How Emotions Are Made

The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

We treat emotions as facts of nature. Something happens, fear or anger fires, the face gives it away, and the same reaction would arise in anyone, anywhere. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying the brain and emotion, argues that almost none of this is true, and that the science behind the old picture has quietly collapsed. The book sets out what she calls the theory of constructed emotion. In her account, emotions are not switched on in dedicated circuits, and they leave no consistent fingerprint in the face, the body or the brain. Search for the brain's anger region or its fear region and you will not find one. Instead, the brain builds each emotion in the moment. It predicts rather than reacts, reading the stream of signals from inside the body, interpreting them through concepts it learned from a particular culture, and constructing a feeling that explains the sensations and tells you what to do next. Fear and excitement can be the same racing heart given two different names. Underneath emotion sits the brain's deeper task, which Barrett calls the body budget, the constant predictive management of the body's energy. Much of what we experience as feeling is the brain's read of that budget. The argument carries her across psychology, the study of the body and the cultures that teach us, by infancy, which emotions to have at all.