Speaking of Psychology - Your Brain Is Not What You Think It Is, with Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

What if the way you think about your brain and how and why it functions is just plain wrong? Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of the book “7 ½ Lessons About the Brain,” discusses myths about the brain and her theory that it evolved not to think but to control our bodies, and that emotions are not something we experience, but things that the brain creates in order to make sense of the signals it receives from the world. Are you enjoying Speaking of Psychology? We’d love to know what you think of the podcast, what you would change about it, and what you’d like to hear more of. Please take our listener survey at www.apa.org/podcastsurvey. Links Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD 7 ½ Lessons About the Brain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're angry or do something impulsive, that's your reptilian brain in action, right? And if you talk yourself out of that impulsive act or gain control over your wrath, that's your neocortex at work, isn't it? And those emotions you feel, such as grief when a loved one dies, or joy at the birth of a child. Those are just things that happen to you in reaction to events in your life, correct? And they're universal across cultures, aren't they? Well, maybe not. What if emotions are things that our brain constructs to make sense of the signals it gets from our body

and from the world around us? What if the way you think about your brain and how and why it functions is just plain wrong? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

Our guest today is Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barratt, a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. Dr. Barrett has spent more than three decades studying emotion. Her research has helped to develop the idea that the human brain creates emotions by predicting rather than reacting to what happens in the world around us. She's published more than 240 scientific papers and is also a prolific science communicator writing articles and books about brain science for the general public.

Her two most recent books are how emotions are made, published in 2017, and seven and a half lessons about the brain, which came out in November. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Barrett. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Kim. I want to start with an idea that opens your new book, which is that the main purpose of the brain is not to think, but to regulate our bodies. This may seem counterintuitive or come as a surprise to some of our listeners.

I'm wondering, can you explain how you came to this conclusion and why it's so important? I actually started with the question of why do we even have a brain? That blob of meat between your ears is the most expensive organ that you have in your whole body. And so why do we even have a brain? And so what I did was I went back in the literature, and I looked in the literature on evolutionary neuroscience to a time when animals on the earth didn't have brains and looked at the evolution of the brain and found some really remarkable evidence that brains evolved

under the selection pressure of predation. So during the Cambrian period, animals learned to hunt one another deliberately and eat each other. And it's not that animals didn't eat each other before then, but there was very little evidence of actual hunting. And so under the pressure, selection pressure of hunting, what happened is that bodies got bigger and required much more coordination of internal bodily systems because animals without brains are don't have very much going on inside they have some some internal coordination but not very much and they really have no sophisticated senses to speak of that is they don't see they don't hear they don't smell they really don't know very much about the world outside their own bodies and what you see under predation is that

bodies get bigger, senses evolve, and brains appear. And if you look at the anatomy of the brain, what you see is that at the core of the brain, even at the core of the cortex, cerebral cortex, are the regions that are regulating the systems of your body, your immune system, your metabolism, an endocrine system, your autonomic nervous system, and your skeletal muscle system. And the networks in the brain that are responsible for remembering and thinking and seeing even are actually involved in regulating the body. And so the bottom line is that we do think and we do feel and we do see, but we do those things in the service of regulating the systems of the body.

Now, we don't experience every feeling of gratitude or sadness. every hug we give, every insult we bear as having anything to do with the body, but it does. And the reason why this is important is that many of the things that we think of as mental, like illnesses like depression and anxiety, or even just, you know, things like seeing or thinking, actually have important aspects to them that are related to the body. So depression, for example, in addition to being a mental illness and having immune, you know, functioning problems is also a metabolic illness, actually. And that's why it's important that we understand. It really starts to break down the boundary between the mental and the physical. And so, you know, we can understand, for example, that all mental disorders actually have basic physical processes that are in disarray.

and also things we think of as mental, physical illnesses like cardiovascular disease and so one, actually have mental aspects to them, which are really important to understand. So a few moments ago you talked about the brain being the most expensive organ. What do you mean by that? Metabolically speaking, your brain costs you 20% of your metabolic budget. That's more than your heart. That's more than your lungs. That's more than your liver. it's a very expensive organ to keep running. All those little neurons and so on. It's really expensive, actually, metabolically speaking. And it turns out that metabolic efficiency is a major selection pressure, not just on any species that's alive. It's true that it also, you know, it's important for the evolution of any species. It's also important for your health, mental and physical. If you have

metabolic dysregulation or things are not running as efficiently metabolically. I'm not just talking about circulating glucose or something. That's like one very small part of a very large, complicated system. If your energy regulation is not proceeding in a metabolically efficient way, you will get sick. And are our brains more expensive than other mammalian brains? I mean, we have this big, big hunk of meat up there. Yes, they are. Yes. You know, when you look at primates, let's say relative to other mammals, primates do have bigger brains relative to their body size than other mammals do, and humans have bigger brains. But I would say that, you know, the size of the cerebral cortex is not any bigger than you would expect for a primate who has a brain of our size.

So it's not like our cerebral cortex is so big relative to the rest of our brain. It's just we have a big brain relative to our body size and our cerebral cortex is as big as you might expect for a creature who has a brain of our size. But there is some genetic upregulation in the human brain that makes it more expensive to run, particularly in the cerebral cortex, in particular layers of the cerebral cortex that have to do with our ability to, I guess you could say, compress information, summarize information from multiple sources so that we can do things like abstraction. Another, what might be a surprising point to some people in your book, I think I alluded to it a little bit in the introduction, is the way that many of us were taught about the brain is

wrong. So a lot of our listeners, I'm sure remember learning that they're three, Three parts to the human brain, you've been asked this a million times. We think there's the lizard or reptilian brain that controls our basic bodily functions. There's the emotional brain. And then there's the rational brain, the neocortex that's like the pinnacle of evolution and makes us supposedly superior to other animals. But you say this is incorrect. So where did the idea of a triune brain come from and how do we know that it's wrong?

Okay. So I got to say, I'm happy to talk about it. I have been asked about this a lot, but I'm so happy to talk about. about it because it's like one of the most pervasive myth, modern myths in science. It's not even wrong is what I would say, Kim. And I also have to say that this is not my research, right? Like this is, I don't do research on this topic, although I do research on brain organization and its relevance for psychological functioning. And I do research on the structure and function of tissue that is called limbic, but it's not called limbic because it's about a motion. It's really more

about the anatomical structure of the tissue. But let me just say that the idea of a triune brain, a brain in three layers, really can be, I've traced it all the way back to Plato. Wow. Because, you know, Plato talked about the soul or the psyche, which is not exactly the same as a mind, but for present purposes, it's like close enough. He talked about the psyche as having the human psyche is having three parts, one part for instinct, one part for emotion, which he represented as two beasts, right, two horses, and then a charioteer, which is human rationality, which obviously controls the beast. And so right there, you have this idea of an inner beast and a rational part, and they're in constant battle for control of the chariot,

of your behavior. That's basically the idea. And so, You know, fast forward like a couple of thousand years and, you know, we're in the era of modern neuroscience like in the, you know, mid-20th century. And you have scientists who are using the best tools available to them, which is, you know, the naked eye or maybe some not so powerful microscopes with some dyes. And, you know, you look at a lizard brain and a lizard brain looks like it has a set of parts. And then you look at an early, like a small mammal brain, like a rat. And you all look there to look like there are some extra parts there.

And then you look at a human. You're like, oh, wow, there's really definitely a really big extra part there. And so the idea that really grew out of this that comes from Paul McLean, who was a neuroscientist, in Boston, actually, where I live in the 1940s, is this idea that lizards have circuitry for instincts. And then layered on top of that evolved the limbic system, limbic meaning border, which is really old cortex, considered to be old cortex, that borders these lizard parts, which is where emotions live.

