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A | Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett. Doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is the chief scientific officer of the center of Law. Brain and behavior Doctor Baird is considered one of the top world experts in the study of emotions, and her laboratory has studied emotions using approaches both from the fields of psychology and neuroscience. Indeed, today you will learn about the neural circuits and the psychological underpinnings of what we call emotions. You will learn what emotions truly are and how to interpret different emotional states. You will also learn how emotions relate to things like motivation, consciousness, and affect. Affect is a term that refers to a more general state of brain and body that increases or decreases the probability that you will experience certain emotions. During today's discussion, Doctor Feldman Barrett also teaches us how to regulate our emotions effectively, as well as how to better interpret the emotional states of others. You will also learn about the powerful relationship that exists between our emotional states and the movement of our body. In fact, much of today's discussion is both practical and will be highly informative in terms of the mechanisms underlying emotions. And it is likely to also be surprising to you in a number of ways. It certainly was surprising to me. I've been a close follower of Doctor Feldman Barrett's work over many years now and have always found it to be tremendously informative. And when I say her work, I mean both her academic published papers as well as her public lectures that she's given, and her two fabulous books on emotions in the brain. The first one entitled how emotions are made, and the second book, which includes information about emotions, but extends beyond that, entitled seven and a half lessons about the brain. As you'll see from today's discussion, Doctor Feldman Barrett is not only extremely informed about the neuroscience and psychology of emotion, she's also fabulously good at teaching us that information in clear terms and in actionable ways. You'll also notice several times she pushes back on my questions, in some cases even telling me that my questions are ill posed. And I have to tell you that I was absolutely delighted that she did that, because you'll see that every time she did that, it was with the clear purpose of putting more specificity on the question and thereby more specificity and clarity on the answer, which of course, she delivers. By the end of today's discussion, you will have both a broad and a deep understanding of what emotions are and their origins in our brain and body. You will also have many practical tools with which to better understand and navigate emotional states, and moreover, you will have many practical tools in order to increase your levels of motivation and better understand your various states of consciousness. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium and potassium. The so called electrolytes and no sugar, salt, magnesium and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios, and we now know that even slight reductions in electrolyte concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science back to electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams. That's 1 gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electrolytes. And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if I've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element. That's lmnt.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelement lmnt.com dot Huberman Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, NiDRa sessions, and NSDR non sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app. Turned out to be the waking up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states, and that he liked it very much. So I gave the waking up app a try, and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations. And there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga Nidra and something similar to it called non sleep deep rest, or NSDR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even with just a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com huberman to access a free 30 day trial. And now for my discussion with doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett. Doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett, welcome. |
B | Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. |
A | I've wanted to talk to you for a very long time. I'd like to talk about emotions. I think everyone has a sense somehow of what an emotion is. Feeling happy, feeling sad, feeling excited, feeling curious, perhaps is even an emotion. I don't know. He'll tell us what are the core components? What are the sort of macronutrients of an emotion? Because I know there's a debate about whether or nothing we should be talking about emotions versus states, but what is an emotion? We all are familiar with what one feels like to us, but from a scientific perspective, how do you define an emotion? |
B | Well, this is a scientist debate about this. Nobody in the last 150 years has ever been able to agree on what an emotion is. And I think from my perspective, the interesting but tricky bit is that anytime you want to talk about what the basic building blocks are of emotion, none of those basic building blocks are specific to emotion. So, for example, there are a group of scientists who will tell you, well, an emotion is a coordinated response where you have a change in some physical state, a change in the brain, a change in the physical state, which leads you to make a particular facial expression. So you've got physiological changes in the body, changes in the brain, changes in the face or in motor movements. But that describes basically every moment of your life. Your face is always moving in some way. If it wasn't, you would look like an avatar, basically. So we're constantly engaged in movements, and those movements have to be coordinated with the physiological changes in the body, because whether we're in a state of that we would conventionally call emotion or not, because the physiology is supporting those, it's supporting the glucose and the oxygen and all the things that you need to make movements of your body. And, of course, all these movements are being coordinated by your brain. So, of course, there's a coordinated set of features that doesn't really describe how emotions are distinct from any other experience that you have. But the claim was for a really long time that there would be diagnostic patterns. So when something triggered fear, you would have an increase in heart rate, and you would have a propensity to run away or to freeze or not just to fall asleep, although that is something animals do when they are faced with a predator. But that's not part of the western stereotype for fear. So that wasn't what scientists were looking for. And also that you would make a particular facial expression, which was presumed to be the universal expression of fear, where you widen your eyes and you gasp, like that set of facial movements. In other cultures, like in melanesian culture, for example, is a symbol of threat. Where you are threatening someone, you are threatening them with aggression, basically, is a war face. But in western cultures, that's the face that western scientists believed was part of that distinctive pattern for fear. And so the way that scientists defined emotion for a long time was these kind of states where you'd see this diagnostic ensemble of signals. And that would mean that anytime someone showed one of those signals, they may move their face in a particular way or their heart increased at a particular time. You'd be able to diagnose them as being in a state of fear, as opposed to a state of anger or sadness or whatever. The empirical evidence just doesn't bear that out. And so it was kind of a mystery. The mystery is, how is it that you feel angry or sad or happy or I, you know, full of gratitude or awe? How is it that you experience these moments? But scientists can't find a single set of physical markers that correspond with each state distinctively. Right, in a way that you could tell them apart. That was a really big puzzle for a really long time. |
A | I have to ask you about this perhaps myth, perhaps truth about facial expressions and emotions, because as you were explaining, the core components of emotions. I had to think back to the classic textbook images of the different faces associated with fear, with delight, with confusion, and on and on. We will get to that. And your opinions on that? Scientifically informed opinions, of course. But there is a bit of a myth that the emotion system and the facial expression system run in both directions. For instance, people will say, if you smile, it's harder to feel sad or anxious. I can't say that's been my experience, but I very well could be wrong. So we know that when people's emotional states change, their facial expressions often will change, right. If you see someone crying on the street versus somebody smiling really big, we can make some assumptions about what might be going on internally for them. But put simply, is it true that changing one's facial expression can direct shifts in the brain and body, perhaps, that change our emotional states? |
B | If you'll permit me, what I would say is that your question is ill posed. So, first of all, it presumes that there's an emotion system and that there's a facial expression system. Now, clearly, there's a system for moving facial muscles, okay? But a movement is not the same as an expression. A movement is a movement. An expression is an interpretation of the meaning of a movement. Not all movements of the face are expressions. And this is a problem. It's a problem in science. It's often the case, I think, in my experience, in the science of emotion, but elsewhere, too, that scientists, in their efforts to make their work meaningful to people, will try to interpret their findings in ways that the average person would find interesting, or the way that a physician would find interesting, or a teacher or what have you to be able to use this information. But then they forget that they're actually making an interpretation, and they start to refer to their observations with the labels of interpretation. So facial movements are facial movements. People move their faces, and those movements have meaning, but they're not always to express an internal state. In fact, one might think that they're very rarely to express an internal state. So I don't know that there's a facial expression system, either. So that's. There's certainly, like I said, there is circuitry for moving a face, but what those movements mean is highly variable. And so that would be my second point, where I would say, when you see someone crying on the street, you are not looking only at their face. You might be aware that you're focusing on their face. That might be the part of the entire sensory ensemble that you are focusing your attention on, but your brain is taking in an entire ensemble of signals. As you know, it's taking in not just the movements of the face, the tears, or whatever. It's taking in all of the entire sensory array, the sounds, the smells, what's going on inside your own body. Your brain is being bombarded