looks like. Or, they want to try to convince me that the hype, that the PR is really right. And my reaction, you know, to the latter is, "knock yourself out, man." If you want to invest all of that money and time in trying to find the- those stereotypes in people's everyday lives- I'm not saying people never scalpel in anger, of course they do sometimes- the question is, how often and how specifically, right? And so, because, you know, if you wanted to use it as an objective marker of anger, it better be pretty specific and it better be pretty frequent. Otherwise, you're screwed.
Jim Coan
You know what it reminds me a little bit? Is the-the AI technology on voice recognition dictation, right? So that technology to date, as far as I know, is what I've read about, isn't very good at just capturing anybody's voice.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
No, you have to train it!
Jim Coan
You have to train it with your own voice over time it learns to sort of recognize you.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so, everything- and the reason why is that even a sound like "buh," that- the acoustics of that sound very different if you say, "bear," or "bottle," right? To us, the "b" sounds exactly the same in our awareness-
Jim Coan
Yeah,
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-but actually, if you look at the acoustical signature, it's different. Because-
Jim Coan
Frequency band analysis-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah because the sound "buh" is actually a heterogeneous category.
Jim Coan
And that's so fascinating, because part of then the way that we probably process it in our experience is contextual based on other sounds all around it.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Of course! Your brain is built to be multimodal in its processing. You don't analyze acoustical signals separately from visual signals, separately from the-the sensory signals from your body, separate from olfaction, and taste and so on. You-your brain has systems for knitting those sensory signals together. And-and it's very hard actually-
Jim Coan
Yeah
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-to-to derive meaning just from a single sensory signal.
Jim Coan
There's, you know, there's so many things... There are many things about what you're saying so far in our conversation that are so satisfying for me, but-but one of them is how much it sort of recapitulates patterns in other literature's within psychology, you know? If you think, you know, I'm reminded a little bit of the sort of Walter Michelle critique of personality, or of the way that perception is active, not passive-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly. Exactly, exactly!
Jim Coan
You know, all of these things start sort of piling on to each other...
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I mean, even something like, you know, like, I was talking to a vision scientist the other day, and he said, well, "but you know, we do experiments all the time where we just show people, you know, visual images, and they process them independently of other sensory systems." And I said, "first of all, no, they don't, that's not true." So he's like "yes they do, we're just showing them, you know, we just show them images."
Jim Coan
Excuse me!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And I'm like, "Well, have you disconnected the brain from the rest of the body? Of course, there are other modalities that are in play that, you're just not measuring them!"
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
People with eyes who are looking at a screen, which has stuff displayed on it, also have a body that is sending sensory information continuously throughout their whole lives. And, you know, so no. Even in a unimodal study, there is still multimodal information. Eeven if you stuck headphones on them, so they couldn't hear anything else, even if you plug their nose-
Jim Coan
Yeah,
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-so you know, there was no olefactory... I mean, there's still the whole body, that's, you know, connected, right? So that's the first point. And the second point is really careful studies show - I just think it's incredibly fascinating - that even in primary visual cortex, so this is the part of the cortex, which is, you know, where information from the sensory world, this is the first part of the cortex that receives information from the sensory world, through you know, from-
Jim Coan
The whole homunculus picture and all that
Lisa Feldman Barrett
So, you know, you have, light comes in through your retina goes along the optic nerve up through some subcortical waystations, like the superior colliculus, the thalamus to primary visual cortex. That structure carries information about auditory signals, and it carries information about somatosensory signals. Nobody's ever checked to see whether it carries information about sensations from the body, which we refer to as interoception. But there's pretty good, I would say, not specific evidence, but pretty good evidence that's consistent with that view. It hasn't been tested, I think-
Jim Coan
Precuneus, kind of? In cuneus kind of activations modulating, all that?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
There's actually a whole network who's... that's responsible for integrating... but I'm talking about now the primary sensory regions carry information about the other senses.
