3 Takeaways - A Mind-Blowing Look at How Our Brains Create Our Reality. With Renowned Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (#117)

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Our brains run the show and determine how we relate to the world. Discoveries from the front lines of neuroscience show our brains are creators (as opposed to spectators) of reality and also creator of our emotions. Don’t miss this enlightening talk with Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the world’s most cited scientists for her groundbreaking research in psychology and neuroscience.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be with Lisa Barrett, who is among the top 1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. Lisa is a professor at Northeastern University and also has appointments at Mass General

Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I'm excited to find out more about our brains and emotions. Lisa's insights are counterintuitive. According to Lisa, our brains did not evolve primarily for thinking. We are not spectators of reality, but more creators of it. Roses aren't really red, and our emotions aren't as inborn and automatic as many of us believe. Lisa's most recent book, which is wonderful, is Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Welcome, Lisa, and thanks so much for our conversation today. Oh, I'm so delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

It is my pleasure, Lisa. Lisa, one of your major findings is that babies are not born with their wiring, so to speak, complete, but it evolves with their environment. Can you talk about how babies evolve in different social, for example, environments? Sure. Here's a basic example. When an infant is born, it doesn't know what's important in the world and what's not, what's signal and what's noise. And in our culture, parents come in and we help our infants, our caregivers help their infants to distinguish what they should pay attention to and what they shouldn't. So babies are born with what Alison Gopnik calls a lantern of attention.

They just pay attention to everything because they don't know what's important and what isn't. And part of what we do with our actions and also our words is we highlight certain things in the world that are important and we ignore things that aren't important. And so you'll see, for example, a little infant crawling around and when they're unsure, they'll reference their caregiver, like they'll look to their caregiver, like, is this OK? So they'll crawl up to the stairs and they'll look to their caregiver like, is this OK? Should I move further or am I going to hurt myself? And they're constantly socially referencing.

And that's actually a pretty typical thing that infants do. But in our culture, we have rules. We have very strict rules for paying attention, especially as the child develops. When kids get to preschool, even kindergarten, we expect children to be able to sit and listen, to sit and pay attention, to focus. What was a lantern of attention becomes a spotlight of attention. And that's what is required for a child to sit in class and learn a lesson or listen to a story or be able to sit quietly and play in a confined space like a playground or a classroom. But if you're an infant who is being raised in a culture where there's not so much parental supervision or adult supervision, where you're spending your time around farm animals or other kids running around. And there isn't an expectation that you will sit and focus your attention for long periods of time.

You won't learn to do that. You'll eventually learn to do it, but you're not learning to do it as a little person. And in our culture, when children can't do that, we diagnose them as having a problem. And we sometimes give them drugs to help them focus their attention. So the challenges to focus your attention are a combination of what the child's brain can do at any given point in development, but also the expectations that are placed on that child by the culture that they're growing up in. What do you believe about emotions that would surprise most people? Well, what I would have said, Lan, a number of years ago, I would have said, I think everything that I think about emotions would probably surprise mostic reactions that we have, that our brains are structured in such a way that we have this kind of inner beast that we share with other

animals and that we have these innate circuits, one for anger, one for sadness, one for fear. Scientists debate about which emotion categories are thought to be universal and innate. But the idea is that you've got some number of them and you've got these circuits and you're born with them. And then a circuit triggers. So if you see a snake, the circuit for fear triggers, and then there's this obligatory response that you have in your face and in your voice and in your body and that all issue in this very coordinated way from this little circuit in your brain. And many people still believe that the circuit is in this little structure called the amygdala, which is part of something called the limbic system. And we don't actually have a limbic

system. We do have an amygdala, but its job, its main job is not fear. There is no fear circuit in your amygdala. And so sometimes people do find this really surprising. I think people find it really surprising when I say emotions don't happen to you. It's not like you have some circuitry in your brain that gets triggered and then you have this obligatory response. It feels that way to us. That's how we experience what's happening, but that's actually not what's really going on under the hood. And when I tell people that your brain is basically creating emotion, it's constructing it, it's making instances of emotion. I think people find this really surprising because

their experience and my experience too, is not that I am in any way doing anything of my own free will to create an emotion. But when you start to understand a little bit about how the brain works, you realize the brain is pretty much constructing everything. And the brain never makes itself aware of what it's doing. So most of the time, we're completely unaware of what's going on inside our own bodies. And it feels to us like the things that we see and the things that we hear are happening in the world and that our eyes and ears and so on are just windows on the world. But that's not really how things work. And it's similarly true for emotion. Your brain is constructing those meanings and as a consequence, constructing the actual experience of emotion and what you do in emotion.

So we don't innately or automatically experience joy or sadness or fear? Well, innateness and automaticity are separate questions, right? Something can be automatic, but not necessarily innate. And I should also say that hardwired is also an ambiguous word because your brain is always wiring itself to its world. What your brain can create with its wiring, it can create because you've learned something. And that's just as automatic as something that's innate, meaning that you were born with the capacity to do it. For example, you're not born being able to see. That's something that a brain has to learn to do. And it learns, your brain learned to see in the first couple of

months of your life. But when you take a person, for example, who has had very bad cataracts or something wrong with their eyes so that no light has reached the retina and been conveyed to the brain, so no signals from the retina reach the brain, that person obviously can't see. But when you, for example, get a corneal transplant or you get like cataracts removed, and now signals of light are now reaching the retina and reaching the brain, that person can't see. That person has to learn to see. It's just that you learned to see and you learned to hear and you learned to do all these things. Your brain learned to do these things, finished its wiring, so to speak, at moments in your life when you were too little, and not something that you have memory for. And this is also true for when your brain learned to

make sense of signals as emotions. It's not something that you remember doing. So your brain is always regulating your body 24 seven, you're unaware largely, so your brain doesn't make itself aware of how it's managing all this stuff inside your body, coordinating the gazillions of cells and dozens of systems. And at the same time, your brain is receiving sense data from those activities. So there's a lot of sensory signals that are constantly streaming to the brain. Is what we see with our eyes like a photograph? No. And in fact, that phrase that we see with our eyes

is not really correct, even though we all use that phrase. You and I and everyone else who sees, we see with our brains. We need our eyes to bring signals like wavelengths of light, certain wavelengths of light to our brains. But those signals in and of themselves are not seeing. They are just an ingredient in seeing. And the other ingredient that you need is your past experience of what those signals meant in a larger ensemble of signals. Sometimes people think, well, the only thing that matters to seeing is the information that hits your retina.