with signals from all of those sources. And when it's making a meaning out of any signal, it's doing it in an ensemble of signals. So, research shows that babies cries aren't acoustically specific to when they're tired or hungry or. Right. I can show you a video without context and show you someone crying. And you might make a judgment, you might think, make the stereotypic judgment in the west, oh, that person is sad. And then we pan out, and really, it's a little girl whose dad just came home from Iraq or something, right? Brains are always interpreting faces in context. They're making guesses. This is something that I've talked about quite a bit, that we don't read movements in people. We don't read emotions in facial expressions. We make inferences about the emotional meaning of facial movements, and we do it in an ensemble of other signals, the context, if you will. And that's really what's what's happening. So, do I think that there is feedback from the face to the brain? Sure. I mean, there's feedback from every muscle. But there's this constant conversation between the brain and the body. The brain is sending motor commands. The body has sensory surfaces which are sending signals back to the brain. If the face is influencing the brain, it's doing so in a way that's not special. It's doing it in a way that works for all other parts of your body, too. And I guess what I would say this kind of a long winded answer. But over time, your brain has learned that certain patterns of signal over time recur. And so if you're smiling, if your brain is telling your facial muscles to move in a particular way that looks like smiling, it's happening in a larger ensemble of signals. And then the brain is predicting what's going to happen next because it's learned over time what happens next. So probabilistically. So if you think about that as cause, then sure. But it's not this simplistic kind of idea that an emotion is triggered. It causes facial muscles to move in a particular way. And therefore, if you just pose your face in that particular arrangement, that will somehow feed back to the emotion system and change that system. There is no emotion system in your brain. And the causation just isn't that. It's not that simplistically mechanistic. |
A | That makes sense to me. I frankly never bought the idea that just smiling would make me feel happy, especially if my internal state was not one of happiness, like fighting the internal state. Also, in the early two thousands, I think it was, there was a lot of discussion about how positioning the body certain ways, taking up more space, would allow people to feel more powerful. And some of these studies and argued that there were even hormonal shifts associated with taking up more space that were associated with feelings of empowerment, and then when shrinking of oneself was associated with elevated cortisol states. And as I say all this, I want to be clear that I do not take a simplistic view of the nervous system or endocrine system. And I don't think that you were implying that either. Just want to make sure that anyone listening or watching isn't thinking. That, for instance, that cortisol is bad. Cortisol is wonderful and essential. You just need it regulated properly. Or that the idea that the body and emotional states are inextricably linked makes a ton of sense to me. But the idea that you could just grab onto one of the nodes in. Now I have to be careful not to say motion system, position of the body. Like, being hunched over makes you depressed? No, that never made sense to me. Taking up more space makes you feel more powerful. That doesn't. It can't be that way. And yet we were told for about a decade, especially through popular press, that this stuff was true. And so what I love about your work is that it includes a neuroanatomical, a psychological, a network perspective, that there isn't one seat of emotions, and so on. So if we could go a little bit further into the facial expression piece for a moment. |
B | Sure. |
A | I was taught in my psychology and neuroscience textbooks, because it was right there in front of me, that there were some core categories of facial expression that were universal across cultures, that conveyed something about the internal state of the person, that the downward lips in the corner and maybe even a furrowing of the brow was associated with negative valence states like sadness, perhaps even depression. That the opposite of upward turned corners of the mouth and widening of the eyes was delight and excitement. Some of that feels pretty true to my experience. But how do you and other serious scientists of emotions view that? Somewhat classic literature now? |
B | Yeah. So I'll just say that my journey here, my scientific journey, was not one of attempting to overturn a century's worth of. Are we allowed to swear? Bullshit. Basically, I mean, it's just. It's like. It's basically western stereotypes enshrined as scientific fact. And that sounds like a pretty harsh thing to say, but I think I pretty much stand by that at this point. But for me, when I was a graduate student, when I was an undergraduate in psychology and in physiology and in anthropology, I also had read that Darwin said that there were these distinctive facial expressions that were coordinated with specific emotional states, the specific states of the nervous system. This was Darwin's view. And I assumed it was correct until I started to try to use that information in the lab and everything fell apart. So when you show someone in a laboratory, like a student or somebody from the community, a face, a disembodied face, where the person's eyes are widened in the face and they're gasping like a stereotypic fear expression, most of the time, they don't know what it is. And so I would try to use these faces as stimuli and experiments, and they weren't working the way that they were supposed to work. There were really going all the way back to the beginning of psychology. There were always debates about whether or not this was actually accurate. And there's a really interesting story about how Darwin came to this idea, which I can tell you about, but it's not because he cared about emotion. And he was basically taking his own very western views about emotion to make some claims about evolution, actually. So I have more to say about that and about why it's a problem to take anything that anybody said, even Darwin, from 150 or so years ago, or whatever it is, and treat it like it's a modern text he was writing at a particular time for a particular purpose. And that doesn't necessarily mean that whatever he wrote is true. But I'll just tell you what the evidence says that there has been in psychology, a debate, really vicious debate, actually, for probably 50 years, about the nature of facial expressions and whether they're universal and whether there's this one to one correspondence between a particular face and, like, a facial configuration in a particular emotional state, smiling in happiness, scowling in anger, wrinkling your nose in disgust. And so in 2016, I think the association for Psychological Science tasked me and some other senior scientists with attempting to write a white paper, a consensus paper, on what the literature actually shows. So what does the research actually show? If you read all the research, you know, can you find a pattern there? Does it actually reveal anything about whether or not facial expressions are universal, particularly for emotion? And the way they do this, they have a journal for this purpose, for taking a widely held belief that is highly debated and bringing together a panel of experts who disagree with each other at the outset. And they have to work together to see if they can come to consensus over the data. And this is something that people have tried in the past. And, I mean, they're really vicious. People have been vicious with each other over this question. So when we brought together a group of people. So several people refused to serve, senior scientists refused to serve on this panel. |
A | But out of fear of losing their funding or something, you know, that's a. |
B | Whole other conversation about why certain scientists would not want to engage with people who disagree with them. That's an interesting conversation to have, but I don't think it's as simple, actually, as just they're careerist or they care about their money or funding or whatever. That would be an easy answer, but I don't actually think that's what's going on. But that's another sort of. But anyway, so there were five of us who got together, all senior scientists, all from different fields. Some of us hadn't met each other before. We all knew of each other, of course, and we met over Zoom for two and a half years. This is pre Covid because people were all over the world, right? And we read over 1000 papers. So I was the only one in this group of the five of us who. My starting hypothesis was that facial movements are meaningful, but there's no one to one correspondence between a particular facial configuration, like a scowl and anger. Not just that it would vary across cultures, but that it varies for you across situations. I mean, do you scowl every time you're angry? I don't scowl every time I'm angry, in fact. And I also scowl at times when I'm not angry. And there are scientific reasons to think that the collection of facial expressions that people make when they're angry or when they're sad or whatever, would be highly variable. So that was my starting position. And then there were varying the four guys. So there was. I just referred them as the guys because it was me and four guys and the guys. They all to some extent thought that facial expressions were universal, but they had differing reasons for hypothesizing that. And they also had different commitments, degrees of commitment to that position. But we, right off the bat, sort of agreed that it didn't matter who was right. That was just not relevant. The only thing that mattered was that we could come to the consensus over the data. And if we couldn't, we had to really pinpoint why, like, so what would be the critical experiments that would have to be done in order for us to come to consensus over the data? And we also agreed that we had all kinds of contingencies set up. So, you know, you've got five senior people who are all running big labs, and theyre investing upwards of three years working on a paper. So if we cant come to consensus, what are we going to do? Are we going to write one paper and sort of write about the process, or are we going to write separate papers? But we had all these contingencies laid out. But the key here, I think, is that we agreed that we were not going to be adversarial about it because it didnt matter who was right. And, in fact, if somebody had to admit they were wrong and someone was going to have to admit they were wrong, it turns out all of us were wrong about something. We were going to be, like, supportive of each other and really encourage each other, because being wrong, no one likes to be wrong, but for scientists to admit they're wrong is hard, and it's something that we should encourage each other to do, I think, more and more publicly. And I think the people who do that are really brave. And so that was my position, and they all agreed. And the long story short here is that two and a half years, a thousand papers later, we all very reasonably came to consensus that there was no evidence for facial expressions of emotion being universal, and that instead, what there's clear evidence of is that facial expressions, the way that people move their faces in moments of expression, is highly variable, meaning sometimes in anger, you scowl. Meta analyses so statistical summaries of many, many, many studies, even in the west, show that people scowl about 35% of the time when they're angry, which is more than chance. So it gets you a good publication in the proceedings of the National Academy. But that means 65% of the time, people are moving their faces in other meaningful ways. That's not scowling. So if you actually used a scowl, or even a scowl in blood pressure, or just maybe not one signal, but a couple signals, but you would be wrong more than half the time. You would miss more than half the cases. Even more importantly, I think that's the reliability question. So there's low reliability for the correspondence between a scowl and anger. It's above chance. So scowling is one expression of anger, but it's certainly not the dominant one, and there is no dominant one. It's just highly variable depending on the situation that you're in. So sometimes when I'm angry. I sit quietly and plot the demise of my enemy. You know, sometimes I smile in anger. Sometimes I cry in anger. It really depends on the situation. But more importantly, half of the scowls that people make are not related to anger. That means that the specificity is, again, higher than chance, but not that much higher than chance. So if you see someone scowling, the chances are that they might not be angry. They might be concentrating really hard, or they might have gas. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why people make a scowl. And we found this for every emotion category that had ever been studied. And I want you to notice what I just did there. I'm no longer referring to an emotion as if it's an entity or a thing. So anger isn't one thing. It's a category of things, a grouping of things. |
A | And if I'm not mistaken, it includes verbs. Right, like anger as a set of verb actions in the brain and body. |
B | Yes. |
A | It's a process. It's not an event. |
B | Exactly. It's not a noun. It's a verb, and it's a process. But the point is that it's a highly variable grouping of instances. If you are talking about all instances of anger, all instances of anger that you have ever experienced or witnessed is a highly variable grouping of instances that vary. That doesn't mean they're random. But what the body does in anger depends on what the physical movements will be in anger, and that depends on the situation that you're in and what your goal is. And there are ways to talk about that in neuroscience terms, which are a little more precise. But the important thing to understand here, I think, is that we're only talking about western cultures. Now, the minute that you go outside of the west or even to the east, there are other cultures that have been studied, like China and cultures in China, in Japan, in Korea. They all have access to knowledge about western cultural practice as a norm. So what happens when you go to remote cultures, which have much less access? It's not like they have no access, because we live in a globalized world. So even hunter gatherers in Tanzania, the hadza, have access to western practices and norms, but much less, much less. And we did do that, and all bets are off there. I mean, most of the time, they don't even understand or experience facial movements as having anything to do with emotion. |
A | So if they saw an emoji of a smiley face, would they just assume it was a couple? They might think it's a face, because as we both know, there's some fairly hardwired brain circuitry for the two eyes and a line beneath it and something in the middle that's pseudo nose. That organization of just spatial features cues up face for both, for most privates, including. |
B | Interesting that you say that, because, yes, of course that's true, but it's not there at birth. What's there at birth is a preference for that configuration, right? So it's like, there's some. And we could talk about why that's there. It's actually very controversial. But what babies, what newborns orient to, they orient to that, or they orient to that configuration, but it doesn't have to be a face. And then very quickly, they start learning faces because they're exposed to. I mean, really, the first three months of life is almost like a massive continuous tutorial on what faces are, because they're, you know, being fed and everyone's in your face. |
A | A baby last night, and you see the baby. Friends of mine have an unbelievably cute baby with big cheeks, and you want. And there's this desire to see the baby smile, right? So you do the things that. And if the baby shows some sort of facial expression that makes it seem like it's a little bit of like, resisting what you're doing, you stop doing it. You change up your strategy. And then when baby cracks a smile, like now, I'm going to assume that the baby may or may not have been happy inside that little baby head, but when they do, there's a reciprocity, then we smile. And so there's a template that's very robust. |
B | Right. But I want you to notice, though, that. So first of all, I'm not saying that recognizing a face as a face is not hardwired. It is, but it's hardwired by. Not by genes alone. Right? And in fact, there's a really wonderful book called not by genes alone. Basically, there's cultural inheritance. We have the kind of nature that requires nurture. We have the kind of genes that require early learning. We need wiring instructions from the world to get the rest of the information that we need to be competent, culturally competent in our lives. And that starts at birth. It probably starts before birth even. But in the third trimester, there's some evidence of learning, fetal learning, even in the third trimester. So the point is not that people aren't hardwired for viewing faces or recognizing faces. It's just, where does that hardwiring come from? It's not by genes alone. Genes aren't the blueprint. The brain is expecting certain inputs from the world, and it needs that because infant brains are wiring themselves to their world. And part of that world is people making faces at them and smiling. And those people happen to also be the ones who are maintaining that baby's nervous system. I mean, there is reward learning, right, or reinforcement learning right off the bat, because these are the people who keep you comfortable. They are the ones who feed you, they're the ones who help you get to sleep and so on and so forth. And so you're going to be very, very sensitive to changes in the contingencies of their behavior. Your brain, as a pattern learner is just going to learn those patterns. If we know that smiling, smiling is a cue for happiness, it's because we've learned it. And that doesn't mean that that learning isn't hardwired. It just means that that information got into your brain by cultural inheritance, which is a part of evolutionary theory in the extended evolutionary synthesis, not in the original, you know, not in the original formulation that some people still kind of stick to. |
A | I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic greens. Athletic greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens, and the reason I still take athletic greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com Huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, etcetera. And they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D, three, k, two. Again, that's athleticgreens.com Huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D, three, k, two. So it's far more nuanced than it was presented to me in those textbooks and it sounds like it was outright wrong on many dimensions. |
B | Well, can I just mention one thing though, please? This is really serious stuff. Like sometimes people think, well, what's the big deal? This is such a big deal. Ill tell you why its a big deal. Because in our culture, people believe that they can read mental states of other people by their face, and they believe it so much that its enshrined in the legal system. And there are people who lose their lives because juries believe that they can read remorse or the lack of it. And in fact, there was just a case, you know, last year, I believe, where, you know, the innocence project got involved because there was a woman who was on death row and what put her on death row was a police officers claim that he could read her emotions by her, the comportment of her face and her body. And, you know, it was possible to get a stay of execution so that she could be retried. And, you know, so I'm not saying she was guilty or not guilty. I'm just saying what put her on death row was evidence that would not be admissible in a scientific way now. And there are lots of cases where judgments are made that end up impacting people's lives in pretty serious ways. So this is a really serious thing. And it's puzzling to me why it's got such traction. This idea that there are these universal expressions that we can use to read each other. It's just not true. I mean, the science just. It's so overwhelmingly. I feel like, you know, scientists, I don't like to use the t word, you know, the f word fact. You know, it's a scary word, t word, truth. But I think in this case, I feel like I can. I can really, at least with a little t, I can use it. You probably have particular facial movements that you make on a regular basis that are tells for you. I know I do. You know, my husband can look at my actions and he can make really decent guesses about what's going on for me upstairs. Right. But that's because he's known me for 30 years, actually, 30 years today. I should just say congratulations, met each other 30 years ago today. But he's, you know, brains are pattern learners. So I'm not saying that everything is random and that there's no, it's all noise. I'm saying that there just aren't these, you know, universal templates. They just. It's not like that. And we really have to stop assuming that there are. |