Jim Coan
Yeah, that's become something that's very interesting to us in our lab-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
It's very cool.
Jim Coan
It's super, super cool. But you also got, I want to get back to the body a little bit sort of embodied, sort of understanding of the world because that's, that's a nice segue into another aspect that was... When I was first reading your work was very confusing to me because I had grown accustomed to a reading of William James, that said, that suggested to me that these emotional states that we experienced should have a specific bodily signature that-that, I drew from William James, as as a sort of theoretical statement that said.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Let me ask you a question seriously.
Jim Coan
Okay.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I'm asking you an honest question.
Jim Coan
I'm gonna give you an honest answer.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Did you actually read William James?
Jim Coan
No! Not until, not until, uh, 2002 or 2003 or so after I'd been, can I give you an extra honest- ? And that's after I'd cited William James on this, this this topic, in some early papers! I mean, you know, thinking about the-the idea of a neural, So I mean, I don't know if you know this, but I in 2000, I published a - 2001 - I published a facial feedback study. That worked beautifully, by the way, it worked, I mean, beyond expectations, and we've replicated it several times. And drawing a little bit on William James drawing, obviously, on Paul Ekman, and uh-
Jim Coan
But it well, let me just say that facial feedback could still work with a Jamesian view. It's just the Jamesian view, is somewhat different from his, what he actually wrote, as I'm sure you discovered.
Jim Coan
Yeah. So what did I get wrong?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
So... let me just say that I have a whole chapter in my book where I talk about Darwin and how Darwin has been misquoted again and again and again, from, you know, the expression of the emotions and men and animals. I talk a little bit about William James. You know, I could, I could have written a whole book really about how great scientists have been misquoted, but here, I only picked a couple and I talked a little bit about how it could be that we could so misunderstand what these great scientists said. And James I think, is really interesting example because James has been quoted, in fact, many textbooks also describe William James as having said that, "there is one bodily pattern for each emotion for anger for saddness... for anger, for sadness, for fear-"
Jim Coan
Experiencing the state of your body is what your experiencing.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, so that your perception of your body, is the experience of emotion, is emotion.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And that there's one pattern for each emotion. But here's the thing. William James actually said, that there's one bodily state for every instance of emotion that you feel. So when he said-
Jim Coan
For instance.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
He wasn't talking about types of emotion, or categories of emotion, he was talking about instances, or what philosophers would call tokens. What James was saying, was that when you feel angry because someone, you know, blocked your goals, or if you feel angry because you didn't get something you deserved, or if you are angry at your child, or if you're angry, you know, for whatever reason, that each-in each instance, where you feel something that anger feels different, you will have a different bodily state. So, when you are, and he actually has beautiful examples of this, but the idea of being afraid of a bear versus being afraid that you'll lose your lover versus being afraid, you know, that each of these fears is an instance, that isn't different from the other, you know? He has this great quote where he says, "anger doesn't exist in the entitative sense," which means it's not an entity. It's not a thing with an asset.
Jim Coan
Yeah, that's, that's, yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And so what, so how could it be that, and he goes on and on about how really idiotic it would be to assume that each emotion category has its own pattern, when it's so clear that there's all this variability, even within a single category. So how can it be that William James could be quoted as, and not only quoted, but that, you know, decades, almost half a century of science could be dictated by the exact opposite of what he said? Yeah, he's quoted as saying the exact opposite of what he actually said.
Jim Coan
In one context. But in the other context, he is saying that you should have this sort of bodily state. That's, that's... So if you already buy the story-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Listen, listen, listen, no one's ever saying that your body is doing random things. Right? Your body is no, that each instance has its own physical comportment.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But here's the thing. There was someone at that time, who said that each category has its own bodily pattern. That was Carl Lang.
Jim Coan
Uh huh. Right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
So whoever-
Jim Coan
James Lange theory...
Lisa Feldman Barrett
James Lange theory is like a Frankenstein theory. It's-It's like taking two theories that on the surface look the same, but in the details are saying the opposite thing and putting them together. So anyone who cites the James Lange theory of emotion has not read William James.
Jim Coan
Whoo! Wow.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And not only that, we, I actually go back into the history a little bit and I show who actually made that mistake first, and why did they make it and what does it have to do with our deep beliefs about human nature that would allow us to not only make this mistake, but actually perpetuate it in almost a century worth of science?
Jim Coan
This makes me a little nervous. You make me a little nervous. I'm a little-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Are you nervous, or are you interested and enthusiastic?
Jim Coan
Well, I think both right, and there we go. But isn't the brain and the study of the brain gonna save us from all of this stuff? Because once we once, we're able to really look at the functioning brain and get really fine grained at the level of what's controlling the body? Well, let me even back up a little bit from that. When-when I think about the diversity of bodily responses- you and I've talked about this before- it's, that diversity is probably accounted for by the fact that these different instances of anger, don't only have anger, per se to do as a thing to do. They have problems to solve in the environment, right? And the environment, these different these different versions of anger, entail different demands on you, and your body.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Absolutely. This is- well, you know, so, you know, think about what Obrist said -so this is a great physiologist in the 19 I guess, the 60s through the 80s, right? His point, it was an excellent point, was that the physical state of your body corresponds to either what action you are taking, or what action you are about to take. So when you shout in anger, when you smile in anger, when you sit quietly and seethe in anger, in each case, your body is doing something different, the physical systems of your body are in a different state, because your actions are different.
Jim Coan
Right, right. I think that's such an important thing.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
So the question then becomes, how is the brain, with, in-in combination with the body, creating these incredibly contextualized, highly variable instances of- anger let's say- how does it do that? And how is it that you, as the perceiver, are able to identify in other people, these highly variable instances, all as anger? That's the real mystery. That's the real question. And what I do in the book is I explain how. How is the brain able to do this? And it's not just a brain by itself, you know, it's a brain-
Jim Coan
It's a body.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-but it's also a brain in a body in the context of other brains in bodies. Right?
Jim Coan
Right, Of course! I mean, you don't have to tell me. I mean, this is my whole research program. But it's a brain that's sort of trying to anticipate what's going to happen and moving a body around.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly, exactly. And it turns out that if you look at research on anatomy, research on physiology, research on signal processing, electrical signal processing because, you know, neurons actually have an electrical aspect to them.
Jim Coan
Yeah,
Lisa Feldman Barrett
If you look at all of that evidence- having nothing to do with emotion, just the evidence itself, what you see-is that the brain actually is wired to predict, and it is wired to predict the body. And everything else that you do, that you feel that you see that you hear, is based on your brain's predictions about what the body needs to do.
Jim Coan
Right. And then feedback about how well it's done it.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly. And, I have to tell you that I'm an inherently skeptical person, as you know, I mean, we've known each other for a long time, right? So I don't believe anything, I sometimes don't even believe my own data, right? So the thing for me that was so compelling and I felt like it was okay for me to write this book, was that, do we know everything about how the brain predicts? No, absolutely not. Are there still some really interesting and important questions to be answered? Yes, absolutely there is. But the fact that you have all of these different literatures: anatomy, signal processing, physiology, I could go on.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And the fact brain imaging-
Jim Coan
Exercise physiology.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Oh, sure. Exactly. No, and the thing is that, and you keep coming across these ideas, again, and again, and again, and they don't know each other, these literatures.
Jim Coan
And they have different names.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
They have different names!
Jim Coan
There's free energy. There's, you know, Bayesian brain hypothesis, predictive coding...
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah. And so I was just reading, for example, these really nice papers by a neuroscientist named Danielle Bassett, who's at Penn- at University of Pennsylvania- and she's doing connectomics work. She's a physicist doing connectomics, where she's studying the connections between neurons in the brain. And she's- her evidence- which she doesn't connect it to prediction, she doesn't she doesn't do that. But when you read the evidence, you're like, "Oh, my God, this totally fits!" So I was just at a conference a couple of days ago in Pittsburgh... and though that crew, we just do fantastic work in health physiology. And sure enough, you know, there's the evidence.
Jim Coan
We call it- yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
So it's very, very... Do we know everything? No. Do we know enough to be able to say "the brain is not a reactive organ, it's a predictive organ. Your brain is using past experience to guess at the immediate future, which eventually becomes your present." Do we know that this is really happening? And I think the answer is we do. And understanding how the brain makes these guesses is the key to understanding how emotions are made, and not just emotions, but really every thought, every memory, every action that you take every perception that you have. The key is to understanding the brain's predictive dynamics.
Jim Coan
And its, and its ability to flexibly solve problems that it perceives in the enviornment.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right. And the really cool thing about a brain, as you know, is that brains are able to take bits and pieces of past experience and combine them in brand new ways.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
In neuroscience, we call this generativity, right? We have generative brains. So the idea is that our brain is running a generative internal model, it's using the past to predict the immediate future. Does it make one prediction at a time? No, it makes whole populations of predictions at a time it's making tons of guesses.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And then one of those guesses, or some small number, will be confirmed or corrected by the evidence from the outside world and from your body. Now, here's the really cool thing, which I talked about in my book. What's a concept?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
In cognitive science, a concept is a population of representations that are similar for some purpose. So a category is a collection of instances that are similar for some purpose. They don't have to necessarily look the same, or smell the same, or sound the same, they have to have the same function. Okay?
Jim Coan
Right, right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And a concept is a population of those things. So when the brain is generating a population of predictions about impending sensory-
Jim Coan
It's creating concepts.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
It's creating concepts.
Jim Coan
Shit!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Your brain-
Jim Coan
I never thought of it in those terms.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right. So that's-
Jim Coan
Super helpful for me. Thank you.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And because when the brain is anticipating sensory inputs in the next moment, so that it tries to guess what to do about them, it's not asking "What are these sensations?" It's asking "what are the sensations like relative to my past experience?" And so what it does, is it generates concepts on the fly. So when I asked you, "what's the concept of a bird?" or what's the concept of a bird, you might give me a list of features, right? That's because you're right then, it's not like you're reading off some static representation that you have of a bird, you're generating an instance, and you're telling me what the.. right? But if I say, "what's, what are the properties of a bird," and you and I were out in a park, you would say, you know, probably the properties that a robin has maybe or a sparrow. But if we were-
Jim Coan
It would queue you in that direction.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, but if you were hungry, and we were in a restaurant, and you said... and I said "what are the properties of a bird?"
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
You might say it roasts well!
Jim Coan
Chicken. Right, exactly.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
So. So the idea that your brain is generating- it's using past experience to generate predictions, concepts, as guesses about what's going to happen next, for the purposes of regulating your body. And. Because, you know, your brain starts to prepare your body for action before it needs to make those actions. And it's- so it's preparing a bunch of actions, and then it's waiting for information from the world, and from your own internal body to know which, which action to take. And your experiences are a consequence of that. So think about it for a minute. In our normal way of thinking about things, we think that there's a stimulus that we experience, which causes a reaction. But instead, what's happening, is based on the present moment, right now, your brain is making a guess about what actions it needs to take next. And based on that, you have perceptions.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
So perception follows action. It doesn't precede it.
Jim Coan
Because it combines prediction and feedback.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Correct.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
The stimulus- what we've always called the stimulus- is the feedback.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
It's the... right?
Jim Coan
That's absolutely right. Right, that's absolutely true. It's tough to keep in mind.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah.
Jim Coan
But it's, but it's important.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
It's tough to keep in mind, but it's super powerful. And I have to tell you, that-the, you know, my book so far has done very well.
Jim Coan
Good. Congratulations!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And I've got, no but I'm not-I'm not, thank you. But I'm not actually saying to brag. I'm making a point that I get emails almost on, well certainly on a weekly basis and sometimes on a daily basis, from people telling me that this book has changed their life.
