Instant Genius - How emotions are made
Episode Date: February 21, 2018This week, we chat to neuroscientist Lisa Feldmann Barrett about what happens in our brains when we create emotions, how to control them, and what this means for the future of artificial intelligence.... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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more. There are no facial movements, bodily changes or patterns of brain activity that uniquely
identify any emotion. For example, people smile when they're sad and they cry when they're
angry and they scream when they're happy. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC
Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print
and in several digital formats throughout the world.
Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.
Hello and welcome to this science focus podcast.
I'm Daniel Bennett, the editor of BBC Focus magazine.
In this episode, we try to make sense of our emotions.
Now, culturally speaking, we see emotions as distinct archetypes.
And by that, I mean, we all recognise the sudden rage
a dangerous driver might provoke in us, or the kind of joy that a puppy inspires.
But, according to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, not all of us experience and express these
emotions in the same way. In her new book, How Emotions Are Made, she challenges our current
understanding of emotions, and in it she describes how our feelings aren't as clear-cut as we
might think, and that instead, they're complex psychological experiences,
crafted in the moment and shaped by our lives.
Here's ScienceFocus.com editor Alexander McNamara,
speaking to Lisa about what happens in our brains when we create emotions,
how to control them, and what this means for the future of artificial intelligence.
You've got a new book out which is called How Emotions Are Made.
I'm just wondering if you can ask you, what are emotions?
Well, I think it's probably important to start off with what people believe emotions are
before I leap into the more complicated question of what they actually are.
So the pervasive belief in the public and really in science for a very long time is that emotions are kind of built into your brain from birth.
So the idea is that you and I and everyone around the world and maybe even some animals have a circuit for anger, a circuit for fear, a circuit for sadness.
and so on. And when these circuits trigger, they cause a specific facial expression that everyone
around the world can read and a specific physical state, like, you know, your heart rate changes
in a specific way or your breathing changes in a specific way. And you produce a specific action,
like running or attacking or what have you. So the belief is that emotions are kind of built in
and they're universal, and they're easily read by everyone around the world.
And it seems like, you know, there are decades of research now,
which suggests that none of those beliefs are true, actually.
So what's the new theory that's sort of changing this classical theory?
Yeah, so when we talk about a theory in science,
we usually are talking about not just a set of ideas,
but a set of ideas that are backed up by a lot of scientific.
evidence. And so the first piece of important evidence is that there are no facial movements,
bodily changes or patterns of brain activity that uniquely identify any emotion. For example,
people smile when they're sad and they cry when they're angry and they scream when they're happy.
And you or I or anyone can tremble in fear, jump in fear, freeze in fear, scream in fear,
hide in fear, attack in fear, even laugh in the face of fear.
So an emotion like anger is not a thing.
It's a category of highly variable instances where variation is the norm,
variation that's tied to the situation that you're in.
So that's the first important point to make.
The second point is that emotions are not built into your brain from birth.
They're built by your brain.
as you need them.
And the idea that's backed up by a lot of Evans now is that, you know, your brain, we sort of think
of our brains as reacting to things in the world, but in fact, your brain is predicting, not reacting.
It's guessing.
It's constantly guessing what's going to happen next.
And those guesses are the basis of your emotion.
And this happens completely outside of your awareness pretty automatically.
Sort of like a reflex?
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's specifically like a reflex
because, you know, your brain always has choices.
So when your brain is predicting, it's making a guess.
It doesn't usually make one guess.
It makes, you know, hundreds or maybe even thousands of guesses at the same time.
It's trying to pick which one is the best guess for this situation.
So what I would say is the fact that it's guessing is like a reflex,
but what it's guessing is actually based on your past experience.
Your brain is trying to figure out what's about to happen next in a particular situation
based on your past experience of what has happened in the past in similar situations.
So these guesses really are the basis of your emotions.
Right. Okay.
So for instance, you say that,
it's built in and it's gaining these experiences.
So if you take like a small baby, for example,
obviously they don't smile instantly.
Is that because they've taken that time to sort of work out
that when you're happy, you're smiling,
and they're taking that in as well?
Babies don't really know what happiness is.
They don't know that you're happy.
And they, you know, babies are basically born with brains
that are not completely formed.
They are born.
If you look at a newborn brain or even a one-year-old brain, these are not brains that look like miniature adult brains.