A | Well, I'm so glad that you're getting that message out there, and I'm very thankful that you highlighted the seriousness of these myths that have propagated. And that's a perfect segue into what I was already going to ask, which is, it's based on something that I think is in very much agreement with what you're saying. A previous guest on this podcast, I think it was our first guest episode, Doctor Carl Dysroth, colleague of mine at Stanford, incredible bioengineer, really zero, 1% in his category of science, as well as a practicing psychiatrist, said something which really stuck with me over the years, which I once heard him say, we don't really know how other people feel at all. In fact, most of the time, we don't even know how we feel. And that prompted the question for me about how good or poor are we at gauging our own emotional states, and in particular at labeling them both to others and for ourselves? And so here's the direct question. Is language sufficient to capture this incredibly complex thing that we're calling emotions? So, for instance, the other day, I was in New York with my sister. Then she left. I went out for a bit. I was having a pretty good day. And then I returned to the place where I was staying, and I was hit with this feeling of intense loneliness, and I don't know why. And then I had a bunch of ideas about how that related to growing up. But I was going to see friends the next day, and I'm an adult, and so I could use some top down regulation and say, oh, maybe I'm a little tired, or I didn't because I hadn't slept as well the night before. I've been pretty rested recently. And then I actually wrote in my journal, I said, maybe most of feeling good is being pretty well rested and not in any physical pain. That's a big part of feeling good, is the absence of fatigue and the absence of physical pain. And then I thought, wow, that's just so basic. There's two building blocks. It's clearly insufficient. But then I couldn't think of a word to adequately describe the emotion. That came about an hour later when I was feeling a little bit better, but not completely better. So was I lonely? Not really. Not anymore. Was I sad? Not really. But as I headed out into the city, I was thinking, I don't really have a word for how I feel. I'm sort of okay, not great, not low. And so I think that we have emotional labels. I certainly do for peaks these peak emotional states. Super happy. I loved the time with my sister. We do this every year. This was a particularly good year for us to do this, and it went really well. We were texting back and forth how great it was. I certainly know what it feels like to be really down in the pits. I've got language for that, but then there's this huge range in between. And so I guess the simple question is, should we even trust language as a way to understand how we're feeling, or are there additional, if not better, signals that we should perhaps learn to elaborate our understanding of emotions with? |
B | So I'm going to give you a simple answer, and then I'm going to give you a more complicated answer. So the simple answer is, no, language is not sufficient, period. I think the way that you have, well, I should say one language is not sufficient. So English is not sufficient. And probably French on its own is not sufficient, and probably Swahili on its own is not sufficient. Although it's very interesting that the states that we mark with words in each culture, some of them overlap, but a lot of them don't. And it's very, very useful to have labels of emotion concepts from other cultures that capture configurations or a state that we don't really mark. We don't mark those and, and sort of distinctively pull them out as different from other states. |
A | I'd love to know what some of those are. |
B | Oh, I should have brought them with me. I mean, there are some, like, there's a german word which I can't remember the name of the word, but it's like the experience of someone having a face that deserves a punch. |
A | I'm sure someone will tell us in the comments, someone who knows German or spend time there. Please put that word in the comments, but don't punch anyone. |
B | Another one that's my favorite is Ligut, which is a polynesian headhunting emotion word, and it means exuberant aggression in a group like soccer or headhunting, where you're basically, or I should say, also in the military. So when I was listening to NPR one day a couple of years ago, must have been more than that because it's in my book. So it was probably more than seven years ago I was listening to these guys talk, these former military personnel talk about being deployed in a war where they're with their buddies and they're basically hunting the enemy. And they feel exuberant, like they're, you know, and they're, it's not that they're happy, but they're it's pleasant, and it's very intense, very high arousal, you know? And in the moment, it seemed right. And then they come back, you know, and they ask themselves, like, they come back. And so they're. Now, you know, their deployments ended. Now they're back home, and they're like, am I a psychopath? Like, I enjoy killing people? What is this about? And I was thinking, no, no, you just experienced ligut. And if you had a word for it, you would understand that it's a groupy feeling where you're all in it together. And it's really intense. And, you know, they were experiencing the intensity of having their life on the line and being responsible for their. For their brothers, you know, and sisters in their troop. So what they would realize is it's perfectly within the range of normal human variation. It's just that in English, we don't have a word for it, really. But there are words that are concepts in other languages, right. Or the other one that I like is called geagol, which is where when you see a baby who's really cute and you just want to like, oh. |
A | I had that experience yesterday evening. Squeeze. The kid was so cute. His cheeks are just, like, jumping at you. And. Yeah, and the parents are delightful people, too. And Dave was just facing out. Cause they have one of those outward facing baby things, and it's just sort of like. Yeah. |
B | And I think it's called gigol. |
A | Giggle. Oh, giggles is from the other episode that we did on babies, but, yeah. |
B | In a different way. Or there's one in Japan. I think there's a japanese word for the despair that you feel when you got a bad haircut. |
A | Really? |
B | Yeah. Cause it's. I mean, it really is a different kind of feeling than, you know. Cause you've gotta, like, wait for it to grow, you know, whatever. Anyways, the point being that words for us mark particular states, and they're not always the states that other people in other cultures care about. But there's a. But even again, the phrasing of your question I just wanna come back to. And I'm not trying to pick at. |
A | You, but feel free. What I love. Is that what you said before, when you said my question was ill posed in the answer that followed, it made it very clear why. And I learned something about how the not emotion system, but the things plural, that create emotions work. So feel free. I grew up in the same culture that you did. I'm not canadian by birth, but in the academic culture, the stuff that we take online, by the way, folks, is nothing compared to the kind of hazing that I experienced growing up in academic culture as it was done then. I don't know if it's still that way now. So feel free. I'm tougher than I look. |
B | Well, no, but I think my point is that I'm trying to get at here is that when we ask questions, any of us. Me too. Anybody asks a question, there are certain assumptions that we're making in order to allow us to pose the question. And sometimes what I'm taking issue with is not the question itself, but it's the assumptions behind the question. Right. And this is a very classic thing in philosophy of science, which I know I just said the p word philosophy, which scientists, usually, they roll their eyes back in their head and fall over when you talk about that. But I think it's really important. So is language sufficient to label or to. To gauge emotional states? Kind of sounds like. And this is the assumption that people make, that there's a state in here called an emotion. And now I have to label it. I have to identify it. That is not how it works. Like, that is not what your brain is doing at all. And in order to explain what I think is happening and what I. My best available guess, you know, like, based on what I understand, it's like, not even remotely. That is just not a meaningful question at all. I do think words are important. I just don't think that they have to be insufficient by virtue of what the brain is actually doing. And the way that I come at this is just really different from a lot of my colleagues. So really, for 100 years at least. I hate when people say things like that, like, for 100 years. But it really is for 100 years at least. What psychologists and neuroscientists do or did and are still doing is they start with a folk experience, a folk category, a common sense experience. I feel angry. I'm making a decision, having a memory. I'm remembering something. They start with their experience, and then they go looking for the physical basis of that experience in the brain or in the body. I think that's really problematic because not everybody in the world actually uses those categories or has those experiences. |
A | A lot of that has to do with the scientific publication process. One of the most important statements I ever heard is from the late Ted Jones, one of the greatest neuroanatomists of probably the last 500 years, which was the following. He said, a drug is a substance that when injected into an animal or a person, produces a scientific paper. And in many ways, yeah, it kind of gets you square in the face. Can you go, oh, right. I mean, basically, every drug disrupts if taken an hour or two before sleep changes the amount of rem sleep that you get. So I could imagine that almost any perturbation of the language system, the body, the facial movement system, could give you a quote, unquote effect that you could write a paper about. But that doesn't mean it has any semblance whatsoever to what's happening in the world when we or other people experience emotions. |
B | And here's the. You know, there's so much in what you said that I just want to. It's very exciting to talk to you. So the first thing I'll say is that, you know, we often will identify we as in the, you know, people, but also scientists identify biological signals by what we believe them to mean psychologically. So serotonin is a happiness chemical? No. Serotonin evolved as a metabolic regulator. It is a metabolic regulator. And whatever it's doing, it's allowing an animal to spend resources when the animal's brain isn't sure there's a reward at the end of that. You were saying before, the absence of fatigue, the absence of discomfort, that's a pleasant feeling. Well, yeah, maybe serotonin has something to do with pleasantness because it has something to do with energetics. Cortisol. Cortisol is on a stress hormone. It's not a stress hormone. I mean, it's a hormone that is secreted more. When the brain believes that there is a big metabolic outlay that's required, that's what stress is. Basically. It's. The brain believes there's a big metabolic outlay that's about to be required. And it matters. These kind of, like, little semantic tweaks, like, they matter a lot because of how we do. Because of how we do research. So I would say I don't start with the categories that derive from English and my own experience. I start with the nervous system. I try to learn what is the best available evidence for how that nervous system evolved, how it developed, how it structured. Anatomy, to me, is very important. Some of my best hypotheses come from just learning the anatomy and realizing, oh, there's a connection there that's direct. That should mean something. I mean, I could give you lots of examples of where we've made discoveries solely because we noticed a set of anatomical connections, and we're really curious about what they might be involved with. But if you start with that premise, then you think about the brain, and I think about the brain a really different way. Right? So I don't think about the brain as a stimulus driven organization. I think about it more like this, that the brain is, first of all, the brain is not running a model or making inferences about the world. All the brain knows are signals from the sensory surfaces of its body. So your brain is modeling your retina, and it's modeling your cochlea, and it's modeling the sensory surfaces of the skin. And sure, signals hit those surfaces, and those surfaces transduce those signals and send them up to the brain. But the brain only knows the body. And anything it knows about the world, it knows about the world through the body, through the sensory surfaces of the body. So that's the first, for me, really big important point. The second important point is that I think about the brain as being trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull. You know, and it's so weird saying these things to you. You're so much, you know, you're like, you're this really esteemed, like, neuroscientist. And here I am explaining to you how I think the brain works. It's just very, you know, well, it's. |
A | Important for our audience, but it's also important for me. Even though, yes, I know these facts, I believe it's always informative to go back to the fundamentals because we forget. Actually, I would say that someone once described, I'll call him the great cause. He's a great visual neuroscientist. Visual neuroscientist Tony Moffschen, who founded the department of neuroscience at NYU, once said, a real intellectual is somebody that can appreciate and work with a topic at multiple levels of granularity. |
B | For sure. |
A | The more expertise is associated with more focus on detail. So I love returning to the core basics. So I think it's wonderful. Please continue. |
B | So I think about the brain as being trapped in this box, and it's receiving signals continuously from the sensory surfaces of the body. But those signals are the outcomes of some set of changes, and the brain doesn't know what the changes are. It doesn't know the causes of those signals. It just knows the outcomes. It knows the signals. That's what it's receiving. And so it has to guess at what the causes of those signals are in order to stay alive. And so that's, in philosophy, called an inverse problem. So the brain just has a massive, continuous inverse problem that it has to deal with all the time. |
A | It doesn't have access to all the information. No, it's just a guessing machine. |
B | It's a guessing machine. So, for example, you know, if you hear a loud bang, what is that loud bang? It could be a car door slamming. It could be thunder. It could be a car backfiring. It could be a gunshot. The brain doesn't know. It has to guess. And it's not making a guess like an intellectual guess. The guess is a motor plan. It's a plan for changing the internal state of the body in order to support motor, skeletal motor movements. Do I need to run? Do I need to shut the window? Do I need to get an umbrella? Do I need to hold my breath because the car is backfired? What do I need to do? So where does that plan come from? Well, it comes from past experience, the experience that's been wired into the brain. But I think that the evidence suggests that what the brain is doing is basically reinstating bits and pieces of past experience. So, remembering, although we don't experience ourselves as remembering, but basically, it's re implementing ensembles of signals from the past that are similar to the present in some way. Now, a bunch of things which are similar to each other in psychology, is a category. So what the brain is doing is it's constructing a category. And, in fact, we think about the brain as a continuous category constructor. It's constructing a category of possible futures, possible outcomes, possible motorhouse plans. And how does it know which is the right one? Because it's not just picking one. There's going to be some sample that it's re implementing. But how does it know which one? Which is the right one? Because there can only be one. |
A | Well, I feel like in the example of a loud noise, what I immediately thought of as you were describing that is that my system would become aware of it. I would become aware of it. But then it's a question of, is there another loud noise? How closely are those loud noises spaced? Is it getting louder or less loud? So, a bunch of categories. It's like a bookshelf with an infinite number of books. But then with the second loud noise, now it's just one wing of the library. And then with the next thing that happens in the context, it starts narrowing. And then pretty soon, you get presented with the book that says the roof is about to cave in. |
B | And I think your analogy there is pointing out toothache. One is that really what the brain is attempting to do is to reduce uncertainty, because uncertainty is super expensive. Now, sometimes we deliberately cultivate uncertainty. We deliberately try to learn things that we don't know. We put ourselves in novel situations. We seek novelty because it's fun and interesting and whatever. Sure. But imagine every single waking moment of your life was like that, where you didn't know, you couldn't narrow things down from the library to the wing to the bookshelf to the, you know, to the particular shelf on that bookshelf to the. It'd be terrifying. Yeah, it would be terrifying. Yeah, it would be. |
A | That's the label I would give it. It would be terrifying. |
B | Right. |
A | Because I couldn't plan anything or do anything because all possibilities are open, right? |
B | And it's just actually metabolically unsustainable. And there are some brains that are wired in a way that they don't predict very well. They don't create these categories very well. And so they're dealing with really unbelievable amounts of uncertainty. So that's one thing. That part of what's the goal here, if you could say there's a goal, is to reduce uncertainty. And I'm going to get to why this has anything to do with emotion in a minute, but I just need to set up the ground rules or the assumptions of what I'm working with here. The other thing, though, that you pointed out, which I think is really important, is that none of this is static. It's all evolving over time. The signals are evolving over time. Both the signals that are constantly hitting the sensory surfaces of the body and making their way to the brain, but also the intrinsic signals in the brain. It's all changing over time. So when we talk about context, that's important. How is the brain making a decision about similarity? Like, what are the features that are similar? It's not just at a single snapshot in time. It's always happening dynamically over time. Most of the time, though, you don't wait to hear a second sound. You're not deliberately attempting to figure out what the sound is. Your brain is just sorting it out, right? And it's sorting it out by narrowing down the possibilities. And there are some selection mechanisms in the brain that help it guess better. But also the signals coming from the world are also helping to select which possibility is the right one. |
A | There's this scene that comes to mind from that movie, I think it was saving Private Ryan, where the guys that are about to hit the ground on D Day are flinching with every crack of gunfire. Everything's a stimulus to move. And then some of the more seasoned soldiers are literally having bullets whizzing by their head, and people are dropping dead all around them and they're moving forward, steely eyed and stable. And upright. And in part, we look at that and say, okay, they're courageous, they're seasoned. Maybe they're desensitized in certain ways, but actually it fits much better with the idea. Based on what you're saying, it fits much better with the idea that they have intimate knowledge, both conscious and unconscious knowledge that something right next to them is a threat, but not a threat worth responding to. |
B | Right, exactly. |
A | But if it were headed straight for them, they would quite, quite understand. |
B | What I would say is that it's not. I keep referring to things as signals, and really, that's my generic word for a quantity of energy of some sort. Your brain, my brain, every brain is constantly making signal noise distinct, you know, like distinctions. Do I need to care about this? Do I, do I not need to care about this? Right. And we have ways of learning, and we also have ways of cueing each other. So, you know, humans use eye gaze to cue each other about what is signal and what is noise. Right. So if you and I were sitting, let's say we were at a coffee shop and we were in a part of town that I had never been to before, and we were sitting having coffee, and a loud siren went by. If you turned and looked, I would probably turn and look because you just cued me that that was something I need to care about. If you ignored it, I would probably ignore it because you just cued me that I didn't need to worry about it. I didn't need to care. And we're constantly doing that with each other. And we also do it with little babies and with kids, and that's how we teach children. This is signal. This is noise. This you need to worry about. This you can ignore. And so, yeah, your description is perfect. So what does this have to do, any of this have to do with emotion? In order to answer that part of the question, I want to say so, okay, you've got these signals. The brain has these electrical signals going on. We'll just ignore the hormonal signals for the moment because that's complicated. One is complicated. So it's got all these electrical signals going on when it's remembering something. It's just basically reinstating a pattern of signals. And it's got these signals coming in from the sensory surfaces. Okay, so what's, so what is the brain doing? It's a signal processor. So what is it? I don't mean a computer. I mean a signal processor in the engineering sense. So what's it. What is it doing? Without getting into all the dynamics of prediction. And, you know, whatever what the brain is doing is, it's assembling a set of features. Some of the features that it's assembling are very close in detail to the sensory surfaces of the body. So in primary visual cortex, there's a retinotopic map. The details there are very, very low level, like a line, an edge, you know, same thing in primary auditory cortex. Right? It's tonotopic, so there are tones, but it's very, very, very low level details. And we might. There are many, many, many of these little features. So we would say it's a high dimensional array, lots and lots and lots and lots of features. And let's just talk about one structure, just the cerebral cortex. Let's not worry about just. But what I'm about to say is basically true of, really, the rest of the brain as well. If you take the cortex off the surface, the cortical sheet, off that wavy, you know, cortical sheet, you take it off the rest of the brain, the subcortical parts, and you stretch it out like a napkin. You can see there's a compression gradient there in the architecture of the neurons. So at the primary sensory areas, there are these tiny little pyramidal neurons that are representing these very low level features, and they feed into bigger neurons, which feed into bigger neurons, which feed into more bigger neurons. So what's happening is you've got this very detailed array being compressed in its dimensionality until you get to the middle of the brain at the front, where there are many fewer neurons, but they're bigger and they have many more connections. So it's a dimensionality reduction that's happening. |