And then layered on top of that is the new part of the cortex, the neocortex, which is where rationality lives, the pinnacle, as you say, of evolution. And so there are a couple of things wrong with this view. One is that evolution, we aren't the pinnacle of anything. Evolution didn't aim itself at us to use paraphrase wording from Henry Gee, the paleontologist, Henry Gee. And, you know, animals are well adapted to their niche. If they still, if a species still is around, you know, after a couple of, 100,000 years, or longer, then it means it's well adapted to its niche. And, you know,

other animals have some pretty miraculous abilities to do things that we don't have, frankly, and that we endow our superheroes with. So, yes, it's true. We can do some pretty amazing things as humans, but other animals can do very amazing things like grow back limbs. Yeah, we can't fly. We can't grow back limbs. We definitely can't grow new neurons in most of our brains. Whereas other animals, there are animals who can do all of those things, or each of those things, right? But more importantly, the evidence for molecular genetics, when you peer in deep into the cells, the molecular structure of cells, and you look at the genes deep within what you see really clear evidence that brains did not evolve like sedimentary rock, you know, or what I think of it is, you know, you've got this like deep animal beast, like inner ancient beast. And then, you know, what evolved on top of that was, you know, rationality like, like icing. on an already baked cake, you know? Brains didn't evolve that way.

They just didn't. That's the evidence. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years and yet hasn't managed to percolate its way into, not just into the public sphere, but into psychology textbooks. Like, yeah, anytime you read that the amygdala and other parts of the limbic system, which I would put in scare quotes, because there's, There is no limbic system in your brain. Anytime, you know, you read that the amygdala or the limbic system is being regulated by the prefrontal cortex, that is a phrasing which rests on this old, really mistaken idea that, you know, you have this inner beast lurking inside your brain, which is constantly.

in battle with your more sensible rational self and that the outcome of your you know that you're when your rational side wins you're healthy and moral and when your uh inner beast wins you're either uh you know if your inner beast wins because um you didn't try hard enough then you're not moral and uh if your inner beast wins because you um you know there's something wrong then you're sick that's just a that's just a it's a morality tale, but it doesn't reflect actually the biology of how we got these miraculous brains to begin with. You make another really interesting point in your new book that I think is another myth-busting point.

I think a lot of people have the sense that parts of our brains kind of go dormant from time to time, and we're not using them. And I think what you're saying is neurons are firing all the time. Maybe you can explain a little bit about how that works and why. So if you look back in the history of how neurons were discovered and how they were studied, like in the 1950s, for example, one way to study the properties of a neuron was to take a big squid neuron, like literally take it out of the brain and lay it out on a table. And when you lay out a single neuron on a table that you can see, because these are like really giant squids have.

like very, you know, they have a neuron that you can see with the naked eye as I understand it. It's dormant. And then you have to stimulate it with electricity to get it to produce an action potential down its axon. And this is very conveniently consistent with the idea that the stimulus response idea that has really been around in psychology, really since the inception of psychology, right? So psychology as a field was a, was a, field of fundamental philosophy until the mid-19th century when philosophers and neurologists and physiologists started to use the methods available to them from the physiology lab and from

patients with lesions to try to search for the physical basis of the psychological categories that were in mental philosophy. So the physical basis of memory, the physical basis of emotion, the physical basis of perception and so on. And the idea was that, you know, the brain is stimulated. The mind is stimulated by something in the world. And then maybe some processing goes on inside and then there's a response. So it's stimulus response jazzed up. This was very consistent with, you know, what happens when you look at an individual neuron lying on a, you know, table.

It's dormant and you have to stimulate it in order for it to fire. But that is not how neurons work when they are. actually in situ with other neurons bathed in chemicals and, you know, oxygen and so on. Neurons are constantly talking to each other. Your brain is basically having a conversation with itself throughout your entire life. And that's ongoing. And information from your body and information from the world merely modulate that ongoing activity. And that is the way the brain works. The scientists say, and therapists know this,

they use different words, but it's exactly the same idea, that the brain is running a model of the world, an internal model of the world. That's not quite right. The brain is a model, and it's a model of the body as it receives information from the world. So we don't model the world. We model the world. We model the information that arrives to our sensory surfaces, like our retinas and our cochlea and so and so forth, and all the sensory surfaces inside our body. And the brain is receiving this information, and it's attempting to make sense of it so that it knows what to do next to keep itself alive and well. And it's using past experience to make these guesses. So what you see and what you hear and what you smell and what you taste and so on. And what you feel in your body, because you don't really feel

anything in your body. You feel everything in your brain. Everything is felt in your brain. You see in your brain. You don't see in your eyes. You hear in your brain. You don't hear it in your ears. Everything you experience and everything you do is a combination of what's in the world and in your body. Because from your brain's perspective, that's outside the skull, right? So what's in the world, what's in the periphery, and what's in the past that your brain re-implements as the present. Let's turn to your work on emotion, which is also fascinating. And one of the big ideas that you've developed is that the emotions aren't things that happen to us, but there's something that our brain constructs. Explain that.