Jim Coan
Really?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
The thing that they find really empowering, is understanding that they have a predicting brain.
Jim Coan
Ah, yeah. Super important.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
It explains to them not only some of the feelings and thoughts that they have, but it also, they understand that, that because your brain is predictive, your horizon of control over your own mental life is broadened quite significantly. And in the book I talk about ways in which this control is broadened and how you can be more effective as an architect of your own experience, now that you know, how the brain predicts. Does it mean that you can just snap your fingers and change how you feel in an instant? No, you can't, you never can.
Jim Coan
Right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Does it mean that, it will be easy for you now to regulate your thoughts or feelings? No, it's never easy, actually. But you do have many more options, to architecting your own life, then you might have thought. And I think that's the thing that people find powerful. They find it empowering and inspiring enough that they, that they write me emails about it.
Jim Coan
You know, you're reminding me again of the sort of the way in which what you're speaking about, from a conceptual point of view, is generalizable. And that is, in evolutionary approaches to talking about emotion or behavioral... behavior generally. One of the big influences on me in the last 10 years has been the discovery of Behavioral Ecology as a field and as an alternative in terms of evolutionary thinking to evolutionary psychology.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
So, absolutely right. And in this book, I actually also talk about how this view, which I have crafted... First of all, you know, I can't claim it's mine, I'm really, of course, I think I've added some innovations. But you know, but I'm getting together-
Jim Coan
You've been the center of it for a long time-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-I'm getting together a lot of ideas from a lot of people. But the point is that it's very consistent with evolutionary biology. It's very consistent with actually Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." So one of the things I talk about is how, you know, the classical view- you know, basic emotion view, some appraisal views, for those listeners who know something about emotion- is very, the views that are very consistent with Darwin's the experience of the emotions in man and animals are actually inconsistent with "On the Origin of Species," because Darwin actually contradicted himself in the two books, right? the view that I've put forward, the theory that I've put forward and I should say, when I say the word "theory" here, I don't mean the ideas, I mean, the ideas that are backed up by tremendous amounts of evidence- I'm using theory in a technical sense-
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-is very consistent with Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." It's specific with a number of conceptual innovations that he introduced in that book that don't appear actually-
Jim Coan
Because it's adaptationist.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly, exactly. It's very consistent with-with Behavioral Ecology.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And I talk a lot about about how this is the case, and why the average person should care that this is the case really.
Jim Coan
Because-because what's probably not going on, and we can, this might get us into the brain a little bit if we have time to do that, but is, is that we have evolutionarily derived modules that are just waiting for the on button to be pushed.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, yeah, right. So-
Jim Coan
Right? We're much more adaptable than that. And flexible than we, we are our design is for flexibility.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. So our design is not only for flexibility, though, it's- for sure that's necessary. But actually, our brains are designed for complexity. And what that means is not just like, "wow, this is super complex, complex," right? Complexity is the idea that your brain is a single structure of neurons.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right? It can take on a huge number of different states. So it's a huge information bearing structure. And not only that, but it's information gaining, it's information generating because it can combine the past, in, elements of the past in novel generative new ways, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But absolutely, so I should say too, that the idea that your brain is a-is a bunch of mental organs, each of which can be flipped on or off and pass information to each other like, you know, like in a relay race-
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
So you have a stimulus and that's perception then passes information to you know, cognition-
Jim Coan
I call it the billiard balls model.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, yeah. Or we call it in my lab, we call it blobology. The idea that, that your brain is a bunch of mental organs is-is false anatomically. And also, if that kind of a brain is too metabolically expensive.
Jim Coan
I would say so. I would, I would guess so.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
You just can't- so one of the major constraints-
Jim Coan
It's not efficient for sure
Lisa Feldman Barrett
No, exactly. But one of the major, one, this is to me it was a really cool thing to discover that one of the major, major constraints on brain evolution is metabolic efficiency.
Jim Coan
God! Totally!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right.
Jim Coan
And this is also very ecological. This is- because the, the organism has to manage its resources.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly.
Jim Coan
Resources are always flying out the door, flying out the door.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly. So, I don't know if you remember this, but a number of years ago, you and I had a conversation about using economics as a model for discussing the brain and nervous system, right? Th-the way to think about it- and this is something I talk about in my book- we have technical terms for these things, right? Like allostasis and so on.
Jim Coan
Right, right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But, but the-the way that I talk about it now is to say something like this, which I think you'll recognize from our prior discussions, right? That you think about your brain as the financial office of a company. And just like a financial office, just like a company has lots of different branches that it-it has to kind of balance its expenditures, and its revenue, you know, revenues. Your brain has to do the same thing. So your brain is kind of running a budget for your body. And it's making decisions about what to expend, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
In order to get revenues. What do we call that? We call that decision making, we call that motivation, we call that reward.
Jim Coan
Completely.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right? But it's always predictive. And sometimes it's predictive in the instance, like, I predict, my brain may predict that if I smile at you right now, you know, that you'll smile back. That there's a kind of, you know, I'll get a shot of opioids, you know, or oxytocin-
Jim Coan
If you're lucky!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
If I was lucky, and then that will be revenue. But sometimes our decisions are over longer terms, right? Where you're going to make investments, now, you're going to expend, right? So you're gonna maybe even let your body budget go into the red a little in order to get a bigger payoff later.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And we need certain neurochemicals to do that, right? Like serotonin. And if we don't have enough, we can't really do it.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And, you know, in economics, they talk about this as temporal discounting.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But this is essentially what-what the brain is doing. It's always running a budget. And we do allow our budgets to get into the red, sometimes.
Jim Coan
Sometimes because you have to.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Because you have to, but the expectation is that you will get the revenues correspondingly, because your brain- I always tell my husband this when he, you know, complains I've spent too much money on shoes- I say, "my brain is not metabolically frugal." I am, I am, I am not, you know, I'm frugal. I'm actually, my brain is very frugal. But your brain actually is really frugal. This is the reason why you don't learn everything. You can't predict everything about the current situation. And your brain doesn't learn everything that you haven't predicted, right? So, it doesn't, it can't pay attention to everything because that's metabolically frivolous. It's only going to learn the things that it predicts will be relevant for the body budget in the next... in the future.
Jim Coan
Yeah, one of the most exciting things I discovered when I started reading in Behavioral Ecology literature was the idea of the surplus. That biological organisms universally are designed to generate surplus.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, yeah. Even single-cell organisms.
Jim Coan
Because- I know it's incredible!
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, exactly. And so- but correspondingly, when your body budget gets in the red, if it gets too far in the red, or it's been in the red for too long, your brain will start to treat your body like it's sick.
Jim Coan
Right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Your immune system, your immune system gets involved, and then you really, if it goes on for long enough, you actually really will get sick.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
This is why though, that many of the physical symptoms, the physical sensations of illness are similar to the physical sensations of mood disorders because they are similar. At a physical level, they're similar. Their meaning isn't similar, necessarily. Or it might be... I mean, we, that's an open question. But the the physical properties of the sensations are the same.
Jim Coan
So interesting. You know, one of the things that I love about where you've gone with all of this stuff, is that... I think early, on when I was reading your work in the 90s and discussing it with people, there was this, there was this sort of idea that you were sort of anti-biology. That you were like, you know, that-this sort of social constructivism was kind of a quasi-political view that was, that was sort of a response to the genetic-ization of-of things in psychology or the biolog-izing of things and, and you haven'- You've proved that you've laid that to rest. This is you've, I really like the way, and I think it's been important for you, to have dug in so much in with the biology and really respect the true nature of the biology. The brain and the biology and what the biological systems are for-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Well, thank you.
Jim Coan
- and how they do that stuff.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
I will say this, that there's a stereotype, you know that- and I think it for a long time, the stereotype was probably reasonable- that the classical view was citing an evolutionary view. It was, I think it's the wrong evolutionary view. It's not Darwin's great innovations in "On the Origin of Species," but it's more essentialist ideas that are more Lamarckian.
Jim Coan
Yeah, interesting. Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But nonetheless, they labeled themselves as an evolutionary view, they pointed to, you know, what we now know to be a misunderstanding of William James-
Jim Coan
They asserted themselves as the real scientists.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, as the real scientists, and then construction was always social construction... or you know, psychological construction, which, which sort of was seen to ignore biology. And I think what this book does, is it- first of all- it integrates natural construction-constructivism, which is an approach to science, which integrates neuro construction, psychological construction, social construction, in a way that shows the biology of meaning-making. This book fundamentally is really about the biology and the evolutionary significance of the biology, of meaning-making. It's about the the physiological, you know, biological, not so much genetics, I do talk a little bit about genetics. But you know, the book is already 400 pages, you know-
Jim Coan
Yeah, can't do it all.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
You can't do it all. But that is, actually have a lot to say about-about genetics, it's just I didn't. my editor was like enough already. Enough, about the biological architecture that allows the brain to construct. And not just construct immediate experiences or direct action. But also, what is the biology of social construction? How it-what is happens to a little infant brain, you know, little infant brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a little brain that's born, waiting for wiring instructions, waiting, waiting for wiring instructions on how to wire itself.
Jim Coan
Right, interesting.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
To social- to its physical, and it's social circumstances. And so what does that mean actually? The biology of that, what does that mean for making comments about cultural variation or understanding how all of the phenomena that social constructivists- not all of it, but some of it- might be understood in biological terms? So, I will tell you that when-some of my most gratifying moments with this book are were when sociologists and/or anthropologists come up to me and say, "You just-you've just outlined the first plausible biological framework for understanding how construction works." And my most frustrating moments, are when, you know, like on Amazon, for example, most of the reviews are very positive, but they're a couple, you know, like one or two star reviews. And these folks say, "Oh, this is just another, you know, social construction book." And I'm thinking, "these people haven't read past the introduction, I think," because there are several chapters, plus an appendix, several appendices, 900 plus and notes, and then almost 1000 web nodes. Yeah, about the biology that undergirds any constructivist approach.
Jim Coan
Well, I tell you, I am so- I feel so lucky that somewhere in like, 2000- maybe it's 1999 even when I, I can't remember when I first met you is at a conference-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yeah, right. That's right. In Arizona.
Jim Coan
And we were both- what I discovered, I couldn't believe it- because I had grown up in this completely different set of assumptions about what emotion was and about the physiology of emotion in the neuroscience of motion. And I saw you as being in this utterly different camp. And I remember discovering at that conference that we thought very similarly about things and also learning that you were really thinking hard about measurement and measurement models and the assumptions under different measurement models. And having that moment, this is part of why I'm doing these! Because I had this moment where we talked, I remember, we sat down- we had to go to another room because we were really talking a lot about, what I would later call the emergent variable model, what you what... and Linux and you call, call it with the effects model. I have to make it more concrete somehow I can't deal with abstract terms.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Well we've been trying to figure out how to do that. You and I and people for like, I don't know, it since we talked about it all those years ago.
Jim Coan
Exactly. Right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
What's 20 years ago? Almost 20 years, yeah.