A | So just to make sure I understand correctly and that the audience understands, the physical world obviously is transformed by our sensory apparati, the retina, the cochlea, the sensing neurons in our skin. It's physical things, mechanical pressure, light, photons, sound waves, okay? That's translated into neural code, which is chemical and electrical. And those sensory inputs are fairly vast high dimensionality. So lots of different orientations of lines, even. Even though it originates with just three cone photo pigments, lots of opportunity for encoding different shades of color, contrast, and all of that. And so you have lots of little neurons to represent all the possibilities of the physical world that are occurring. But as that information is passed further up along, I have to be careful with the use of hierarchies, because that's controversial nowadays, not for political reasons, but for accuracy reasons. As that information is passed along, there's more convergence onto a smaller number of larger neurons. So these are neurons that have access to a lot of information, but in coarser form. |
B | Right. So they're low. You know, it's like compressing an MP3, like how an MP3 compresses information, for example. So the cortex is representing features. So. And I represent. I'm just using that in a generic way because that's also controversial about exactly how is the brain. Okay, but. Yeah, but it works. But for now, I'm using it just in a generic way. So you go from lines and edges to a shape, like a round shape to a face to. Right. So you're basically, what's happening is there are summaries of summaries of summaries of summaries. |
A | I love that. I hope everyone hears that because I've been in this field of neuroscience a long time. As you move along the neuraxis from the sensory epithelium, now it sounds very, very nomenclature ish, but from the surface of the skin, inward, you're getting summaries. Yeah, you send more and more summaries. I think that's so important. That's like a gazillion dollar statement for understanding of the nervous system. |
B | So, but at each of those points correspond to some mental feature, like a line or an edge or a circle or a square or a face or. Right, but now, then you. When you. When you're in the midline, at the front, what are those features? Well, those features are things like, they are multimodal summaries, meaning they're summaries of the sights and sounds and smells, and they are lower dimensional, meaning they're coarser. So they're things like threat, reward, pleasure. I mean, really abstract. That's what abstract means. It doesn't mean that those representations have no sensory or motor meaning. It means that threat, for example, a summary, can have many different patterns associated with it, and the brain is treating them all as equivalent. |
A | This, to me, again, feels so, so important for people to understand, because as I'm hearing this and this word summaries is just ringing in my mind. It's so important because one of the core components of my experience of my emotions, because that's all I can really say for sure. My subjective interpretation and labeling of my own emotions is that they are pretty broad bins, like I described earlier. |
B | Pretty broad bins. And so that's where I was, exactly where I was going. So what about the word anger? Where is that represented, like, well, that's one of these multimodal abstractions. In fact, anger is just a couple of phonemes. It's a couple of sounds. But those sounds, the sound of anger, corresponds over thousands of instances that you've learned in your life to very different patterns of sensory motor features. That's right. Because what's going on in your body during anger can vary. The way you move your face in anger can vary depending on the situation. What you see someone else doing in anger can vary. So the word anger, or any word, is actually just a multimodal summary of many, many, many instances which are in their sensory and motor features. The sensory and motor meaning, very different. |
A | And it seems to me are highly constrained by developmental and cultural experience, because just today I learned that there's a word in Japan for the feeling that one has of having gotten a haircut they don't like. There's a word in Germany that pertains to the feeling of wanting to punch someone specifically because of the look on their face. |
B | Well, really, it's more like you like. To you, it feels like they're asking to be punched in the face. |
A | So you added yet more dimensionality to it. So upon learning just those things just today, there is additional dimensionality brought in, such that if I were to ever want to punch somebody in the face simply because of the look on their face, that I wouldn't necessarily label that as anger alone. It now has another dimension to it. And so I think I'm finally starting to understand how the developmental and the cultural influences, plus the fact that language is a pretty crude descriptor for this neural process that you're describing. |
B | Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so, but before you use the word granularity, and so I'm going to use that word, too. In fact, I've coined that phrase emotional granularity. Just as an aside. You know, I coined that phrase almost 30 years ago, and now people study it like it's a phenomenon, which is cool in a sense, but also, I kind of want to keep reminding them, like, that's a word that refers to a process. It's not a thing. It's a process. And the. But the process is. So when the brain is a category constructor, how fine grained are the categories? How precise are the categories? Right? Like, if you're using, if your feature of equivalence that your brain is using is threat, you're in really big trouble because there are like a gazillion different sensorimotor patterns that could go with threat. So your category is going to be massive. So how does the brain figure out which of those massive number of options is the one to use in this instance. If, on the other hand, you don't just want to use sensory motorhouse patterns as the features of equivalence or the features that you're using to say this instance right now is similar to these past instances. If I had to search like right now, what is similar to right now, it would be me sitting across the table from somebody who has a beard and is dressed in black. And, you know, there are a lot of details there that probably don't matter, right? So you'd be searching for a specific match from the past that's not very efficient either. So you need something in the middle. And that is to say, you need to have. Your brain has to be able to make categories that are more fine grained, but not super fine grained, but they have to be more fine grained than just threat. |
A | You want to keep in the library analogy that I made earlier, you want to keep the rest of the library accessible at some level, so you're not just staring at that one book, but. |
B | If you use the category bad, this feels bad, then your brain is basically going to be partially constructing an entire wing full of books, like an entire wing full of options. If you use the word angry, then maybe it's a bookcase. It's constructing a bookcase full of options and a category that's the size of a bookcase. And if you were using the word frustrated, then maybe it's a shelf. The brain can learn to construct categories at different scales of generalizability. So if I'm in an instance and my brain is making a guess, is it drawing from past instances that were associated with the word anger? We're associated with the word fear. Maybe it's some combination. The words are just features, they're just sounds. There are also all sorts of other features, like, what was my heart doing? What kind of motor actions did I make? What did I see next? So the point being, what I'm trying to bring here is that it's not like your brain creates an emotional state and then labels it. What your brain is doing is creating a category of possible futures, of what it's going to do next. And that state is largely determined by what the brain is remembering and how it's drawing from that huge population, that huge library of options. Which books is it sampling? |
A | I love this so much because it explains so much that, frankly, has been perplexing to me and also somewhat troubling to me. For instance, we hear about emotional intelligence, and sometimes I wonder whether or not true emotional intelligence would be what you just described the understanding of how this process works so that you can work with it. And I definitely want to talk about how one can work with this knowledge, because I think it's incredibly powerful in its explanatory power, but also its actionable power. The other thing is that. But it's clear to me, just based on my experience today, of hearing these words from other cultures that relate to different emotional states, that this system, unlike a lot of systems in the brain, I like to think, is fairly plastic. The moment that you know that there are additional dimensions to sadness, anger, et cetera, there's something comforting about that. What's really unsettling is the idea that we have such broad bins that we are. We would define a near infinite number of situations as just fear. That would suck. That's not a good existence. And yet I have to ask whether or not you think that as a species, not as a culture, but in our entire species, whether or not we are taking the exact opposite approach, that we're sort of moving into the emoji ization. Is that a word? I'll make it a word. And people can assault me in the comments. The emoji ization of this very rich and complex system. We're starting to get into this mode of, like, I'm gonna post an angry face, and therefore, like, this is a bad. I'm angry at you. This is a bad interaction. We're gonna. It's potentially combative. Or, and, you know, maybe Twitter x or Instagram or other social media sites are kind of the epitome of this, where you reduce this high dimensional space. You keep the sensory stimulation very high. It's movie after movie after movie and color and sound and people doing crazy parkour stuff and bears eating giraffes or whatever it is probably not bears eating giraffes, you know what I mean? And you can see stuff that's sexual and violent and political and emotional and sweet. And then the cats are kissing the monkey, and you're like, or the monkey's kissing the cat. So it's high dimensionality in terms of sensory space. But then what do we call it? We're like, oh, this is an emoji. You assign an emoji, you're hearting something. You're giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down. So I almost feel like we're trying to. We're regressing to a state where we're kind of like an infant trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and we're saying, you know what? You get like, six categories of response, when in reality, we should probably be expanding the number of different responses that we can have in order to accurately match the way that our nervous system actually works. |
B | Yes, exactly. There are many different things we could talk about with respect to the summary that you just gave, which I think is completely accurate. So what I would say is that if you look through even just the last, I don't know, 100 or so years, like the 19th, you know, 19th, 20th centuries, maybe, you can see that the complexity of the. Of people's responses expands and contracts. Right. So, for example, this is something that I've written really speculatively about. But one of the things that I found really interesting is that authoritarianism, authoritarian thinking is the reduction of complexity to some things that are really, really simple. Like, you're getting rid of all the complexity to basically these very, very coarse, low dimensional judgments, and things become black and white. It's the avoidance of complexity so that there can be simple, single answers to things. And it happens in human culture at times. And then. Then there's an expansion of complexity at times, too. So what predicts that? Like, what is it in the human nervous system or our collective human nervous? You know, like, we're just a bunch of brains attached to bodies, interacting with other brains and bodies, right? So, like, what is it that causes these ripples of. And I have some thoughts about that that are really, really, really speculative. But I think the other thing that's really important is that we've talked about. We'll go back to our cortical sheet that we've. And by the way, this is just one compression gradient in the brain. There are others, too. There are at least four others that I can think of, so this is just one. But all compression gradients work the same way, which is that now, we've talked about going from the low level details compressing to these multimodal summaries, these really simple features that are right, but that compression is what engineers would call lossy, meaning you lose the information. You lose the information. So when you go from lines and edges to a face, those neurons, they just know the face. They don't have. They lose what they've thrown away the details. They've thrown away. Those details are gone. For those neurons that are representing a. |
A | Face, they don't have access to that. |
B | They don't have access to it. So we said, well, the brain is making a guess. It's making a guess about what? This big, very, very high dimensional soup of signals in the world and in the body. What do they mean when the brain makes a guess, it starts with the compressed low dimensional signals. It starts with the features like anger or like threat, or it starts with these summaries, and then it has to infer or guess at every synapse. There's a guess that's being made about what the details are at the next level. Because what's happening is the guess is basically the brain going from these really general things to these very specific sensory motorhouse patterns. It happens along the cortical sheet. It happens also down the neuraxis, down the nerve, you know, from the cortex to the midbrain to the brainstem to the spinal cord. You have to go from a representation of run to the actual physical movements of muscle spindles and angles of joints and things like that. So what you're doing is you're going in the other direction, adding detail, you're particularizing. And the brain is guessing. It's guessing. Well, if it's using anger as the general feature, well, which instance of anger is it? And what are the specifics that are going to happen? And what are the. |
A | And forgive me, but. And what are the adaptive steps that I might take or not take? Because I'm quoting a lot today. So forgive me, but in the words of the great Sherrington, Nobel Prize winning physiologist, the final common pathway is movement is movement, and movement is nuanced. Right. Humans, I suppose, have among the greatest variety of different speeds and types of movement. I think about parkour gymnastics. Think about then what a cheetah can do. Cheetahs are impressive. A gymnast is truly impressive in terms of the range of movements and speeds, et cetera. In any event, the ultimate choice that the nervous system has to make is whether or not to move which direction, how fast, or stay still, move forward, move back. I'll just add, because I'm hoping that you'll expand on this. It's been said before that ultimately the nervous system is trying to make decisions about yum yuck or meh. Am I going to move towards something? Am I going to move away from it? Or am I just going to stay put? |
B | Well, that's only at the. That's a very. I would say that those are very low dimensional features. Those are those compressed features. But that's not the only thing the brain has to decide. That's just a misnomer. |
A | Well, I can get out of this little pickle that I just put myself in by saying that. I didn't say that. Now, I won't quote who did, because he's a very famous neuroscientist, but he tried to reduce it all. He's at Caltech. He's not somebody who studies emotion. He studies the visual system. But he said that, you know, that. That the neural circuits, maybe it's because he studies mice, are essentially binned into yum yuck and meh outputs. And I've always liked it on the one hand, because threes work, and it's simple, but rarely is the way that we describe things the way it actually works. |
B | So we would, in studying humans, we would say, well, that's affect, affect, that's mood. Or it's just like, should I move towards it? Is it pleasant? Should I move away from it? Is it unpleasant? Or is it irrelevant? And basically, I don't care. Okay, think about when you're feeling horrible. You just feel. You feel bad. What do you do? |
A | You don't know what you don't know. |
B | Because you don't have a plan of action. And that's ultimately, that is what those compressed, like summary features, those very low course features, they have to be decompressed into details, otherwise you don't know what to do. So ultimately, what the brain is doing is it's sampling from the past based on similarity to the present, to plan an action. And when I say action, I don't just mean skeletal motor action, like moving a limb. The first actions that are planned are the actions of coordinating the heart and the lungs and all of the internal actions that are required to support the motor, the skeletal motor movements. So your brain is categorizing and it's creating a category, and there are options there. Those options. The motor plans begin with, should the heart beat faster? Should it be slower? Does blood pressure need to go up? Should the blood vessels constrict? Or should they dilate? Should the breathing be deeper or more shallow? Those are the first plans that get made. And then milliseconds later, there are the skeletal motor plans. And then your experience of the world derives from those motor plans, those viscero, motor. That is, the plans for the viscera, for the internal organs and the skeletal motor. So I'm just going to refer to them as motor. Those motor plans actually give rise to your experience of the world. There's not some state that exists as an emotional state, which then you apply a label to. The label is just a set of features that are useful for generalizing from the past to the present. And the bin size or the. You know, of what a word refers to can change it can change it's different for different people and it can change in your lifetime and you can add new bins. That is, you can. So for example, there's a concept, guskenluck, which I probably just butchered. So if you speak Turkish, I'm sorry, but it's like it has features of it of loss and people blocking your goals. So we would say it's anger and sadness together. That's Giskenluk. When you lose something and you're pissed off about it. But that's a category on its own, right? It's just a different way of parsing that really detailed soup. And the more words, you know, the more words are just useful for pointing to a set of features that are similar to each other. So what I mean by that is, if I say to you, Andrew, I had pizza last night for dinner, pizza, two sounds, two syllables that those two syllables, they stand in for like 50 different sensory and motor features. Because I don't have to say to you, I had a food, I didn't have pizza last night, but let's say I did. I had a food that was round and flat and had sauce and also cheese, and it had mozzarella cheese and also a little parmesan cheese and it had mushrooms on it and a little bit of olive. And, you know, that's like really, really detailed and complicated. But instead I can just say, I had pizza. Two features, two sounds, two syllables, phonemes. And with those two phonemes, I have just communicated to you in your brain. My brain had 50 features. It was representing of details. And now I have just communicated those to you or some number of them with two sounds. Very efficient. Now, of course, you might think that I was from Chicago and had deep dish pizza. And I'll just resist. I don't want to like offend anybody from Chicago. |
A | It's not pizza. |
B | That's not real pizza. That's not real pizza, right? So you could then ask me, was it, but you're from Chicago, is that deep dish pizza? And then I would say, no, no, I'm actually from Toronto, which is just like New York. And so, no, it was thin crust pizza, which is really the only kind of pizza there is just saying. But you know, but my point is that words are just stand in for, they're just low. These like low dimensional features, these kind of gross features that stand in for many, many, many little detailed features. And that's how we communicate with each other. |
A | And we are constrained by what we know and what we can say and the extent of our vocabulary. |
B | And I'll just say that little babies, three months old, they don't speak yet, and they don't understand language, but they can use words to learn abstract categories. So abstract just means that the word refers to many different patterns of sensory motor features. So the word is or the category, the things that make the instances similar are a function or a goal, not like the sensory motor feature. So you say to a baby very explicitly, because if you're talking about three, four month old babies, right, babies can also do this implicitly, too. But in experiments, you say to a baby, look, sweetie, this is a bling. And you put the bling down and it makes a beeping noise. And then you say, now this looks different, feels different, right? Smells different. Look, sweetie, this is a bling. It beeps. Now you take something else, which also is different, and you say, look, sweetie, this is a bling. Now, the baby expects this to beep. |
A | By the way, folks, just listening. Lisa just gave three examples, first with a pen, then a coffee mug, and then her very own watch. Three very distinct objects, but all of which make, that are told. The baby is told, make a bling sound, and they will bin those three visually distinct objects, functionally distinct objects, into. |
B | One single bin because they are sharing a function which is to beep. |
A | I think this is so important. And if I may, I want to ask whether or not we can take this incredible understanding of emotions, because that's really what we're talking about. |
B | Well, we're really talking about how the brain, my version of how the brain works and how emotions emerge out of this system, basically. |
A | And absolutely, you described it far better than I could, and anchor that to this concept of movement. The movement is the final common path, with the understanding that the movement system, and forgive me, but that we have systems in the brain and body that allow us to move. That's for sure, systems, plural, that they run in both directions. In other words, how we feel, what we feel, our emotions has some bearing on the movements that are more or less likely for us in a given context. And our movements clearly can also influence the way that we feel internally. |