Well, yeah. In 25 years old. Yeah, right, exactly. So, You know, if you, what goes along with this idea that we're born with these ancient circuits, right, very deep inside our brain kind of hardwired already there is this idea that emotions happen to you. Something happens in the world like you see a snake and it triggers fear and then fear produces this whole cascade of events. You make a particular facial expression. Your heart rate goes up. Maybe you freeze or you run. And the idea is that this, you know, that this is universal with everybody in the world.

everybody who has a nautypical brain who has these circuits which are derived from ancient mammals or were evolved in hunter-gatherer society in Africa or whatever there are different versions of it and I'm painting kind of a

you might want to say it's a straw man sort of a description but you know you can add bells and whistles and nuances but the basic idea is that emotions are universal they have a single set you know anger is has a single set of features, maybe with some variation, but not so much variation that you can't

recognize it in someone's face or in their body or in their body movements or in their voice or whatever. And all I can say is, I know it feels that way. It feels that way to me too, you know, when I get angry, when I'm, you know, when I feel gratitude or any rush of emotion to me feels exactly the same way as it feels to you. But that is not how the brain works. And that is not what the evidence shows. I mean, so the evidence shows really clearly, it couldn't be clearer, frankly, that emotions are not universal. What is universal, however, is that the human brain is constantly constructing experience. It's constantly trying to make sense of the world around and the body, or actually I would say it's trying to make sense of what's going on inside the body

in relation to what's going on around us outside in the world. And it's doing this using past experience, and it's always doing this. So the way I would say it is kind of like this. The evidence to me suggests very strongly that your brain receives sense data from the world, sights and sounds and smells and so on, and it receives sense data from the body. And so when there's a loud bang or a tug in your chest, your brain receives that information as the outcomes of some set of causes.

But what caused that loud bang? Is it a car backfiring? Is it somebody slamming a door? Is it a gunshot? What's happening? You know, what caused that tug in your chest? Is it anxiety? Is it that you over ate?

You know, too much you have heartburn from like, you know, eating too rich of a meal? Is it the beginning of a heart attack? your brain actually doesn't know. It only receives the outcomes. It has to guess at what the causes are. This is called an inverse problem. You know what the outcome is. You don't know what the cause is. And so your brain has one other source of information available to it. And that is past experience. memory. So it's not like you walk around consciously remembering things in order to perceive the world. Your brain is constantly remembering, meaning it is constantly reassembling bits and pieces of past experience in order to make sense of what's going on in the body in relation to the world so that

your brain knows what to do next. Because frankly, if a loud bang is a door slamming, you would do something different in a particular situation than, you know, if it was a gun fire, if it was a gunshot. And so what your brain is, you know, if you were to, you know, anthropomorphize a bit, you'd say, you know, what your brain is constantly doing is it's asking the question, what is similar in my past, what is similar to what this sensory array looks like and what caused it and what did I do about it and did it work? Now, in psychology, things that are similar. to one another are a category. So your brain, you could say, is constructing categories. It's a

category construction organ. It's constantly using the past to construct categories to make sense of the present in order for the purposes of guiding action and regulating metabolism. But we also know that a representation of a category is a concept. So you could say also that what the brain is doing is it's doing concept generation, ad hoc concept generation. Your brain is constantly remembering, reassembling past experience as concepts that are tailored to the specific situation that you're in to make sense of what your body means in that particular situation so that it knows what to do next to keep you alive and well. And that's what emotions are. Emotions are just when your brain uses past experiences of emotion to make meaning of the present and guide action.