These are brains that are waiting a set of wiring instructions from the world.
And the way that we interact with a baby, when we feed a baby, when we talk to a baby, when we cuddle a baby, all of these things actually help to wires, wire the baby's brains.
So babies are not born with the capacity to feel angry or something.
sad or happy, they don't look at another face, another human face like their mother, their father's face,
and recognize happiness or sadness or anger. Babies are born with the capacity to have very simple
feelings that come from the body, like comfort, discomfort, calmness, agitation,
pleasantness or unpleasantness. But these aren't emotions. These are simple feelings that are part
every waking moment of your life and they kind of give you a quick summary of what's going on
inside your body like a barometer and that's what babies are born with the capacity to feel and we also
feel these simple feelings we feel them every waking moment of our life whether or not we are
making an emotion but sometimes out of these simple feelings we we make emotions and sometimes we make
other other mental events like a physical symptom or even a perception of another person right so
For example, if you know, you're eating dinner and you experience the food as delicious,
that's an example where these simple feelings are turned into a perception as opposed to an emotion.
And so babies are born with the capacity to have these simple feelings,
but they learn how to make emotion really throughout the first couple of years of their life.
They're learning how to make the emotions that are present in their culture.
Okay. So does that mean that we sort of like globally around the world?
Are there some emotions that we all express in the same way, or does that change?
Do we express emotions in the same way?
No, we don't.
My lab has studied people from the Hudson communities.
These are hunter-gatherer communities in Tanzania that have their ancestors have been hunting and gathering since the place to scene.
they do not experience or express emotion in the way that we do in the West.
My lab has gone to rural Namibia to study the Hymba communities.
These are very rural communities, again, very remote from Western civilization.
Again, they show highly variable differences in the way that they experience and express and recognize emotions.
So not everybody around the world smiles when they're happy and scowls when they're angry and pouts when they're sad.
And in fact, I would hazard a guess that you yourself don't scowl when you're angry and you probably all the time and you probably scowl at times when you're not angry.
So for example, my husband makes a full facial scowl when he's concentrating really hard.
And I would just say, you know, when I'm talking to audiences in the United States, I say, you know, when's the last time you saw anybody win an Academy Award for scowling when they're angry?
I mean, nobody, you know, it's not a very, when we scowl when we're angry, we're usually doing it to signal to somebody something deliberately, you know, like in a cartoon.
But for the most part, it's not just that emotions are not universally expressed in the same way around the world.
That's true.
But even within, you know, the UK or in the U.S. or in Canada, the way that emotion is, the way that emotions are,
are expressed are highly variable across people and across situations.
And we have to, as we get to know someone, we get to learn what the vocabulary of facial
movements are that they use to express their emotions.
So does that mean that we'll never actually, you know, as far as scientists looking in
or anything or just people looking at other people, does that mean that we'll never truly
be able to actually know what the other person is feeling or the emotions that they have?
Well, the brain is making probabilistic guesses.
And you can guess well or you can guess poorly.
And that's what scientists do too.
We guess sometimes well and sometimes poorly.
So what I would say, like, it's not random.
People don't move their faces randomly.
You know, facial movements and body postures and vocal cues all carry information about a person's internal state.
But it's not a one-to-one course.
And so part of what we do when we learn the emotions of a given culture is we learn what the likelihood is of certain, what the likelihood is of certain facial movements or vocalizations or body postures, what they mean, what their emotional meaning is in a given context.
So I don't think it's hopeless that we'll ever know.
But I think we never know for sure 100%.
We're always guessing.
It's just that we can guess with, you know, better probability or worse probability.
And I think it's a little humbling, right?
I mean, basically, there's no physical fingerprint for any emotion.
It's not like you can say that you're experiencing anger and I can say, well, actually,
no, you're sad.
And then there's some objective ground truth that we can appeal to to see who's right.
There is no objective ground truth, not because we can't measure physical changes
and emotion, but because there is no single fingerprint for anger. Anger is, and sadness in any
category of emotion is a highly variable grouping, not a single event that is the same
across situations, people, and cultures. When you said there's no sort of physical fingerprints
or anything like that, what is actually happening in the brain then when we have emotions? What's
happening to our bodies at that point? You know, it seems to us as if
our brains are made for thinking and feeling and seeing and making decisions and so on.
But that's actually from an evolutionary standpoint not true.
Brains evolved to control your body.
And as bodies got bigger, brains got bigger.
And the reason why is that you can think about your brain like the financial office of a
company, right? A large company has a financial office that tries to figure out where to spend
and what the revenues will be. So it's trying to kind of keep expenses and revenues balanced
across the various accounts and offices in a company to keep the budget, the financial budget of the
company imbalance, right? And your brain's kind of doing the same thing. It's managing a budget
for all the accounts in your body.
Nutrients are like water and salt and glucose and those kinds of things.
And in science we call this allostasis.
This body budgeting is really important because it's what keeps you alive and well
and able to pass your genes to the next generation.
It's important to do allostasis or body budgeting efficiently,
really metabolically efficiently.
That's a major constraint.
on your nervous system. The minute that your brain stops working in a metabolically efficient way,
your immune system gets involved and you get sick. And you get sick with a metabolic illness
like diabetes or depression or heart disease, some cancers and so on. So what your brain is doing
is it's maintaining alistasis, maintaining that body budget, and it's doing it predictively.
So, for example, when your brain is going to stand you up, it doesn't raise your blood pressure
after it stands you up.
It raises your blood pressure before so that oxygen can get to your brain and so you don't faint
when you stand.
Right.
So your brain is, when it's body budgeting, it's trying to anticipate what the needs of
the body and then meet those needs before they arise.
It's also anticipating the sensory consequences.
of those physical changes that are about to happen.
And that's where your simple feelings come from.
But simple feelings,
like feeling comfortable or uncomfortable,
feeling pleasant or unpleasant,
don't have any detail.
You know,
they don't tell you what to do about that feeling,
about that change in your body budget.
Instead, we need something else.
We need another kind of prediction
that your brain has to make
to make sense of those feelings, to make sense of those physical changes in your body.
So what your brain is doing is it's not just making a prediction about what your body needs to do
and what the feelings will be as a result, but also what those feelings mean in terms of what's
going on around you in the world. And it does it also predictively. And that's what an emotion is.
So, for example, if you were about to walk into a hospital room or into a clinic, let's say,
then, you know, your stomach, your brain might start to cause your stomach to churn,
and your brain might make anxiety or fear or worry out of that physical sensation and the feelings that come with it.
Alternatively, if you were walking,
into a bakery, it might make hunger out of that exame ache. And if you were meeting your lover for
coffee in the afternoon, your brain might make longing. So to give you an example, when my daughter,
Sophia, turned 12 years old, we made a disgust, a birthday party for her. And we, for example,
I took white grape juice and I poured it into medical urine cups.
So it looked like pee.
And I'm telling you, even though I was pouring the white grape juice myself, I swear to God,
it smelled like pee.
Like, I just could smell it, right?
And I made pizza and I doctored it with green food coloring to make the pizza look fuzzy
and moldy.
And I made vomit jello.
I took little pieces of vegetable and cut it up and put it into a peach gelatin so that it
looked kind of like vomit, like congealed vomit. But the real event at the party was we played a
game where I took baby food, like ground up baby food, like sweet potatoes and lamb and so on.
And I laid it kind of artfully in disposable diapers to make it look like poo. And then the kids had to
pick the diaper up, you know, and take a good, deep whiff of what was in the diaper and then
identify the food. And kids, these kids were having a full body gag. They were playing around.
You know, they were, this was like a real thing. They were completely disgusted. And I think this is
important to illustrate a couple of things other than, you know, being an awesome parent in making
a, you know, your 12 year old, a great birthday party. One is that they were exuberantly disgusted
these kids. They were not unhappy and they weren't, they weren't feeling unpleasant. They were
having a lot of fun to the point that, you know,
the making the point that, you know, disgust is not always unpleasant.
Sometimes it's pleasant.
Emotions are variable, right?
Fear can be pleasant when you're at a horror movie or you're on a roller coaster.
It's not always unpleasant.
So each emotion is a category of variable instances.
The second thing is the kids were simulating.
They were, that's the scientific term, for your brain, when your brain makes a guess about
what's going to happen next, it actually starts to change the firing of your own neurons,
of the neurons and other parts of the brain so that you start to smell and hear and taste things
that aren't really there. And this isn't just a fun party trick. This is actually how your brain
works. When your brain is making a guess about what's going to happen next, it starts to modify
the firing of its own sensory and motor neurons so that you start to prepare sensations and
feelings that haven't quite happened yet. And then when the information comes in from the world
and from the body, that information just confirms those guesses or it changes them.
And so the neat thing is that when, now in this case, you know, the kids were expecting a certain
smell in the diaper. They didn't get it. But they continued to smell what was in their head
instead of what was on the diaper.
And we do this all the time, you know.
We call it illusions.
But this is actually how the brain works.
So, for example, to you, it might feel, and to me, right?
It feels like we're just talking and that we're listening to each other.
And we're just reacting to what, you know, each person says.
But in fact, you know, your brain, because you've had a lot of experience with English and what the sounds mean,
Your brain is guessing every single word that is uttered from my lips.
Exactly.
And so if I were to, for example, ask you or ask your listeners to, in your mind's eye,
can you conjure the image of a red delicious apple, the kind that you would eat?
Can you see an apple kind of the ghost of an apple in your mind's eye?
Yeah, it's there.
And if you think about it for a minute, can you imagine grasping the apple and kind of
taking a bite into the apple, you know, hearing the crunch of the apple and maybe the kind
of tart sweet taste of the apple, maybe the roughness of the flesh on your tongue?
Can you imagine any of those sensations?
It's all making me very hungry and wanting an apple.
So here's the really cool thing.
If we were, if we had you in a brain scanner right now, we would see that when you imagine such
things, what's really happening under the hood is that your neurons in some part of your brain are
causing the visual neurons in your brain and the visual parts of your brain to fire differently
so you see an apple. And they're causing neurons in your auditory cortex to fire differently
so that you hear the crunch of the apple. And in gustatory.
cortex so that you taste something about the apple. And so what's happening is you're changing the
firing of your own neurons to have these kind of ghost-like sensations. These are the same thing
as what your brain is doing all the time. It's making predictions by changing the firing of its own
neurons in preparation for the next moment. And then when information comes in from the world and from the
body, that information either confirms or changes the predictions or sometimes the information
is ignored like my daughter's birthday party.
But the point is that what your brain is always doing is it's searching the past to make
predictions about the immediate future, which then becomes your present.
And these hallucinations, so to speak, are what neuroscientists like me call predictions.
This is just how your brain works, 24-7.
This is responsible for every experience you have in your life, every action that you take.
This is a very efficient way for a brain to work.
And this is how your brain makes emotions.
It anticipates what actions you need to take, what sensory changes will occur based on past experience in situations.
like this one. And so if you've been in, if you're in a situation you've never been in before,
your brain will do what a scientist called conceptual combination. It will combine
knowledge from the past in novel ways to let you make a good guess about what's going to happen
next. And so babies, right, are all prediction error all the time. They don't, they can't make
predictions very well. So they are, they are constantly taking in information from the world and learning.
That's our fancy name for, you know, taking in prediction error, learning. They're learning about
the sights and sounds and smells and feelings that go together. You know, we call this statistical
learning. And they're learning to build this knowledge base so that their brains actually can start
predicting that's how their brains become wired to look like adult brains.
That's just incredible, just the amount that goes on there that, you know, we didn't realize
that the brain was doing all that time with the emotions.
Yes.
You know, the really cool thing is that your brain is a master of deception.
It's creating experiences and directing your actions with a magician skill.
It never reveals to us how it does so, and all the while it gives us a, you know, false
sense of confidence that our day-to-day experiences, you know, its products, actually reveal
how it works when in fact that's not the case at all.
What about for people who don't have the ability to create as many emotions or recognize
as emotions in other people? Is there something that's going on with the brain there that's
stopping that happening? Yeah. So there are differences in what scientists call emotional
granularity and that means that if you know less about emotion you've had fewer experiences or you
have people in your past your caregivers didn't teach you emotion concepts didn't use a lot of
emotion words then your brain is not equipped to make very many emotions or to perceive emotions
in other people and as a consequence you will be what's called experientially blind to emotion so
for example, if I were to play you a sound in a language, here you play you some speech in a
language that you've never heard before or that you don't know how to speak. So I'm sure
there's a language you don't know how to speak. What's a language you don't know how to speak?
Most of them, to be honest. I know, me too. I'm barely monolingual some days. But, but, you know,
so let's say Mandarin Chinese. Can you speak Mandarin Chinese? I cannot speak Mandarin.
no. Okay, great. So when you hear someone speaking Mandarin, how does it sound to you? Does it sound
like something meaningful or just like noise, like sounds that you can't quite make sense of?
It sounds that I just can't make the sense of. Even the sort of intonation and tone doesn't match up.
Right, exactly. And in fact, sometimes in a language that you've never heard before or that you're not
familiar with. It's even hard to figure out where the, where the breaks between the sounds are for words,
right? It just sounds like a constant stream of sound. In my book, I talk about how, you know,
the first time my daughter played dubstep for me, I thought, I said that horrible parental thing
of like, like, this is music, this just sounds like noise. But in fact, it does, it does sound like
noise to me. I mean, I did actually, after a while, after she played it for a while, and she actually
learned, she started playing it on the drums herself, I actually could start to recognize the sounds
as music, but it took me a while. And that's exactly the same thing that happens with feelings and
emotion. So if you don't have past experience with something and it's really not, you know, you,
and you can't even take your past experience and combine it in a novel way, you are experientially
blind, meaning it's just noise to you. It's just, you know, it's just sounds or it's just
flashes of light and so on. So for example, if you take someone who was born with cataracts
or with corneal damage so severe that they can't see at all, and then when they become adults,
they have their corneas replaced with a transplant or maybe their cathericks removed,
they don't automatically start seeing.
They are experientially blind to what the flashes of light mean.
They have to learn what they mean.
They acquire knowledge.
We call this acquiring concepts.
And those concepts, that knowledge, lets them start to see properly.
So for people who know very few emotion concepts or who will move from one culture to another where the emotion concepts are different,
what they experience and perceive are these simple feelings, which scientists call affect.
So if you go anywhere in the world, you're usually pretty good at guessing whether someone is feeling pleasant or unpleasant,
whether they're feeling pretty agitated or feeling pretty calm.
The evidence suggests that people from all cultures are pretty good at reading affect in each other.
And babies are certainly good at reading affect in their caregivers.
But you really need to have specific emotion knowledge from your culture that you learn as concepts, emotion concepts.
And if you have fewer of these concepts, you've learned fewer of them,
then you, not only are you experiencing mostly affect and the simple feelings and having
difficulty perceiving emotion and other people, but you're at risk for all kinds of illnesses
and difficulties because simple feelings aren't sufficient to know what to do next.
So that leaves you kind of at sea.
It makes it hard for your brain to know what you should do next.
and to predict what somebody else is going to do next.
And this is a phenomenon called, the scientists call,
Alexothymia, that is being very, very, very agranular.
So for those, for people who struggle with Alexithymia,
happy and excited and feeling gratitude and awe
are all synonyms of feeling good.
and angry and sad and afraid are synonyms of feeling bad
as opposed to very specific emotional events.
Does this mean that there would be a problem, for instance,
if we're, so obviously a lot of artificial intelligence
is trying to recognize emotions at the moment.
Does that mean that that's only going to be as good
as the information that we recognize that we give it
and that's leaving out a lot that we just don't know about of the emotions?
Yes. So my concern is that tech companies are
spending millions of dollars and are harnessing hundreds of thousands of hours of the most
creative minds on the planet. And they're building these fantastic technologies and they're
asking the wrong questions with them and overclaiming what they can do. So, you know, you build
a face reading device. That device is not recognizing anger or sadness or fear. It's recognizing
facial movements of scowling or frowning or smiling, which can have a variety of emotional
meanings and in fact can sometimes have nothing to do with emotion at all. So I think it's
important to realize that these technologies that the companies are building potentially could
revolutionize the science in a way that will allow us to solve some of the most pressing
problems that people face in their lives. But currently how they're being used, at least how
they're being portrayed and reported in the media, suggests that they're asking the wrong questions.
They are over-claiming answers. And that can have really serious consequences for people's lives,
including whether or not they are convicted of a crime or in the United States, you know, given the death penalty,
or not be convicted of a crime when in fact they actually did something to harm someone else.
So does that mean that in your opinion, humans will always be better at judging or at least having an empathetic understanding of emotions rather than AI?
Well, I think that's a different question than the question that you asked before.
So, you know, do I think that technology will be able to detect emotion in people ever?
I think the answer is probably yes if the research was done differently.
So if the tools were put to somewhat different use and they were asking somewhat different questions,
then I absolutely think that those tools could actually be really useful for revolution.
our understanding of emotion.
But the question of whether a piece of technology can go beyond detecting or making a pretty good guess, which is what detection means, making a pretty good guess at the physical state of another human, whether if we go beyond that to whether or not the technology actually has empathy for a human, then I think you're, you know,
you need to have something more than just really good detection algorithms and, you know, asking
questions in the right way. So I just, for example, was talking with a bunch of a class at MIT
last night who are really interested in building, you know, feeling machines. And again, I would
just point back to the major point that brains didn't evolve to think. And they didn't,
evolved to read emotional expressions in other people. They didn't evolve to see. They evolved to regulate
the systems of a body. And they are intricately involved with that. So the very same regions of
your brain, while they are working together to create thoughts and perceptions and emotions, they
are also regulating your body. They are never asleep, these regions of
the brain, they're always working, always regulating your body from birth till death.
And so this suggests that the ability to think and feel and see even is intricately related
to what is going on inside your own body. It may not feel that way to you, but that's what
it looks like is happening under the hood. And so if you want to have an empathic piece
of technology of artificial intelligence, it needs to do something more than just detect whether
or not you've made a smile or a frown.
When it comes to emotions, is it possible for us to control them or using just what we do
with our bodies or what we do with their brains?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, here's the thing.
We have much more control over what we feel than people might think, but that doesn't mean
that we can just snap our fingers and choose how we feel.
The way to think about it is there are three kind of groups of ingredients that go into making an emotion.
What's going on inside your body?
What's going on outside in the world?
And the past experiences that you have that your brain can reconstitute as predictions.
And so if you change any of these three ingredients, you can change how you feel.
the horizon of your control is much greater than you might imagine.
So, for example, if you keep your body budget solvent, you get enough sleep, you eat properly,
you avoid pseudo foods that don't provide enough energy, you get enough exercise.
Is that going to change the ease with which you control your emotions?
Absolutely.
You know, if your body budget's in balance, you will feel unpleasant less often.
And then your brain will not be in a position of having to make negative emotion as frequently.
you know, so it sounds kind of boring.
Like I sound more like a mother than I do, like a nagging mother than I do like a neuroscientist.
But, you know, I can be a nagging neuroscientist for a moment and say, you know, get enough sleep, eat properly, get enough exercise.
Actually, these things matter tremendously to your ability to control your emotions.
Another thing that you can do is you can cultivate new experiences, you know, learn new
emotion words, deliberately cultivate experiences, invest the energy when you have it to make new
experiences because when you do, you seed your brain to predict differently in the future.
And this is, it's like driving.
You know, if you invest a little bit of time at the beginning, something, you know,
it takes a lot of effort to learn to do something.
But then if you practice enough, it becomes pretty automatic.
So, for example, people do this with awe and they do this with gratitude.
You know, they practice making those emotions, and that actually seeds their brain so that they can
start to do it automatically with very little effort in the future.
Another thing that you can do is change the circumstances that you're in.
So, you know, sometimes that means physically getting up and moving to a different place,
going for a walk or what have you, but sometimes it means just shifting your attention
to pay attention to different things in the world without really moving your body.
This is what it means to be mindful.
So, for example, if I'm walking down the street, I can step over a crack and the sidewalk
and completely miss the fact that there's a weed there.
Or I could notice the weed and I could be, I could marvel at the power of nature
to assert itself even through the crack of a concrete sidewalk.
And in that moment, I've created a little moment of awe,
which gives me some perspective on everything else in my life
and might be soothing.
Well, I can tell you, I do find it soothing, actually,
to have these little moments of awe throughout the day,
which you can learn to cultivate just by shifting your attention slightly.
So I think we have a lot more control over our emotions than we think we do.
But that control isn't always in the moment.
Sometimes the control means that you're doing things now to give you a lot more choices later
to make it easier for your brain to shift around what you're feeling later.
And that's what I call being an architect of your experience.
That was Lisa Feldman Barrett there, talking about what happens in our brains when we create emotions.
Her book, How Emotions Are Made, is out now.
Thanks for listening to The Science Focus podcast.
In our March issue, which is on sale now, we look at the science that makes us feel good about the future,
explore how hallucinogens reset depressed minds,
and we look at how we might replace animal testing in the future.
And of course, there's much, much more inside.
Thank you for listening to the Science Focus.
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