B | Well, I mean, so if we just look at how things are happening. Here's what the anatomy tells us, that when the brain makes a guess, that guess starts as a motor plan, starts as a visceral motor plan and a skeletal motor plan. |
A | So heart rate changes, breathing changes, blood pressure changes, and potentially skeletal muscle movement. |
B | Right? And literal copies, literal copies, efferent copies of those signals are sent to, they propagate to the sensory areas, telling the brain telling those neurons, this is the last time we made this in this context, when this other stuff just happened. Like this temporal context. Right? And we made these movements. Here's what we saw next. Here's what we felt next. Here's what we smelled next. |
A | So, yeah, I think of this as the image that pops in my mind, and we should explain to people what efferent copy is. In neuroscience and neuroanatomy, the connection to a structure is called an afferent with an a, and the connections out from a structure are called the efferent. But the way I was thinking, it doesn't even matter. |
B | It's just basically the point here is that in our experience, your brain conjures an experience, okay? And that experience is that you feel something first. You see something, you feel something, you act. That's not what's happening. What's happening is your brain is preparing the action first, and the feeling and your experience comes from that action preparation. So it's a copy. It's like literally you have axons that are sending motor signals down the brain stem to the spinal cord, and literal copies of those axons. Those axons have branches that, collateral branches that just send axons other places. The same signal that is being sent to your spinal cord to move stuff in your body, that same signal is being sent to other neurons in the brain as predictions of the sensations that are going to happen in a second from now, a moment from now, probably faster than a second. But, you know, in a couple milliseconds, if you move. And so, yes, it is the case that what you feel is linked to what you do, and what you do is linked to what you feel, but not in this simple mechanistic way that neuroscientists and psychologists have been using forever. It's not like you're probed by a stimulus. You see something, you hear something, and then you process it and evaluate it, and then you react to it. No, that's not what's happening. What's actually happening under the hood is that based on how things are right now, your brain makes a guess, or some guesses, and those guesses start as motor plans. And the consequence of those motor plans are predicted sensations. And then, of course, sensory signals are coming from the sensory surfaces. And here's to me, the really the most mind boggling thing about this whole explanation. If your sensory neurons in your sensory areas are already so they're firing the action potentials, the spiking has changed based on these prepared motor movements. So these are sensory predictions. And you know, when I give talks and on my website, I have some cool examples of how this works. You can experience it yourself. You start to experience, you hear things that aren't there. You feel vibrations in your chest that aren't there because your brain is predicting, predicting these sensations. So let's say the sensations come, the sensory signals, I should say, let me say so, the sensory signals from the sensory surfaces of the body make it to the brain. If you have, if your neurons are already firing in a way to anticipate those signals, those signals just confirm the firing and then they're done. They don't make it any further into the brain. So when you're predicting, well, your experience is constructed completely by your brain. The signals from the sensory surfaces are there just to confirm or to change the signals. So if there's things you didn't anticipate, then those errors of prediction, those are the signals that are propagated and become compressed and stuff. And we have a special name for that in science. We call it learning. You know, Andy Clark is a philosopher who writes a lot about prediction, predicting brain and so on. And he talks about normal everyday experience as being a controlled hallucination. |
A | That's true. Yeah, I subscribe to that. It's fairly adaptive in most circumstances, controlled hallucination, but it has its limitations. What we were talking about, if I could be somewhat of a summary neuron, you can tell me if my summary is too coarse, is first of all, the neural systems and the brain, let's just call it the nervous system, because we're talking about brain and body, are incredibly dynamic, a bunch of inputs. Those inputs are incredibly elaborate. They get summarized. The summary prepares the body for a certain action. That's a motor commands, a premotor commands, and then some action may or may not be taken. But already, as soon as an action is taken or not taken, the whole state of the neural system is different. It's changed as a consequence of what just happened. Now, of course, when people hear that, and when I hear that, indeed, I feel like, wow, it's a tough system to study because these are the dynamical neural systems, and we have the technology to put people in functional scanners and look at what lights up, so to speak. We have the capacity to ask people how they feel based on questionnaires. But you can imagine that's incredibly crude. So then you give them Likert scales of rate from one to ten, how happy or sad you are. And so you're adding some depth and dimensionality to it, but it's incredibly crude. It's nothing like real experience. And if somebody's more verbal, less verbal, maybe they somaticize more or less. I mean, the example comes to mind that occasionally you learn from social media, which often I learn from social media. And someone once said, I don't think in thoughts, I think in feels. And I thought, okay, great, you're probably also from northern California. And I said, wait, andrew, stop being so judgmental. What do you mean? And I asked, and they said, I experience emotions in their mind, first as a bodily state. Then the label comes much later. That's not how it works for me. It feels fairly more integrated of brain and body for me. But other people started chiming in, no, I think of emotion. I experience emotions clearly as a verbal label. It's all in their head. And so you start to realize that we might all be encoding the world slightly differently or very differently, and it's changing in time. So then the question becomes, what are the anchor points in terms of our understanding of emotions that we can work with? And the following questions come to mind. Neither you nor I are clinicians. As far as I know. I'm certainly not. |
B | I was actually trained as a clinician. |
A | Oh, there you go. I'm wrong again. |
B | No, no, no. But I mean, I haven't practiced in, like, really gazillions of years. |
A | Okay, well, you're more than qualified to answer the question I'm about to ask, which is, to me, there is a great conflict of information in the psychology, psychiatry, and let's just call it wellness and mental health space, which is when we are feeling lousy, like not good, let's put valence on it. Just lousy. I don't want in a state that we're having an emotion that we don't want to have. There's an entire category of information that says, you need to feel your feelings. You need to feel your feelings. You need to acknowledge that they're there. You need to go into the feeling, maybe even full catharsis. You need to amplify the feelings until they quote unquote, leave your body. After all, Steve Jobs was into scream therapy, and he helped him expunge his anger. Who knows? You get these examples. He's probably the worst example because it seemed like he was angry a lot from what I hear. But then there's another category of thought, which is, no, you need to use your ability to top down control inhibition of the cortex on lower structures. Again, I'm deliberately using crude language here to say, wait, this is an emotion. Emotions pass. This is not real. This is just a limited set of high dimensionality stuff that's been summarized. And you know what? I don't need to feel this way. I can make myself feel differently. Maybe I'll go for a run. In fact, I always feel better after I go for a run. Even this question as simple as should we feel our feelings or should we not feel our feelings? And of course, you would hope that this would be answered appropriately, such that people don't go harm other people or themselves. But assuming that they're not gonna harm other people themselves, verbally or physically, then you really get yourself into a bit of a pickle. We don't understand what to do with emotions, ours or other people's. Clearly, we don't understand emotions per se. |
B | So I would say I'm going to answer your question, and then I want to also pick at the word. I want to pick at an assumption, because it's come up actually a couple of times, and there's something super important in your descriptions that I just want to pull out for the listeners because I think it's really important and you're doing it very naturally. But I think some people, it just bears commenting on. So let me just deal with the question of should we feel our feelings or use our words? We say to little kids, use your words like, don't throw a tantrum. Right. But then there was also this other feeling. Well, just feel. It's important to feel, and you don't want to get it. Have it be pent up and use. |
A | Your body and hit a pillow. I mean, there's scream therapy. Bite the pillow, scream the pillow, tear the pillow. You can pay $5,000 for a week of doing this, and they'll tell you you're going to feel better at the end. |
B | So the answer there is, it's the wrong question. Like, flexibility is important for everything, always, right? So, first of all, you don't have emotions in your body. Your body doesn't keep the score, you know. |
A | Yeah, great book title because it's super catchy. But with all due respect to, I think, the important work of Vanderkohl, I think it oversimplified and led people to believe that their back pain was trauma and that all trauma is somaticized. And it's not. |
B | No, it's not. But I would go further and say, like, first of all, your body does keep the score. Your brain keeps the score. Your body is the scorecard. That's super important. And he has done really important work, but his explanations for why things work is scientifically incorrect. It just is, because we don't feel things in our bodies. Everything we feel, we feel in our brains, we don't see in our eyes. We see in our brains. Of course we need our eyes, but we don't see in our eyes. Just like if you pinch your hand, take skin and pinch between two fingers, the skin, you don't feel that actually in your hand. You feel it in your brain. That's the magic of the brain, in a sense. So what I would say is it depends on the situation and what your goal is. Sometimes it is useful to use your words, and sometimes it is useful to go for a run. It just depends on what your goal is. |
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