If emotion is something that our brain creates, then can we will ourselves to feel emotions differently? I mean, how much control do we actually have over our emotions? Well, I would say that we definitely can, but it's much harder to do than actually sometimes we make it out to be. and every client that every therapist has ever had knows this to be true. It's actually very, very hard to do. And also what it means is that what control looks like doesn't only happen in the moment when a person wants to change how they feel. So one thing I haven't done is made the distinction between affect and emotion.

And that's a really important distinction in the science that we do. You know, emotions are easier to change. Affect is not as easy to change in the moment. moment. So let me back up a little bit and explain that distinction and then I will answer your question. Your brain is always controlling your body and your body is always sending sense data back to your brain. And for the most part, we are not aware of all of those sense data to the same degree that we're aware of sights and sounds and smells and things. At least I hope you're not. If you are aware of what's going on inside your body, I feel really bad for you because it means

that you've got a whole drama unfolding there. And if you're aware of it, that means that you're probably in significant discomfort and I'm really sorry. But what evolution has done is made available that information to us as affect, as simple feelings. I feel pleasant. I feel worked up.

I feel calm. I feel comfortable. I feel uncomfortable. So your brain is regulating your body 24-7. Your body is sending information back to your train 24-7, and you feel affect, 24-7, regardless of whether you're emotional or not, you feel affect. Affect is universal.

Now, what affective features are associated with different things is not necessarily universal, always, but affect is universal. The ability, the capacity to have affect is universal, and most likely all mammals and many vertebrates, probably maybe all vertebrates, and maybe even some invertebrates can, also feel affect. That's a, you know, that's an interesting, you know, morass of confusion there. But it's interesting to talk about and think about. But, you know, I would say affect is, is definitely not a human specific ability. And sometimes when we're making meaning of the sensations and the affect that goes with it, sometimes we make episodes of emotion by

again, creating categories or concepts on the fly. In fact, there's a convenient term called a conceptual category, which means that the concept, that knowledge is what makes a bunch of things similar to each other in a category. Because a bunch of things can be similar to each other by virtue of their function, not by virtue of what they look like or smell like or sound like or taste like. And many things that we deal with in life are categories of that sort. And infants learn those kinds of categories in the first year of infancy.

They're called abstract categories where the similarity that draws the instances together are not perceptual. They're functional. That is, they serve some kind of function. And this is something I talk about in seven and a half lessons. And so affect is hard to change because you don't have volitional control over your heart and your lungs. You do have volitional control over your breathing.

And you can try to practice breathing in order to calm your heart and, you know, control your heart and so on and so forth. But you can't stop your blood from flowing. No. And so, and you can't, it's really, most people can't speed their heart up just by thinking about it. And, you know, so affect is actually really hard to change without drugs, like in the instant, you know. And that's really often why people use drugs, both prescription, you know, chemical. and unprescribed chemicals because they're attempting to relieve discomfort or distress, which is affective in nature.

But you definitely can change how you make sense of affect and the sensations that give rise to it. But there I would say in the moment, for example, what would James Gross and others call re-appraisal is just you could think of it mechanistically as your brain is recaptu. categorizing a set of the set of sensations is recategorizing what they mean. That is, it's conjuring a different category, a different concept to make sense of those sensations and therefore give rise to a different action. So in the moment, you can do that very deliberately, but sometimes even that is really, really, really, really hard to do. And one way to have more control over your emotions, in addition to just, you know, keeping, making it easier for your brain to regulate your body,

which is like get enough sleep, eat healthfully, you know, surround yourself with people who, you know, care about you and who you love and have good relationships with. In addition to those things, you know, you can learn and practice reconceptualizing that is changing the categories that your brain can make easily. So it's kind of like exercise, you know, or like driving. You know, first of all, it is like exercise because it's very effortful to do this. And so it's like an investment in a healthier you. But it is also like driving where at first it's really hard.

But then when you practice it really a lot, you know, it gets easier and pretty automatic. So you can take anxiety and turn it into determination or exhilaration even. You can take anger and turn it into awe. the aspect stays the same, but the meaning is what's changing. And if you practice in advance, you're like seeding your brain to be able to do this much more automatically. So, for example, you know, I'm like skeptical by nature, but there is research to show that gratitude and compassion and awe are very good for your nervous system and therefore for

your mental health. And right down the hall for me is a colleague who studies gratitude and the importance of gratitude. So I'm like, okay, fine, you know, all right, I'll try it. And so I set myself the task of, you know, gratitude I was already on board with, but all was a trickier one. So I thought, all right, I'll try to, you know, cultivate a sense of wonder for five minutes every day where, you know, I'm a spec and therefore my problems are a spec and, you know, let's see if I can do it. And sure enough, you know, it was hard at first, but I did it just like, you know, I learned to, you know, do a plant, hold a plank for a minute or two, whatever. And, um, and eventually it became really easy. And now I can switch in and out of, you know, that particular, um, state. My brain can make

it easily when I need it. And, um, and give my nervous system, you know, if you're a spec for a minute, your, your problems are a spec for a minute. And that gives you a break for a minute. And that gives you a break for a minute. And that changes how you breathe and it changes how you comport your body and it changes what you do next. So a lot of the things that we kind of know by different names, we misunderstand mechanistic way in which they occur. Right. So appraisal or reappraisal is a description of something that happens, it's not an explanation of the process that produces it. And by understanding how your brain works, you can generalize that process and start using it in new other ways. So, for example, you can learn other emotion concepts from other cultures that don't exist in our culture,

but that might be really useful for helping you to make sense of your affect and the sensations that give rise to it so that you can broaden the repertoire of actions that you can potentially take. And we know from the wonderful work of George Bonanno that flexibility is the key to resilience in any situation, even a really stressful one. And so that's a way you can control your emotional life, cultivate your emotional life, architect your life, architect your experience in a way that is before the heat of the moment. So what are the big unanswered questions in your field and what are you working on now? Oh my God. Well, I have a lab of 25 full-time people and, you know, a hundred or so undergraduate researchers. So we have many, many questions that we are trying to understand.

But one thing we're trying to understand, for example, is the name for your brain sensing your body is called interoception. And usually interception is studied as your awareness of your physical sensation. Are you aware of your heartbeat? But that's really a very small part of what interception is. Your brain is estimating the state of your body. It's modeling your body, basically. And most of that state estimation is happening outside of your awareness at all completely. You just have no awareness of it. And so that's a question we're really interested in. Not the question of like, are you're aware of your heartbeats, but how well is your brain actually tracking what's happening in your body? Because one cause of depression, for example, could be that your brain has a mistaken

model of your body. And there's some disconnect there. So that's one thing that we're really mechanistically trying to work out. Another is, you know, in the way that we understand some things that we think something first and then we act, or we think something first and then we feel something. So we go in and we try to tinker with how people think in order to change how they feel and what they do. But actually, the way the brain works is that your brain prepares your actions first and your experiences derive from that.

It's not the other way around. And this is also something that I explain in both books, actually. And there's a very strong likelihood that what's happening is not that you think bad things and then you feel bad, more like you feel bad and that leads your brain to think bad things. So it could be that there are problems with the way that your brain is modeling your body or literally problems with your body. For example, maybe your mitochondria are not as effective as they need to be.

And that could be a source of depression. That could be a source of, you know, this disconnect. Your brain is attempting to model your body. Your body's not functioning well in this really, you know, subtle way that you would not be aware of, but maybe you'd just be aware of feeling bad, and that that is actually what's driving those negative thoughts, not the other way around. To me, this seems, first of all, very plausible from a neuroscience standpoint. And what it means is that when we go in and we get people to change how they're thinking in order to change how they feel, what we're doing is actually just breaking a cycle.

We're not changing the cause of the problem. We're just interrupting an ongoing cycle. And again, I would say there are real lessons there about things that you might want to do differently if this is actually. It's not that what we're doing is bad. It's just that there might be additional things that we might want to think about doing

for treating mental illness. Well, it just sounds amazing the work that you're doing. I really appreciate you're taking the time to speak with me today. And I highly recommend, I mean, maybe I shouldn't say this, but I think your new book is very accessible and a great read. So I appreciate the time that you've taken. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, thanks very much. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.combeckiology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word at APA.org.

Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condihan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.