Jim Coan
Yeah, but what a generative, exciting conversation. And that's when I really started, like, it was like a walking around and seeing your work from a different perspective. And then pulling on the thread, little by little reading more and more of it and thinking, "oh, yeah, I gotta read this stuff. I got to know this stuff." And also realizing that I had the training in the materials to see what you're talking about already. I just had a worldview that was keeping it sort of blurry and out of view.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Well, it's so interesting that you say that- first of all, it's I, you know, I'm smiling as you're talking. I remember that, I remember very vividly that-
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-that set of interactions. And then when we reconnected a number of years later, when I came to Virginia, to give a talk. And so, a meeting of the minds is so, so satisfying in science. Particularly when you're talking to someone, you know, on the other side of some debate, right? You feel like you've achieved some mutual understanding. So it's very gratifying.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
But you know, what I... One of the things I talk about in the book, is why, thinking about why it is that the evidence has been there all along. That the classical view is-is seriously in doubt. But we've really clung to it. So at every era, in every era, where people have written about this classical view, there's always been evidence- whatever counted as evidence in that era-
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
-that, um, that the view is wrong, but yet the view is persisted across thousands of years. I'm not- this is not hyperbole, this is, you know, actual, this is actual fact, from the written record. Why would it be the case? And I think the answer, is that the classical view, is a theory of human nature. It's a particular theory of human nature that we get from ancient Greece, that we've tattooed onto the brain, you know, MacLean's triune brain- which we know to be, I mean, evolutionary biologists have known for a hundred years that that view is false, but yet it still persists. Oh, but it exists, and it-it lurks in all of psychological theory. You know, you know, the idea that cognition regulates emotion, the idea that we have system one and system two, the idea that we have an Ego and an Id, the idea that we have any dual process theory of any sort in psychology is also a remnant of this, this particular view of human nature. And it's a view of human nature, which is, you know, really culturally bound and not supported by the architecture of the nervous system. So, and I talk a lot about this in particular chapters in the book because I think it's important not just for understanding emotion, but it's under, it's important for understanding the law, you know? That it's embedded in our view of the law. It's embedded in our view of illness and treatment for illness, physical versus mental illness. The idea that your mind and- that your mind derives from your body is not a mystical statement. It is a biologically verifiable statement, you can actually point to the systems that, where the mind is constituted out of- not solely, but partially- information from the body.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And- but our particular western view of human nature, is really limited, you know, how we do science of the mind, and also our application of that science. And so, one of the things that I take on in the book, particularly in the final chapter, is instead of starting with mental categories that were bestowed to us by the ancient Greeks and asking, "Where do we find these in the brain? So where does attention live in the brain? Where does memory live in the brain? Where does anger live in the brain?" Let's start with the structure and function of the nervous system and ask what kind of human minds can a structure like this make make?
Jim Coan
Interesting.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
And maybe our theory of human nature should be adjusted, Instead of being the driver.
Jim Coan
Lisa Feldman Barrett, thank you so much for talking with me. This was, this was fabulous.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
My pleasure, thank you so much for having me on your podcast.
Jim Coan
All right.
Jim Coan
Okay, that's it. I am feeling really lucky, right now, that I get to do stuff like that. Just want everyone to know that my luck has not gone unnoticed. Thanks to my friend, Lisa Feldman Barrett for taking a little time out of her very busy schedule to just talk with me and for maintaining that laser focus that she does on the topic of emotion. Whew! That was something. Folks, you might be thinking at this point, you know, "well, my mind is blown and I want to learn more about this stuff," or something like that. So I'm gonna mention Lisa's book one more time befor we close. It's called "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" and it's from from Houghton Mifflin. I think it's Houghton Mifflin press. I don't really know how to pronounce that. But anyway, it' already out there in bookstores all over the place. So go get it! Okay? And, I also want to say the music on circle of Willis is written by Tom Stouffer and G Lee, and performed by their band the New Drakes. For information on how to purchase their music check out the about page at Circle of willis dot com. And don't don't forget that Circle of Willis is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and citizenship at the University of Virginia. And, and that Circle of Willis is a member of the TEEJ FM network. You can find out more about that, if you want, at Teej.fm. Also, if you liked this podcast, how about giving us a little review at iTunes? And letting us know how we're doing? It is very easy! Super easy, and we like it. Or you can send us an email by going to Circle of Willis podcast.com and clicking on the "Contact" tab. In any case, I'll see you all at episode six where I talk with social neuroscientists demigod John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago, about... just about everything! Including how science ought to be done, and why it's so important to have friends. Until then, bye bye.