So if they're thinking about it at all, they're thinking, oh, you know, we see with our eyes and it's like a window on the world. It's like a photograph. But actually, if your brain doesn't know how to make a good guess about what those wavelengths of light mean, then you will be experientially blind, meaning it will be like visual noise to you. You won't know how to make sense of it, and therefore you won't actually see an object or objects or a scene. Are roses actually red? Well, when we say a rose is red, and we're probably talking about roses that give off wavelength of light around 600 nanometers, really what that statement means is I'm experiencing this rose as red because redness isn't in the rose. The redness is a transaction between the

wavelengths of light that are coming off that plant, the petals of that plant, and your retina, and your brain. Without a human brain or a brain of an animal that can make meaning out of those wavelengths of light, they're just wavelengths of light. We use those kinds of shorthands all the time. The problem is that sometimes people don't realize that they are shorthands and they take it really literally. You can take a red rose, a rose that you're experiencing as red, and you can put it next to a background color, like a different set of wavelengths that will make it look more or less red. The color isn't in the petals of the rose. Wavelengths of light are in the physical world. Colors are a combination of the signals in the world and the signals in your brain

filtered by your retina. Most people also believe that our brains are wired to think before we act, but you also believe that that's not true. Well, I just want to say it doesn't really matter what I believe. It matters what the evidence shows. The evidence is very clear on this point, and it's not my evidence, I'll say too. And it doesn't just come from one domain of science. It comes from several domains of science. Your brain prepares actions first, the actions that it will take inside your body and the action that will allow your muscles to move and your limbs to move. So actions, your brains,

everything that you experience, everything you see, everything you hear, everything you think and feel is a consequence of your brain's preparation for movement, not the other way around. It's perplexing. That's not our experience of how things are working, right? So the brain doesn't make itself aware of that reality. But I would say for our best

available methods, the most sophisticated methods from hundreds of scientists in several different fields suggest that this is actually how it works. So that's about as close to a belief as I could probably. When I say that I believe something to be true, that's about as close to a belief as I'm going to come as a scientist, I would say. How can someone affect another person in terms of their breathing or their heartbeat? Well, there's very good evidence that we synchronize our actions with each other. So we do this without really knowing it, that if I scratch my chin, you might scratch your chin. If you put your hand up near your face, I might put my hand up near my face. This is something that people do when they like

each other and they trust each other. They mirror each other's actions. Some of the actions that you are taking right now is that your chest is expanding and your chest is moving up and down as you breathe. I'm not really aware of my brain tracking your body movements in that way, but actually very careful studies indicate that brains do that. And our brains, it turns out, are sensitive to the subtle changes in the color of skin, which is related to blood flow. So often what happens is that people's breathing synchronizes and that synchronizes their heart rates because people,

even though they're unaware, their brains are tracking the signals in other people's chests and how they rise and fall with breath. Lisa, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? One is that I think that curiosity is a better stance on the world than confidence. Your brain, you don't read other people's emotional expressions. Body language doesn't exist. That's a metaphor, but you're not reading other people's movements the way that you read words on a page. Your brain is guessing and it's guessing based on past experience and you can be wrong. So it's better to be humble and curious than confident. That would be my first takeaway.

My second takeaway is that if you think about it, your brain is always using past experience to make guesses about what's about to happen and what certain signals mean. And that means that you're partly the author of your own experience. And this is an opportunity for you to change how you experience things and what you do in the future if you want to. Because if you expose yourself to new ideas or you cultivate new experiences for yourself, you learn new words, you learn new skills, what have you, what you're doing really is you're training your brain, you're wiring your brain with new information, with new experiences that in the future will be available for your brain's guesses. So control over your experiences doesn't necessarily mean stopping yourself from eating that second piece of chocolate cake, or in my

case, that second piece of chocolate when you really, really want to. It means cultivating experiences when you feel like you have enough energy, just like you would exercise. You would exercise and you spend a lot of energy and then you'll replenish it because what you're trying to do is create a better, healthier you in the future. And that's exactly what you can do by creating new experiences, learning new words and so on and so forth. What you're doing is you're cultivating a different past that will be used to experience the world differently and therefore enact differently and be a different person or somewhat different person in the future. And in my books, that's a

really optimistic way of thinking about what your brain is doing. It's hard work. I'm not saying it's really easy. It's hard work. And it relates, I think, to the third takeaway, which is that this wonderful ability that your brain has to wire itself to the world continuously throughout your life comes with some fine print. And the fine print is that you are more responsible for what you do than you might think. And what I mean by that is sometimes we're responsible for things, not because we're culpable, but because we're the only ones that can change something. If there's something that you don't like about yourself or you don't like about your life, there's some chance that you have a little bit more control over changing that than you might think. You certainly don't have as much control

as you probably want. I know I don't, but you probably have more control than you think you do. Again, responsibility comes with some benefits. Thank you, Lisa. This has been fascinating. My pleasure.

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