WHOOP Podcast - Neuro Knowledge: A Deep Dive Into The Brain With Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is joined by Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD. Dr. Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She is among the top 1% most-cited scientists worldwide over the past five years and has authored two best-selling science books, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Kristen and Dr. Feldman Barrett discuss how Dr. Feldman Barrett got started in the field (3:35), realizing her research was taking shape (11:56), the human brain (16:25), modernity impacting brain evolution (24:17), affect and arousal (42:17), Seven and a Half Lessons on the Brain (53:41), people thinking about emotions (55:22), and what Dr. Feldman Barrett is obsessing over (1:00:39).Resources:Dr. Feldman Barrett's Website  Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with the best of the best. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. This week's episode, WOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes, is joined by Lisa Feldman-Barritt. Dr. Feldman-Barritt is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital, MGH, one of the best hospitals in the world. For the past five years, Dr. Barrett has been among the top 1% most cited scientists worldwide for her research in psychology and neuroscience, having published over 280 peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been cited more than 92,000 times. It's pretty remarkable.

She has also authored two best-selling science books, How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life of the brain and seven and a half lessons about the brain. Kristen and Dr. Feldman Barrett discuss the core components of emotions, the neurological connection of emotions, how to understand and interpret emotions, and all the findings and teachings of Dr. Feldman Barrett's two bestselling books. That's right. This podcast is hitting emotions. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast, whoop.com.

Call us 508-443-4952. Without further ado, here are Kristen Holmes. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has been among the top 1% most cited scientists worldwide for her research in psychology and neuroscience. She has testified before the U.S. Congress, is the chief science officer for the Center for Law, Brain Behavior at Mass General Hospital, has served as president of the Association for Psychological Science, co-founded the Society for Effective Science, and actively engages in informal science education for the public via popular books,

articles, and public lectures. Lisa's TED Talk has been viewed more than 7 million times to date. Colleagues have called Dr. Feldman Barrett the most important, affective scientist of our time and the deepest thinker on the nature of emotion since Darwin. Dr. Feldman Barrett, warm us welcome to the week podcast. Thank you. so much for having me on the podcast, Kristen. I'm so excited for this conversation. And I think, you know, our listeners are really into living a healthier and more meaningful life. And I think

the research that you've done in the realm of emotion science provides this insanely compelling argument that if we as individuals improve our understanding of how the brain and body develops and processes emotions, we can in fact live a healthier and more meaningful life. And I can't wait to dig into the work that you've done to just help us understand what these processes are and how we can think about them to make more accurate, meaningful associations in our life. And a lot of, I think, the assumptions that we've made about emotions are just are flat out wrong. So maybe we can start, you're starting your PhD, you have this intention to be a psychotherapist, but all of a sudden there's this kind of grand pivot. Maybe you can take us back to that and then we can kind of get

into, you know, the brain and just kind of create this foundation for a conversation around emotion. Sure, sure. I mean, I think that, you know, you could talk about my education as sort of one long, actually even my career is sort of one long educational experience. So, you know, my original intention, even before graduate school, was to go to medical school. And I was always really interested in physiology. I really liked anatomy. Actually, even as a high schooler, I took like an anatomy class, you know. I just really thought the systems of the body were super interesting. A bunch of my friends went to medical school before me, and I watched what they were doing, and I thought, you know, I don't really like being bossed around. I don't like

following other people's orders. I have my own ideas about things, and so I thought that a PhD would be a better route for me, but I still was super interested in the mind. And I thought that, you know, trying to understand how people worked kind of holistically was the right way for me to go. And one of the things you do when you go to graduate school is you need to do your own research projects, as you know, and in order to demonstrate that you're competent in a laboratory and that you won't hurt anybody terribly, you have to try to replicate studies that have already been published.

And so I attempted to do this eight times. And I had my own little replication crisis, you know, eight times I tried, eight times I failed. And by the time I was at the end of my third year in graduate school, so I was, for people who don't, you know, or listeners who don't know, you go through, at some point in your graduate education, you go through like a series of very big tests, usually called comprehensive exam. where, at least in my day, people failed. Like, you could fail and you have to leave. It was not a foregone conclusion that you're going to pass these things. No, not at all. So I was writing comprehensive exams at the same time as trying to figure out what I was going to do.

And my advisor left. I mean, it was just this, you know, she went to another university. So my life was basically falling apart. And I was getting divorced. So it was like just this, I got married, very young, whatever. Anyways, my life was falling apart. What I did was I went back and I looked really closely at the data that I did have. from eight studies and realized that actually I was replicating an observation again and again

again. So I was replicating myself. And what I was finding was that people were not distinguishing between feelings of sadness and depression and feelings of anxiety and fear. And I'm not talking about clinical depression here. I'm talking about reports of feeling depressed. Feeling low. Feeling low and distress, basically. And I thought, oh, well, the problem here is that the measures of emotion that I'm using are not working. And everybody knows that. So you aren't wrong. They were wrong.

Yeah. I thought, well, everyone knows. Everyone's, I, you know, remember reading in my textbooks that, you know, what I would now call an emotion category, like anger or sadness or fear, these categories have distinct expressions. they have distinct physical manifestations, they have, you know, the idea would be that they have their own distinct circuits. And it seemed to me that the obvious path to take would be to just measure emotions objectively rather than asking people how they felt and that that would be the solution to the problem. And maybe I might even discover, you know, why it is that some people are unable to distinguish these clearly distinguishable states. That was,

my kind of operating premise, I thought this would take me like four months, you know, like I would just, you know, learn to measure people's faces and bodies. And then I'd And that's just always like the classic naive, like, oh, yes, it's going to take me four months. And then four years later. Yeah, like, well, 30 years later. I mean, so it ended up becoming really my career, actually, because what I discovered really systematically. So I had to retrain, you know, to learn how to measure facial movements, for example. And I thought, well, you know, everyone knows that Darwin said that, you know, that people scowl and anger and they smile in happiness and they frown and

sadness and these are universal expressions and we share them with other animals and blah, blah, blah. Well, it turns out that it's a little more complicated and also Darwin was wrong about that. So Darwin, the book that Darwin wrote on the expression of the emotion in men and animals make certain assumptions that we now know are not the case. And believe me, I'm not, are we led to you salty language here? I'm not shitting on Darwin. I mean, I think, you know, on the origin of species as a book is a masterpiece, right? I don't think anyone would disagree.

But also, these books were written at a particular time in a particular place. You have to think of them as historical sources. And Darwin was wrong about some of the assumptions he made were wrong. And it's okay. Great scientists can be wrong about things, you know. So because it turns out that people don't frequently scowl in anger, for example, like, you know, studies now show really clearly that people maybe scowl about 35% of the time when they're angry, which is more than chance. So scowling in anger is one expression of anger, but 65% of time on average, people don't scowl when they're angry. They do something else with their face that's meaningful.

So, okay, well, then I'll have to retrain as a psychophysiologist because, you know, obviously there's no diagnostic signal in the face. I'm not saying faces are meaningless. I'm saying that they're meaning, the meaning of a facial movement as an expression is contextual. Yeah. So more nuanced than what we're giving credit for. And so obviously, for a quick and dirty measure, I'll just measure. you know, the peripheral physiology will, because everyone knows that William James said that

there was one pattern of physiological change for each emotion. But actually William James didn't say that. He said exactly what he actually said. When he said a pattern of physiological change for an emotion, he meant an instance of emotion. So he was basically saying, you could have two instance of anger, and they would have very, very different peripheral, they could have very, very different peripheral physiological changes associated with them. That was his actual view. And so anyway, systematically, I just kind of would retrain in a field, learn about that field, learn about the history and the theories and the measures in that field, and systematically just went looking for these fingerprints or signatures, biomarkers, if you

well for different emotion categories. And it turned out that there aren't any. You know, and then the question became, well, okay, so there's this variation. Variation is the norm when it comes to emotion. You don't do one thing or feel one thing or look one way when you're sad or when you're happy or when you're angry. So how is it that we, what is, you know, what is a brain doing when it's creating emotions? And that really led me to what I think of now is probably the main thrust. of my work, which is, so what is it, what is a brain and how does it work? Why do we have brains? So really, you know, 20 years of research on emotion became the vehicle for me to ask questions, really basic questions about brain structure, brain function, brain evolution, and so on.

One thing I learned from you is that brain is not the thinking, which we're going to talk about a second, but, you know, there's been this classic view of emotions that's been hanging around for like 2,000 years, right? So I just want to know, like in your late 20s, presumably, you come to the realization that that viewpoint on emotions is wrong. I just want to understand just the human moment of when you're, you know, back at your apartment or your house and you're brushing your teeth or getting into bed and you're thinking like, I'm going to get some real shit for this. I get, I just so want to understand. You know what? So I was so. Was there a realization or no. And there should have been. But no. And I think I was really naive. So I'll just betray that

another example of this naivete. No, I thought. First of all, I didn't come to that realization in my 20s. I came to that realization later because when I realized the face wasn't going to give me an objective measure of emotion, I thought I went to the body. And when I realized the body wasn't going to get me that I went to the brain. And now I'm in my early 30s and I'm retraining as a neuroscientist, which is not a, I mean, training as a psychophysiologist was hard enough. But re-training as a neuroscientist, that took several years. And it was when I had my child, and that slowed me down a little, for many reasons, not the least of which is you can't walk into a scanning bay with a big magnet when you're pregnant.

So, you know. But no, I mean, actually it was more like I would be saying to my husband, my current husband, not the practice husband who I divorced in graduate school, I'd be saying to my husband, is this right? Am I, like, what is going, what's going? Am I completely wrong about this? So, no, I think it was more, I just wasn't, I just had an open mind and I was curious.

But honestly, I actually thought that people would be excited. Like, I love, I wouldn't say I love being wrong, but when someone, when I see a piece of evidence or a paper, a published peer review paper that violates my, intuitions. I just love it. I have a lot of fun with it. There are some things that I've been... I think that is the core feature of a scientist, though, like a true science. I don't think so. No. I don't think so. I mean, I think science is more complicated as a human endeavor than that. I think that's the idealization. Yeah. And it's not like I've never, it's not like I've never

struggled with being wrong because I certainly have been wrong about some major. things in my work, you know, specifically the role of affective feelings like mood. I had to really change my views on that based on the evidence that we were collecting and also that other people were finding as well. But I guess I would say, no, I actually was sort of taken a back. And let's just say I've learned to appreciate scientists who are willing to actively engage with counterintuitive evidence or even evidence that contradicts their own views. There are people who enthusiastically and with great curiosity engage with such data, but I wouldn't say it's the norm. Yeah. So I was shocked, actually. I was shocked at the

And I also felt, and this is not a conversation about women in science, but I, you know, I'm five foot two. I'm kind of, you know, small of stature. And I think that all of those things worked against me, including having breasts and a vagina, you know, like I just think that as a woman, when you come along and say, well, you know, what you guys have been doing actually for 100 years, totally wrong. It does not make you, you don't win popularity contest that way. That's hard. I mean, that is definitely a whole story. separate discussion. Yeah, it certainly is. I would love to engage with you on because, you know, I think it's important. I think we're also in fields where there actually aren't a lot of

women, you know, when you look at, at physiology and neuroscience. For sure. And actually most, I mean, I certainly have trained some wonderful people in my lab. But on average, there are more women who train with me than men. And believe me, they're all, all of them are, I mentor all of them. I mean, they've watched what's happened to people who, I'm certainly not the only one. There have been a number of us who've been pushing at this question for a long time. But they've watched that happen, and that's the environment that they've grown up in. So they're very aware going in. They're not naive.

So the brain. So the animal kingdom is made up of just mind-blowingly array of just super cool brains. what makes the human brain distinctive and why does that matter? Yeah, so it's not the things that you would think, or at least that, you know, the sort of the myth, I would say, or the story that gets told is that what makes the human brain unique is our big, juicy cerebral cortex, right? That wrinkly bit, you know, that sits like a cap on top of the rest of the brain, that it's big and that that is the home of rationality and that that's what makes humans distinct, that we can think, we can plan, we can engage

in very deliberate decision-making, and that we have this old, ancient, animalistic part of our brain, you know, which is under the cerebral cortex, it's like your kind of your inner beast, you know, that you carry around with you. It's like the lizard brain that we refer to. in the limbic system, you know, they're like, you have this inner beast that has to be tamed by rationality by that big honkin cerebral cortex and that your brain is like a battleground between instincts and emotions on the one hand and, you know, rationality on the other hand and they're constantly in battle for control of your behavior.

Every executive coach in the world uses that. For sure. We're here to tell them that that is wrong. It is 100% categorically incorrect. This is not my evidence, right? This is evidence from 50-plus years of evolutionary biology, like molecular genetics and anatomy and, you know, people who've done absolutely really outstanding work in evolutionary biology. There's just too much evidence for us to talk about in even an hour.

about why that view is wrong. Right. So first of all, our cerebral cortex, the cerebral cortex of a human brain is not bigger. It's about exactly the size it should be for a primate of our size. It scales, you know, pretty consistently with the rest of the brain for primates using a primate. I mean, there are differences in proportions when you look at, you know, reptiles versus, you know, mice versus primates. But as far as primates go, we're pretty typical.

Every mammal has a brain that is built from a common brain plan. This is work by the neuroscientist Barbara Finley. And what she's shown really convincing me is that every mammal has this common brain plan where neurons are born during an embryo formation, that neurons are born and they wire up in a pretty typical pattern. And even after birth, like the brain events, the developmental brain events that happen, are pretty consistent across all mammals.

What changes is the duration of time that you can be in any stage. And that's, so if you're in a particular stage for longer, more of those neurons are born and they wire up differently. There's a great saying, brains are like companies. They reorganize as they grow.

And so what's happened is that for certain periods of time, certain developmental stages, the human brain is growing for longer. And that gives us extra size and extra connectivity. So what really marks a human brain as different, say, from even a chimpanzee brain, is there's much more connectivity, which allows for additional, signal processing. It allows us to do certain things with our brains that chimps can't do. And also, because we're just physically large animals, we have physically large cerebral cortex. That extra space allows us to compress and summarize information in signals so that in the brain

in a more abstract way than other animals can. And so it's really, we have the same brain plan, the same computations are made. It's just we can kind of do more with them. I just want to say chimpanzees can do things we can't do. So whereas we can go beyond the sensory and motor similarities between things, So if you take three apples and, you know, they all around and they all have a similar color and they all have a similar flavor. And, you know, we would summarize that into apple.

And what can you do with an apple? Well, you can eat it, but you could also throw it at someone as a weapon. You could poison someone with it. You could, right? We can abstract away from the sensory motor particulars. And we can see commonalities in the functions. that we use objects for, right? Chimps don't do that,

but what they can do is if you put three apples in front of them and then you take them away, you bring one back, they can tell you which one it was. You know, like they have, they can really focus in on details. Whereas we lose the details because we're abstracting away from them. So when I say these, this is what makes.

And how does that serve us? Well, if you look at what chimpanzees do, they're foraging in the forest for food. They have to know, how is this tree different from that tree, we impose functions on things that they weren't designed to have by nature. And then we agree on them and then they have those functions. So, for example, money, right? We little pieces of paper, we all agree that little piece of paper can be traded for material goods. And then poof, they can be. But it, you know, and we've done this before in

in human history, we've done it with barley and salt and diamonds. We've done it with big rocks in the ocean. We've done it with all kinds of things. So we just, we all agree to impose a function on something. And then the thing has that function. I mean, and we, that's what a government is. That's what a president is. That's what the Supreme Court is. That's what a vote is. So we use these abstractions and we build things with them. We add to our reality. It also means we, can take them away, you know, if we all didn't agree that little pieces of paper could be traded for material goods, they'd lose their value and then they wouldn't. And that's actually how the great crash, you know, mortgage crisis happened. People agreed that mortgages were worth

something and then they decided they weren't. Some people decided they weren't and then they weren't anymore. Yeah. So chimpanzees don't do that. They don't really have the capacity to do it, but they have the capacity to remember specific details about specific objects in ways that far outstrip anything that a human can do. And I'm mentioning this because I think, I'm telling you what some of the things that make the human brain distinctive, but it doesn't necessarily mean the human brain is better. Yeah. You know, there are other animals that have amazing capacities that we don't have that are just, that they're suited to their, their environment. They're suited to what ecologists would call their ecological niche. They're

suited to the ecology they live in, and so are we. In what ways in your view has modernity working against how our brain has evolved? Well, you know, a lot of people have a lot to say about that. It's usually phrased as we have this ancient brain plan and modern life doesn't

jive well with this brain plan. And a lot of the things that people say, I think, are wrong. So I don't really like to phrase it that way. I would phrase it slightly differently and say

your brain's From an evolutionary standpoint, your brain's most important job is running the systems of your body. I mean, this is something I've talked about in my books and in my papers that, again, this is not my, it's not my discovery that brains, you know, came on the evolutionary scene as bodies got bigger and more complicated, as sensory systems developed and so on. That's other people's research, but to me it points to a really important insight, and that is the brain's most important job is regulating and coordinating the many, many, many systems of your body. And the most important selection pressure, the most important consideration is metabolic efficiency. So it's not that your brain is trying to reduce spending. it's trying to be frugal in its spending.

That's a different idea, right? So there's this notion that the brain works by homeostasis, that you have a set point, and if you deviate from that set point, then you know, you have to bring yourself back. Some things do work by homeostasis, like temperature regulation seems, you know, you can't go outside certain years.

But mostly the brain doesn't work by homeostasis for a living creature. Mostly it works by what we call allostasis, which means your brain is attempting to predict the needs of the body, and it attempts to meet those needs in advance. So it's predicting correcting, predicting, correcting, which is much more metabolically efficient than reacting. And so metabolic efficiency, it turns out,

is really important for all kinds of things, including physical health, mental health, your ability to have children to pass your genes on to the next generation. And this is true across the animal kingdom. Metabolic vision seed rules. Okay. So if that's the case, then because, you know, you have to do things that will cost you resources. So the way I, you know, talk about it with a metaphor, basically, I should say,

all metaphors in science are wrong, okay, but some of them are useful. And so I talk about the brain, you know, running a budget for the body. It's not, it's not budgeting money, it's budgeting, salt, glucose, oxygen, you know, all the nutrients and chemicals that are necessary to keep a body alive and for the brain to stay alive as a physical organ. And so, you know, just like in a budget, if you're going to have a big expenditure, You want to make sure the money is in the account before you spend so you don't run a deficit, right? But because you can make withdrawals, you can make deposits, you can have savings, and you can have taxes.

And so a body budget works very similarly. The brain is always running a budget for the body. It's attempting to anticipate the needs of the body and meet those needs before they arise. So, for example, dragging your ass out of bed in the morning is a expenditure, right? Exercising is an expenditure. Learning something new is an expenditure. Persistent uncertainty is a big expenditure. Now, some of these expenditures, some of these spendings are like investments for a healthier future you.

Exercise is a great example, right? you exercise, you spend a lot of energy, but what's happening is the brain is conditioning itself and the body to snap back into shape after you expend that energy as long as you replenish what you spend, or maybe even make some deposits before you, you know, you exercise, so you have a drink or you do whatever. When your brain predicts that you're going to have a big metabolic outlay, it tries to make that energy available to the cells that will need it. That's what cortisol does. So cortisol is not a stress hormone.

Cortisol is a hormone that gets glucose into your blood quickly and conditions your cells to take up that glucose, so to use it translated into ATP, you know, for use. Gosh, that's talked about incorrectly. Cortisol, you know. For sure. Yeah. Now, so what is stress? Stress is just any moment where your brain believes that there's a big metabolic outlay. That's going to, right? So as you wake up in the morning before you get out of bed, you have a cortisol surge. Before you hit the gym, you have a cortisol surge, right? But there are other times. Remember, think about what are the things that are expensive in for a brain, physical movement, you move your body. You learn something new. That. that's metabolically expensive. Persistent uncertainty, very expensive. So what is modern life?

Modern life is a bunch of withdrawals, not enough deposits, a bunch of taxes, and sometimes savings, but not as much as you might think. Or need. Or need. And why do I say this?

Because, first of all, what is the biggest source uncertainty in a person's life. Another person, pretty much. Like we live in a world. Modern life is filled with expensive uncertainties. Other people can create savings in your body budget, but they can also create taxes. If you eat a meal within two hours of engaging in a stressful interaction with someone,

And so this is where your brain is predicting that something metabolically taxing is going to happen. And you do this within a two-hour period, your brain will direct your body to metabolize your food inefficiently to the tune of 104 extra calories. It will be as if you ate a meal that was 104 calories more than what it actually was. Wow. You could be eating exactly the same thing. You will have exercised exactly the same amount.

But if you're within two hours of a meal, if you have a stressful moment, social stress from someone else in an interaction with someone else, it's like adding, effectively adding 104 calories to your meal. Over a year, that's 11 pounds almost. Wow. Yeah. So it's important to remember that, you know, we are the caretakers of each other's body budgets. The best thing for a human body budget is another human.

The worst thing for a human body budget is another human. And then add to that. You've got to pick your circle wisely. I mean, that is for sure. No, that's like it's super important. And then think about all the other sources of uncertainty in daily life. Yeah. And that's even before we started talking about COVID or talking about it.

So the political situation in almost any country, take your pick. Yeah. finances just economics climate you know COVID and other right so a lot of uncertainty persistent uncertainty it adds these like tiny little taxes that add up over time to cause metabolic problems how to metabolic problems manifest themselves diabetes heart disease, depression, anxiety, an increase in the likelihood of some cancers. I mean, and the thing is, it's not immediate. It happens slowly over time.

Like the, you know, it's incremental and very slowly over time. So I think if you add to the fact, you just take that and then add to the fact that most people don't get enough sleep. Most people don't drink enough water. most people don't eat healthfully. I mean, I don't want to sound like a boring mother. I mean, I am a mother and sometimes my kid did think I was boring, but preach. And, you know, I like French fries and bread as much as the next person, probably more actually. But those are like treats. Yeah. They're not food. Like you have to, you know, you have to really, or at least I had to realize that.

They're not, you're not putting a deposit in the bank account when you're, you're engaged. When you're short sleep, poor nutrition, the list goes on. And I'm not saying this as someone who prioritized sleep my whole life either. I'm sure you didn't either. I mean, I think I spent the first 20 years of my adult life being sleep deprived, honestly. I was over-trained and sleep-deprived, yeah. And, you know, we live in a culture where until recently, it was a contest for who could sleep the least. I know.

People would brag about how, you know, the small number of hours they got and so on and so forth. And I think the point to understand here is that any one of these things by themselves is not going to be a big deal. It's when you add all these little nudges together, they create a big effect on your brain's ability to regulate your body. And over time, you know, that starts to cause problems. So that's what I mean when I say, the cultural context we've created for ourselves, is not optimal for how our brains work.

Yeah. It creates this imbalanced body budget, essentially. Yeah. And, you know, you have to go against the grain of society, really, you know, to try to get that balance bad. Yeah. And, I mean, that's really our core mission at WOOP is to kind of quantify some of these imbalances so people can stay ahead of it, you know. And I think, you know, so you understand how much training is too much training. much sleep is too much sleep. You know, how much little, you know, finding those, the sweet

spots of how much time you need to spend in bed. And what are these other factors that, you know, create these imbalances like regular sleep wake time? And, you know, there's like this kind of laundry list of things that we know are withdraws. And I think that's what we really try to surface with the coaching on our, on our app, you know, is to kind of help people think a little more strategically about some of these imbalances. what's up folks if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health performance fitness you may really enjoy getting a whoop that's right you can check out whoop at woup dot com it measures everything around sleep recovery strain and you can now sign up for free for 30 days

so you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. And I think it's really needed. Yeah. Because, you know, as we've talked about before, your brain is, your brain is running a model of your body. That's how it can predict. It's using past experiences to try to make a prediction about what's going to happen next. And because of the way our brains are wired, we're, our brain's, our brain is, our brain is don't make, you know, our brains don't make themselves aware of these conditions. So you can feel perfectly full of energy, subjectively, have the subjective experience of energy,

but yet you could be at risk for overtraining, for example. Or, you know, just, just on Friday, actually, I was on the treadmill, you know, trying, it was too cold for me to go outside. So I'm just going to get my miles in on my treadmill. And I really did. I felt exhausted. But I was thinking to myself, no, this is a subjective experience. You have enough energy to do this. Like, you've been sitting on your ass all day. You have enough energy to do this. Ignore your affect. Like, just keep going. And, you know, I did it and it was fine. But I think that the thing is that, yeah, I know how the brain works more or less, my best guess. But I still have feelings. And those feelings still, can give me wrong information.

So actually having metrics can be super helpful. Yeah. And actually might even over time, who knows, like actually help your brain calibrate better. Yeah. Because how we feel isn't always accurate. Well, I guess the way, yeah, but so the way I would say it is the following that your brain is always regulating your body. Your body's always sending signals back to your brain.

Yeah. But you don't, your brain doesn't make itself aware of those. signals in the same way that we see with a lot of detail. So, you know, we see with a lot of detail, we hear with a lot of detail, our skin has a lot of sensory detail. If you think about vision as kind of high definition, color, TV, then the brain's ability to sense the specific changes in the body, it's more like a blood. black and white 1950s TV with a bent, you know, antenna in the rain.

I mean, if you actually, we just wrote, we just published this paper actually on the structure of the vagus nerve, which is the largest, you know, nerve that brings sensory signals from the interior of the body to the brain. And the structure of the vagus nerve, it's really clear that it's not bringing really detailed specific information about the state of the interior of the body. It's a little bit. It's not like there's no map of the body. It's just like super vague, like north, southeast, west. Wow. And maybe there are signals, you know, about is there pressure? Is it glucose? Those are preserved pretty well. But it's not giving really specific information. That information is already

being integrated in the Vegas before the information ever hits the brain. So what you experience, you experience your metabolic state as what scientists call affect or what people, you know, civilians as we would call them, call mood. You feel pleasant. You feel unpleasant. You feel worked up. You feel calm. You feel like everything's okay. You feel like doom is around the corner. You feel comfortable, you feel uncomfortable. These simple feelings are tied to your metabolic state or what your brain believes to be your metabolic state, I should say, which then informs your budget. Exactly. So there are a couple of things that are important about this. One is that it's a general summary of what's going on. It doesn't actually tell you. And that manifests in the

Vegas nerve as a general summary. Yeah. So you don't really know, well, you might know, like, is it in above your waist or below your waist, you might, you know, is it in the interior of an organ or, you know, closer to the edge? But, you know, the brain doesn't have like a really specific map. So it doesn't actually know exactly what's going on. And the other thing that's really interesting, too, is that your brain is trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull. and it's receiving these signals and the signals are the cause of some changes in your body but your brain doesn't have access to the causes it only has access to the signals which are the effects so it's to try to guess at what the causes are right it doesn't know and this is what

philosophers call an inverse problem or what nurse scientists call a reverse inference problem so you know the outcome but you don't know the cause right So the cause is inherently ambiguous, and it could be multiple things. So your brain has to guess. So your brain's kind of always guessing at what's happening in the body, doesn't really know. It's got some information. I mean, there's enough information that it can coordinate your heart and your lungs and your gut and all the things that it has to coordinate. But it's not so specific as vision.

And all you feel is affect. And affect has no information in it other than things feel okay, things feel like shit. But it doesn't tell you what, who, where, what to do about it. You just don't have any of that. Let's dig into APEC a little bit. So there's two features of Affect. There's valence and arousal. So maybe kind of talk about those features, why they're important, and how that relates

to the predictive mechanisms. Yeah, sure. So the first thing to understand about Affect, these mood, basically, it's with you always. It's not emotion. It's with you always. It's a property of consciousness, really. So it's kind of like if people think about emotion as more of the outcome, whereas affect or mood is kind of that like underlying thereness.

Yeah, I would say that mood, I don't really think mood is an ingredient. I would say that the sensory signals coming from the body that the brain is attempting to model, those are the actual ingredients. Okay. But we experience those signals as mood. Right. And so those are with you all the time. And they're kind of clues to your metabolic state, right?

So it means, for example, when you're feeling like things are pretty good, it means you're probably, metabolically, probably doing okay. Yeah. And when you're feeling pretty miserable, it probably means. that you're running a deficit, right? Or there's been a big metabolic outlay. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong in your life. It could mean that you're just doing something really hard.

Right. You know, about 20-minute research shows about 20 minutes into exercise, just as people are hitting their ventilatory load, you know, like they're starting to build a little lactic acid, right? they start to feel unpleasant. It doesn't mean something's wrong, necessarily. It might mean something's wrong, but it doesn't always. It could just mean that you're doing something hard and you need to replenish, right?

So can I ask a question on that? So does your body, as we think about this body budget, like if I perceive the task as unpleasant. So let's say I'm building thatelactic acid. And I actually perceive that as pleasant. Does that have a different impact on my body budget? If I were to then perceive it as pleasant. Yes, yes, yes, it does. Yes, it does. Okay. I think that's so important. It's really important. We can talk ourselves into a better future. Is that what you're saying? Absolutely. It's not, it's not so much like, it's, yeah, I mean, it's not exactly Jedi mind tricks. Yeah. But two degree. But what one of the things that we have in, really talked about, and it's a little complicated to describe in a podcast without, you know,

props and slides, is that part of what your brain is doing when it's regulating your body and so on is it's, it's creating meaning at the same time. It's not a separate process. Part of what it means to regulate a body, to run a body budget is to guess at the meaning of the signals, which gives them meaning. So I'll give you an example. You know that, you know that feeling, you know that moment when you're exercising where you're just at the point,

you're just at the point of enough nausea that you're going to lose your, you're going to toss your cookies. You know that feeling? Yeah, okay. That feels really not good. Yeah, it's unpleasant. It's unpleasant, except my trainer, my coach,

who I've been working with for 25 years, who, I mean, he's just amazing. He once told me, not once, but every time I would get to this point, he would say, the Marines say that, you know, pain is weakness leaving the body. Or I would say, you know, I would say to him, oh, my God, I need it, I need to get to drink water. I'm really, I'm nauseated. And he'd be like, great, that's so great that you're, that's the, now you're at the edge of change. And I'd be like, what? Except that now, when I get to the, you know, now actually, I can't say that I'm always

driving myself to get to that point. I'm really, that would be not, that would not be true. But when I'm at that point, I think, don't waste it, don't waste it. This is changed. This is the edge of change. Don't waste it. So waste it. So it's, even though it feels unpleasant, you know, the meaning of it, the meaning of it is pleasant. And if you think that, that that that's unusual. I'm not speaking to you. I'm speaking to our listeners. If you think that's unusual,

think about coffee. Most people, when they, the first time they have a cup of coffee. Yeah, it's not good. They don't like, it's bitter or it's like,

it doesn't taste very good. They put so much sugar in to try to bat. But then within like a week or two, they're not even drinking sugar. They'll drink it black. They'll actually, why is that? Because your brain learns patterns.

And it's always making meaning of things relative to the state of, you're the anticipated state of the body. Right. So when a brain is asking itself, is this good for me or is this bad for me, it's not talking about threat. It's talking about metabolism. It's not only about metabolism, meaning you can't reduce everything to metabolism. Because part of what it means to run a metabolism, to run a body budget,

is to create meaning. Signals don't have inherent meaning psychologically. Your brain gives them meaning in the process of regulating your metabolism. I think it's important for folks to understand that we have some control in this world of just things that we really can't control, that we actually can make meaning out of situations and turn them to less expensive moments. Yeah, absolutely. Or you can head into them knowing full, well, it's going to be an expensive moment and prepare. And embrace it. Yeah, and embrace it and prepare. So, for example, if you're feeling really unpleasant, like just really you feel like the world is about to end, it probably means that you're running a metabolic deficit.

it. And so the first thing I do, I mean, you know, there are times where I come to the end of the day and I just, honestly, sometimes I feel like the world is ending. I feel like I just, you know, you can't take your affective glasses off that you see the world through these glasses. So I have to ask myself, am I tired? Am I hungry? Am I dehydrated? Is anything really wrong in my life? Yeah. The answer might be yes. Like if I ask myself, well, if I go to bed and I wake up tomorrow, will this feeling still be here? At first, you might not know the answer, but after you keep doing it for a while, you have some experiences your brain can use to make that prediction. If the answer is yes, then it probably

means you have a problem that you have to deal with. And if the answer is no, then it means that you just need a little self-care. You need to put yourself to bed. You need to wake up tomorrow and it'll be a better day. So valence, pleasantness, unpleasantness is really, I think about, do you have the spoons? That's how I sort of think about it. And arousal is really interesting because what arousal is, is directly tied to uncertainty, the amount of uncertainty. When your brain can't predict well, it's going to attempt to learn. The simple thing is just if you have an increase in arousal, you feel jittery, you feel worked up, it probably means there's some uncertainty somewhere. Not always, because you could be running on a treadmill,

you're, you know, you're, but uncertainty usually goes with arousal, feeling worked up, feeling jittery, sometimes super alert, sometimes not, but that sort of physical feeling of being jangled. Yeah. And our brains automatically make sense of that as anxiety, but it doesn't have to be anxiety. It could be determination. It could be curiosity. It could just be simply uncertainty.

Sometimes you need that arousal to get the job done. Right. And there's an anecdote that I talk about in one of my books when my daughter, who at the time was 12 years old, and she was testing for her black belt in karate. And, you know, she was a little thing. She was like barely five feet tall. And she was testing against these hulking adolescent boys, like almost six feet tall. And she had to spar with them.

And, you know, I'm sitting in the sideline thinking, oh, my God, what's going to happen? And her, you know, her, her sensei, who is a 10th degree black belt. So, I mean, I've said this so many times, but it's true. I mean, like, this guy was so, this guy is so powerful. He could break a board by just looking at it. Yeah. He's just like, he's like really powerful guy. Wow.

Walks up to her and he says, not like, don't be worried or whatever. He just looks at it and he goes, get your butterflies flying in formation. Oh, and I thought. So brilliant. Oh, my God. That is the most, yeah, that is like the best philosophical advice I've ever heard. I mean, that's like. coaching at a next level.

What he's saying to her is not calm down. Right. He's saying this, this is your brain is but preparing you to do something really hard. And I want to hear what I'm saying. I'm not saying your body is preparing you. Right. This is in your brain. You feel things only in your brain.

It's true. You need a body, but you're feeling things in your brain. You see in your brain. hear in your brain, you feel in your brain. If you pinch yourself, you know, it feels you like you're feeling the pinch on your skin, but you're not. You're feeling it in your brain. And so it's your brain that is preparing you. And this is the same kind of preparation. Like, again, another anecdote I tell sometimes where right before my TED talk, I mean, my cardiac output was, I don't even know what it was. I wasn't wearing a monitor, but I could feel

my heart beating in my fingertips. Like I was, that is intense. Yeah, I was standing there in the back before I went on thinking, this is determination. This is not anxiety. This is too many. I was like, I'm not worried at all. I'm not. This is not fear.

This is determination. But so sometimes it's, you know, it's hard to do. But, but it was, you know, like that I was getting, I was really, really on fire, ready to go. So prepared. And sometimes that feels uncomfortable. It just means you're doing something hard, you know? So the simple shorthand answer is valence, pleasant, pleasant, what is your subjective sense of your spoons? And arousal is how much uncertainty is around.

I mean, it's a simplification, but it'll do for now. I think, you know, your book, seven and a half lessons about the brain. I mean, it's remarkable. Everyone on the planet should read it. Thank you. And I think it's because when I read it, it made me think more deeply about the kind of human I want to be and the person I aspire to be. Yeah, exactly.

It doesn't make you a wimp. Right. What it makes you is a healthy. It actually translates, I mean, literally translates into better health for yourself and for other people. So the whole, it really pleases me to hear you say that, because the whole reason I wrote the book. No, it's beautiful.

Was because what I wanted to do is give people a set of little essays. that they could read really quickly, like little bites. Absolutely amazing. With, you know, some nuggets of neuroscience and people could maybe talk about at dinner parties and, like, impress their friends. So accessible. But with deep lessons about how does your brain work,

why does it matter that you know for the kind of person who you are? Like, you have a choice. It's not easy to have that choice. It's much harder than, and we all wish, you know, and some people have more choices than others, for sure. But we, everybody has some choice. Yeah.

And it's a worthy pursuit, you know, because it's going to make our time on this planet more meaningful, right? Which is, I think, where we started this conversation, you know, is how do we need to think about our brain and our body in a way that helps us live a healthier, more meaningful life? And you've just given us this really beautiful outline of what that needs to look like. on the topic of just emotion specifically, you know, how do you like people to think about emotions? You know, and obviously you've written your other book, how emotions are made. This is your first book, which is unbelievable. The subtext, the secret life of the brain.

It's an amazing book. It's dense. It's so beautiful. It is a popular science book, but, you know, seven and a half lessons was written more for people who don't think of themselves as being interested in science. How Emotions Are Made was written for people who like science and they want a popular science book. And so it's, it is, you know, it's, it's, I mean, it's, it's written for the public, but it's science. Totally. It's definitely, definitely science, science heavy. I think the message there is that you are an architect

of your experience. It might not feel that way to you all the time. It's such a powering lens, you know. But you really do have more control over what you experience than you think you do. Like, and again, I'll say it. Not everyone has the same amount, not everyone has the same options. Not everybody has the same amount of control. None of us have as much control as we would like to have and the control is harder to get than it's harder to achieve. But everybody can have more control. The flip side is that if you have more control, you also have more responsibility. And this is a really important point that I'm about to make. Like you have to be a role model. Well, it's certainly that. It is that for sure. I mean, the concept of karma is really

interesting, right? Because all of us are our niche constructors, meaning we all, your behavior towards other people is and towards the environment, towards animals, whatever, your behavior puts things into the world and makes the world different than it was. So, you know, there's, so there is that aspect to it of being a role model. I mean that I'm not saying that you're culpable or to blame if you have negative emotions, but I am saying that sometimes we're responsible for things, not because we're to blame for them, but because we're the only one. who can change them.

So if you have persistent distress, the ultimate cause may not have anything to do with anything that you're culpable for. But the only person who can change that distress is you. It's unfair, but that's just how it is. And once you realize that, and you realize that there are tools that you can harness, then you can take back some control. But you have to own it, right? You have to own it.

Yeah. I think it's empowering. I agree. I love to hear someone like you say that, you know, because it puts the ball in our court, you know, and that's the only court that we can control is our own. you know. And I just want to say that I'm, I've been really heartened by people's response to this message. Like, yeah. A lot of us, everybody has some, you know, tragedy that's happened in their lives. I'm not saying this as a privileged white person who has lived an upper middle class life her whole life and has never faced violence or trauma or anything. Yeah. You know,

this is just how it is. Right. And it's this way for everyone. And, you know, some people have more fortune than others. Some people have more choices than others. Like all of that's true. All of that inequity is absolutely there and it's absolutely true. But everyone has also more opportunity than they think they do. And by and large, people have found that message of responsibility. It doesn't equal culpability, right?

Doesn't equal blame. People have found that really, really, really empowering. I think that's probably the biggest blessing that I've experienced, actually, in the, you know, seven years since that book has been published, how motions are made, that people have really found this super useful, you know, in the, I don't know, 22 languages that the book has been translated into, not everywhere, right? But I'm still on a daily basis receiving, I don't know, like a dozen emails a day about this book that is seven years. years old. That's just so beautiful. Yeah. It's a me. It's a me. I mean, I'm, I am super grateful. I'm super grateful. Well, the impact you made is just, you know, it's, you really provided us a new you of human nature. So thank you for your courage, bringing the science to the world. And I guess just to finish the conversation, we ask all of our guests what they're obsessing over right

now. So curious what you're kind of obsessed with right now. I'm obsessed. by learning to bake raw bread. Oh. So, dry bread turns out to be, like, raw, dealing with rye is really hard. So I'm, you know, I'm on a kick to kind of, like, make, I love bread. Like, I love bread. So I'm on a kick to make, like, healthier bread. Yeah.

You know, so I, like, I reverse engineered these. Bread that won't kill you. Yeah. I reverse engineered these seed crackers, these Danish seed crackers that, you know, we had when we were in Copenhagen a couple years ago. And I, they're really super healthy and they're delicious. So I'm now, like, I'm thinking, well, ride bread. bread. You know, maybe there's a way to, you know, so anyways, I'm fascinated by rye bread. I'm

currently trying really hard to propagate. I have this ancient, I don't say ancient, but it's old blueberry bush. That's like more, it's like an antique blueberry bush. And I'm attempting to propagate it. I tried with cuttings. That didn't work. Now I'm trying with seeds. Like I actually, Yeah, I saved some... How does one acquire an antique? No, much is in the backyard of that we... So we've lived in Victorian houses and, you know, we're in Boston, so we're... Just old, everything's old, yeah.

Everything's old, it's really beautiful. There was this little gnarly bush, like, in the ground. Like, just, it didn't look like much. And the, when we moved into this house, this very, very old house, the gardener, I guess, who had been the gardener for this house for many years, came and said, hi, I'm the gardener for this house. You don't know this, but you bought this house, so now you have to hire me, too. We were like, okay.

That's awesome. You know, who's been amazing, but he explained to me that the previous owners kept mowing over this bush, right? So we brought this bush back to life. Brought this book, yeah, so it gave us absolutely, like, the most amazing, tiny little, tart, yummy little blueberries in the summer. And my daughter, which his little girl would, like, pick them. And, you know, so when we moved to our other.

Victorian house, we took the bush with us. I'm like, I'm not leaving the bush, I'm taking with me. Of course. So now I'm trying to propagate it. So that's a bit of a, yeah, that's an obsession right there. That's an obsession right there. Yeah. And then I think workwise, well, I have a number of obsessions. Really, whatever it happens to be I'm working on, that's the thing I'm obsessed with. One is, one thing, though, is that we're actually doing research on brain metabolism in our lab now, which has been super hard to get that set up. But I have this absolutely brilliant scientist, young scientist who has made it, this is going to be, you know, his thing. His thing.

Wow. And so that's really interesting to actually look at the signal processing effects. So in colloquial language you say, what are the cognitive effects or what are the emotional effects of brain metabolism? Like how your, how neurons are metabolizing glucose? There are a number of ways in which it could, you know, I'm not going to get into the details, but that's super interesting. And then I'm actually also turning my attention to philosophy of science.

Oh, interesting. So embedded in this whole framework that we've been, that we've built over 30 years in our lab and that now many, many labs are using is a philosophy of science, which sounds, every time, you know, You say the word philosophy, you say the P word, like, philosophy. People's eyes just, like, roll back in their head. Abstracts, like, yeah. But it's really important questions, like, how do you know what's true? Yeah.

How do you know what to believe? Like, how do you know what evidence you should trust? How do your prior beliefs influence the questions you ask? Your biases. Yeah, so it's really about, like, how do you know what's true? How do you know what's real? Yeah. This is, you know, a really important question.

It's important in science. It's important in life. And so this is something I'm starting to turn my attention to. I love that. And I'll help us be better scientists, you know, when we understand how to distinguish between the truth. But it will also help us read the newspaper better. Yeah, totally. And it will help us talk to each other better.

And it will help us just be better humans. Well, this has been just such an honor speaking with you. And just can't thank you enough for being a role model for so many of us. Thank you so much. Big thanks to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett for joining the show today to help us understand our emotions and how they play a role every day in our body and mind. If you enjoyed this episode of the Woof podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed.

If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Whoop.com. Call us 508-443-49-2. If you're thinking about joining Wube, you can literally sign up for free for 30 days. that is at whoop.com and new members can use the code will W ILL to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. All right, that's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.