The making of emotions. I just watch a mind-blowing TED talk by…
By: Fabio Salvadori
Tags: Brain, Emotional Intelligence, Habits, Emotions

According to research and study, our brain is a phenomenal and relentless predicting machine. It continuously makes predictions on what is going on and what is going to happen. And in doing so, our brain constructs our experience of the world.

An experience that includes our emotions, as they are a big part of it. So emotions are not biologically wired in us, our brain builds them up. This is a significant shift in how we look at emotions.

My understanding from what Dr Barrett shared, is that we have built-in feelings indeed, but they have no details or features. It is our brain that adds details to them, creating a construct that gives them meaning. And it does so making predictions. Sometimes the resulting construct is an emotion, so the same feeling or sensation can generate a different emotion depending on our brain’s guesses.

The emotions that seem to happen to us are actually made by us in the moment. They are our brain’s best guess of how we should feel in the moment.

To make its predictions, our brain combines three “ingredients”: our body, our surroundings and our past experience. Three ingredients that we can, to a certain extent, change. And, as for any recipe, if we apply changes to these ingredients, we change the outcome. If we change the ingredients used by our brain to make its predictions and constructs emotions from feelings, we can then change our emotional life.

If we change how our brain makes predictions today, by changing the ingredients it uses, we can change the emotions we will experience tomorrow.

Responsibility and Patience

There are two caveats, however, and I guess not everyone will like them.

The first one is that if we can change the ingredients and, as a consequence, our emotional life, it means that we are responsible for our emotions. There are not pre-wired emotion circuits within us that fire automatically emotions. We create them, so we are responsible for them.

Not because we are supposed to control them in the moment, but because the experiences we cultivate today, become our brain’s predictions of tomorrow.

So, it’s not our fault if we experience certain emotions today, but it’s our responsibility to act today, so we can change the emotions we will experience tomorrow.

And here comes the second caveat. We can’t change our emotional life at the snap of our fingers. All three ingredients — our body, our environment and our past experience — can’t be easily changed in the moment.

Sure, we can make minor interventions like walk away from a stressful environment or take a nap to recover some energy. However, the impact of those changes on our emotional life is momentary. Plus, we can’t change our past experiences even if I would argue that we can change how we read them. To create a lasting change in our emotional life, it takes time and consistency. Healthier habits over time will improve our body and thus the signals received by our brain. Paying attention to our environment, so everything we see, hear, smell, taste and touch, allow us to recognise how they affect our physical and emotional energy so we can make adjustments. And there are our experiences, the ones our brain registers, archives and uses to make predictions. If we’re not happy with our emotional life, we can start by cultivating new experiences every day. We won’t see the results immediately and it may even seem pointless. Though, as PhD Barrett explained, over time, we will create a new set of emotional recipes. We need trust and patience. Trust in the process and the patience to stick with it long enough for the change to manifest.

So then, if we take responsibility for the ingredients we provide to our brain’s predicting work, we trust the process, and we have enough patience, we can master our emotions.

But where do we start? Dr Barrett has a suggestion about that. She calls it Emotional Granularity.

Emotional Granularity

Emotional Granularity is a very fascinating discovery made by Dr Barrett and her team almost 20 years ago. In short, it is the ability of the brain to create a large, flexible array of different emotions.

Let’s put it this way, in any situation your brain will make the prediction and construct the emotions that, according to its data, work better for your survival. If the brain has more options available from which it can choose, there are more probabilities that it would make a better choice. If, as an extreme example, your database of emotions contains only two options like joy and rage, your brain will use one of those for any situation. So, a high level of emotional granularity has huge benefits in how you emotionally respond to situations and triggers.

You can increase your emotional granularity by expanding your emotion vocabulary. Learn new words to express emotions. In your language and, even better, from other languages. Very often you can find emotion words in other languages that have no direct equivalent in your own. Each new word gives your brain new options to deal with the signals it reads and construct better emotional reaction. Word after word, we become emotional experts.

After reading all these stuff, I was left with a question. Is this the same as developing our Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional Intelligence

Most of the work on Emotional Intelligence is based on the idea that the human brain evolved in layers from the older one inherited from reptiles. In this perspective, proposed by the American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean in the 1960s, we have three layers, each one in charge of different aspects of human functioning; the brainstem or reptilian brain (dealing with instinctive responses), the limbic region or mammalian brain (dedicated to our emotions and long term memory) and the neocortex region (in charge of our high-order conscious thinking, verbal language and short-term memory). The last two, in particular, are the ones to which Goleman refers to when he says “In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.” Two minds that usually operate in tight harmony, intertwining their very different ways of knowing to guide us through the world. But sometimes they don’t really play as a team, and our emotions take over. To help them work together, we need to develop Emotional Intelligence. Salovey & Mayer, who coined the term Emotional Intelligence in 1990, describe it as “a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”

Obviously, there is a lot more to it but there’s plenty of literature on Emotional Intelligence, starting from Goleman fundamental books with the same title, and I already wrote many words here.

In this article, Dr Barrett contends that we should rethink Emotional Intelligence because, according to her studies, the idea of a brain divided into three layers with different tasks is misleading. She says that our brain doesn’t have distinct processes for emotion and cognition. A very different perspective then. However, albeit implying that we should rethink how Emotional Intelligence works, I feel that it makes an even stronger case for the importance of developing it.

I love how Justin Bariso summarises Emotional Intelligence in one sentence: “Emotional intelligence is the ability to make emotions work for you, instead of against you.”

I’m not a neuroscientist, and I don’t have the tools or the knowledge to have a say about these different positions, but to me, both perspectives fit Bariso’s definition. Being a curious coach like I am, I’m just happy I can benefit from what all these fantastic scientists keep discovering. I can learn from all these different sources and gain wisdom that can help me be more present with my clients.

So, these are my takeaways from this exploration around emotions:

I need to take care of in the environment in which I coach. My surroundings affect my emotions, so I need to tune the space around me to spark the emotions I want to bring in my coaching space.

My physical health and energy play a vital role in how sensations are transformed into emotions. I need to be fit and healthy to be emotionally wise and present.

I’ll invest time in expanding my vocabulary to improve my Emotional Granularity. This way, I’ll be able to better deal my own feelings and sensations. I’ll also be able to offer this richness to my clients, so they can see more.

I’ll keep exploring different experiences regularly, not to become an expert but to improve my presence.

Disclaimer; as I said, I’m not a neuroscientist, so I may have oversimplified or misunderstood some things in this article. In that case, it’s my fault obviously, and I suggest you go directly to the source for more exhaustive and detailed information: