Emotions and the Brain: The Power of Making Meaning
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain blew me away. Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist who has turned what we know about emotions as being “innate” and “happening to us” on its head. She proposes we create emotions by categorizing data and grouping the data into culturally accepted definitions of emotion. For example, we are about to speak in front of a group of people and notice our stomach is a little floppy and we are getting flushed. Rather than saying, “I feel anxious,” we could note that we are having a high level of arousal due to a situation that presents an unknown. This high level of arousal could be excitement as much as anxiety, but in both situations, the emotion is what we assign to the physical experiences.
Barrett explains that the brain lives in a dark room, the skull, and assesses data from various receptors. Some of those receptors are sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing otherwise known as “exteroceptive” or outside the body. There are also receptors known as “interoceptive” or within the body, such as heartbeat, body temperature, saliva production, and gurgling stomach acid that the brain also utilizes in its evaluation.
Barrett highlights another important component to understand about the brain’s analyzation process which is the brain works in a predictive way. If the data is analyzed and fits into a category the brain already created, then the brain predicts this is the same situation, experience, or thing from a previous time. The brain is incredibly efficient. It’s like the old saying, “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” The brain assesses the qualities of that duck and most other stimuli and spits out the result within milliseconds.
Why is all of this important? It is important because Barrett’s research permits us to create meaning around our data interpretation. The understanding that we decide and assign meaning to our experiences gives us choice and the power of choice over our emotions and the way we feel. If we can embrace that we choose to feel anxious or sad or angry or happy, then it allows us more agency over our states of being. It’s a real mind-bender to think about our ability to choose how we feel, but it can be an incredibly powerful realization.
I hear from clients all the time, “He made me mad,” or “She made me feel unloved.” I gently remind my clients that no one actually has the power to “make” us feel a certain way. Their behavior elicits our reactions. We react. We choose how we feel. It’s not always a popular view because we often want to point the finger at the other person, but it is significant in our own growth to understand our contribution to our feeling states.
When we embrace our ability to make meaning of the data we observe and experience, as well as choose how we feel, we become more empowered in our lives.