How do Emotions Work in The Brain

How do Emotions Work in The Brain

The following is taken from How Emotions Are Made by Luz Feldman Barret.

For my daughter’s 12 birthday, we use the power of simulation (and had some fun) by throwing a “gross foods” party. When her guests hook up, we served them pizza doctored with green food coloring, so the cheese looks like fuzzy mold, and peach gelatin laced with bits of vegetables to look like vomiting. For drinks, we served grape juice in medical urine sample cups. Everybody was exuberantly disgusted and revolted (it was perfect 12-year-old humor). Several guests could not bring themselves to touch the food as they involuntarily simulated vile tastes and smells. The pièce de résistance, however, was the party game we played after lunch: a simple contest to identify foods by their smell. We used mashed baby food Apricot, spinach, beef, and so on—and artistically smeared it on diapers, so it looked exactly like baby poop.

 

 Even though the guests knew that the smears were food, several actually gagged from the simulated smell.

Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what is happening in the world. In every waking moment, you are faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past expertise to build a hypothesis the simulation— it compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what is relevant, and ignoring the rest.

The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience. Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are mostly simulations of the world, not reactions to it. Forward-looking thinkers speculate that simulation is a common mechanism not only for perception but also for understanding language, feeling empathy, remembering, imagining, dreaming, and many other psychological phenomena. Our common sense might declare that thinking, perceiving, and dreaming is different mental events (at least to those of us in Western cultures). However, one general process describes them all. Simulation is the default mode for all rational activities. It also holds the key to unlocking the mystery of how the brain creates emotions.

Outside your brain, simulation can cause tangible changes in your body. Let us try a little creative simulation with our bee. In your mind’s eye, see the bee bouncing lightly on the petal of a fragrant white flower, buzzing around as it searches for pollen. If you are fond of bees, then the utter of imaginary wings is right now causing other neurons to prepare your body to move in for a closer look—preparing your heart to beat faster, your sweat glands to fill, and your blood pressure to decrease. Alternatively, if you have been badly stung in the past, your brain may ready your body to run away or make a swatting motion, formulating some other pattern of physical changes. Every time your mind stimulated sensory input, it gets immediate automatic changes in your body that have the possibility to change your feeling.

Your bee-related simulations are stable in your rational concept of what a “Bee” is. This concept not only includes information about the bee itself (what it looks and sounds like, how you act on it, what changes in your autonomic nervous system allow your action, etc.), but also information contained in other concepts related to bees (“Meadow,” “Flower,” “Honey,” “Sting,” “Pain,” etc.). All this information is inserted with your concept “Bee,” guiding how you simulate the bee in this specific context. So, a concept like “Bee” is a collection of neural patterns in your brain, representing your past experiences. Your brain combines these patterns in different ways to perceive and flexibly guide your action in new situations.

Utilize your concepts; your brain gathers some things together and separates others. You can look at three mounds of dirt and perceive two of them as “Hills” and one as a “Mountain,” based on your concepts. Construction treats the world like a sheet of pastry, and your concepts are cookie cutters that carve boundaries, not because the boundaries are natural, but because they are useful or desirable. These boundaries have physical limitations; of course, you would never perceive a mountain as a lake. Not everything is relative.

Your concepts are the primary tool for your brain to guess the sense of incoming sensory inputs. For example, concepts give meaning to changes in sound pressure, so you hear them as words or music instead of random noise. In Western culture, most music is based on an octave divided into twelve equally spaced pitches: the equal-tempered scale codified by Johann Sebastian Bach in the seventeenth century. All people of Western culture with normal hearing have a concept for this ubiquitous scale, even if they cannot explicitly describe it. Not all music uses this scale, however. When Westerners hear Indonesian gamelan music for the first time, which is based on seven pitches per octave with varied tunings, it is more likely to sound like noise. A brain that's been wired by listening to twelve-tone scales does not have a concept for that music. I am experientially blind to dubstep, although my teenage daughter has that concept.

Concepts also give meaning to the chemicals that create tastes and smells. If I served you pink ice cream, you might expect (simulate) the taste of strawberry. However, if it tasted like sh, you would find it jarring, perhaps even disgusting. If I instead introduced it as “chilled salmon mousse” to give your brain fair warning, you might find the same taste delicious (assuming you enjoy salmon). You might think of food as existing in the physical world, but in fact, the concept “Food” is profoundly cultural. There are some biological constraints; you cannot eat razor blades. But there are some perfectly edible substances that we do not all perceive as food, such as hachinoko, a Japanese delicacy made of baby bees, which most Americans would vigorously avoid. This cultural difference is due to concepts.

Each moment that you are alive, your mind utilizes concepts to simulate the outside world. Without concepts, you are experientially blind. With concepts, your brain simulates so invisibly and automatically that vision, hearing, and your other senses seem like re- exes rather than constructions.

Now consider this: what if your brain uses this same process to make meaning of the sensations from inside your body—the commotion arising from your heartbeat, breathing, and other internal movements?

From your mind’s perspective, your body is just a different origin of sensory input. Sensations from your heart and lungs, your metabolism, your changing temperature, and so on, are like ambiguous blobs. These completely physical sensations inside your body have no literal psychological meaning. In time your concepts enter the picture, however, yet those sensations may take on additional meaning. If you feel an ache in your stomach while sitting at the dinner table, you might experience it as hunger. If the flu season is just around the corner, you might experience that same ache as nausea. If you are a judge in a courtroom, you might experience the ache as a gut feeling that the defendant cannot be trusted. In a given moment, At a certain moment, in a certain context, your brain uses concepts to give meaning to internal sensations as well as to external sensations from the world, All at once. From an aching stomach, your brain constructs an instance of hunger, nausea, or mistrust.

Now consider that same stomachache if you are sniffing a diaper heavy with pureed lamb, as my daughter’s friends did at her fat foods birthday party. You might experience the ache as disgust. Alternatively, if your lover has just walked into the room, you might experience the ache as a pang of longing. If you are in a doctor’s office waiting for the results of a medical test, you might experience that same ache as an anxious feeling. In these cases of disgust, longing, and anxiety, the concept active in your brain is an emotional concept. As before, your brain makes meaning from your aching stomach, together with the sensations from the world around you, by constructing an instance of that concept.

An instance of emotion.

And that might be how emotions are made.

Finally yet importantly, I will let you with this video of Lisa Feldman Barrett about How do Emotions Work in The Brain 

𝑾𝒆 𝒉𝒐𝒑𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒇𝒊𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒕 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈. 𝑨𝒔 𝒖𝒔𝒖𝒂𝒍, 𝒘𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒇𝒆𝒆𝒅𝒃𝒂𝒄𝒌,𝒅𝒐𝒏’𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝒔𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒐𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝒎𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒂  +1 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒕.