Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: How to Understand Emotions
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. My guess today is doctor lisa feldman barrett.

Doctor lisa feldman marrett is a distinguish professor of psychology at northeastern university. SHE also holds appointments at harvard medical school and massachuset general hospital, where he is the chief scientific officer, the center of law, brain and behavior. Doctor barriers, considered one of the top world experts in the study of emotions, and her laboratory has studied emotions using approaches both from the field ds of psychology and neurotic science.

Indeed, today you will learn about the neural circuits and the psychological underpinnings of what we call emotions. You will learn what emotions truly are and how to interpret different emotional states. You will also learn how emotions relate things like motivation, consciousness and affect.

Affect is determined. That refers to a more general state of brain and body that increases or decreases the probability that you will experience certain emotions. During today's discussion, doctor felden bert also teaches us how to regulate our emotions effectively, as well as how to Better interpret the emotional state of others.

You will also learn about the powerful relationship that exists between our emotional states and the movement of our body. In fact, much of today's discussion is both practical and will be highly informative in terms of the mechanisms underlying emotions, and IT is likely to also be surprising to you in a number of ways. IT certainly was surprising to me.

I've been a close follower of doctor feldman barrett work over many years now and have always founded the tremendously informative. And when I say her work, I mean, both are academic, publish papers as well as her public lectures that she's given and her two fabulous books on emotions in the brain. The first one entitled how emotions are made, and the second book, which includes information about emotions, but extends beyond that, entitled seven and half lessons about the brain.

As you'll see from today's discussion, doctor felman bert is not only extremely informed about the neuroscience and psychology of emotion, she's also fabulously good at teaching us that information in clear terms and in actionable ways. You'll also noticed several times he pushes back on my questions, in some cases even telling me that my questions are ill posed. And I have to tell you that I was absolutely delighted that he did that because you'll see that every time he did that, IT was with the clear purpose of putting more specificity on the question, and thereby more specificity and clarity on the answer, which, of course, SHE delivers.

By the end of today's discussion, you will have both a road and a deep understanding of what emotions are and their origins in our brain and body. You will also have many practical tools with which to Better understand and navigate emotional states. And moreover, you'll have many practical tools in order to increase your levels of motivation and Better understand your various states of consciousness.

Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast.

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Again, that drink element element t dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eda sessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation, and since my teens, and I started doing yoga eja about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations.

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Yogananda is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even, which is to a short ten minute session.

If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slashed huberman to access a free thirty day. And now for my discussion with doctor lisa feldman barrett. Doctor lisa feldman barrett, welcome.

No, it's my pleasure to be here.

I've wanted to talk to you for a very long time. I'd like to talk about emotions. I think everyone has a sense somehow of what in an emotion is feeling happy, feeling sad, feeling excited, feeling a curious, perhaps as even emotion.

I don't know you'll tell us what are the core components, where are the sort of macro o nutrient of of an emotion uh, because I know there's a debate about whether not we should be talking about emotions versus states. But what is an emotion we all are familiar with, what one feels like to us. But from a scientific perspective, had you defined in emotion?

Well song, this is a scientist debate about this um nobody in the last hundred and fifty years has ever been able to agree on what an emotion is um and I think from my perspective, the interesting but tRicky bit is that any time you wanna talk about what the basic building blocks are of emotion, none of those basic building blocks are specific to emotion so for example, there are a group of scientists who will tell you well in emotion is a coordinated response where you have a change in um some physical state, a change in the brain, a change in the musical state um which um leads you to make a particular facial expression, so you've got physiological changes in the body, changes in the brain, changes in the face or in motor movements.

K but that describes basically every moment of your life your face is always moving in some way. If IT wasn't, you would look like an avatar. R, basically.

So we're engaged in in movements, and those movements have to be coordinated with the physiological changes in the body, because whether whether were in a state that we would conventionally call emotion or not, because the physiology is supporting those, supporting the you know the blue coast and the oxygen and all the things that you need to make movements of your body. And of course, all these movements are being coordinated by your brain. So of course, there's a coordinated set of um features that doesn't really describe how emotions are distinct from any other experience that you have.

But the the claim was for a really long time that there would be diagnostic patterns. okay. So when something triggered fear, you would have an increase in heart rate and you would have um uh propensity to run away or to freeze or um not just to fall a sleep, although that is something animals when they are faced with a credit. But that's not part of the western stereotype for fear.

So that wasn't what scientists we're looking for and um and also that you would make A A particular facial expression which was presumed to be the universal expression of fear where you widen your eyes and you gas like um that facial set of facial movements in other cultures like in melanie's an culture, for example, is a symbol of threat where you are threatening someone, you are threatening them with aggression basically is a war face but in western cultures that the the face that western scientists believed was the you know that the distinct of part of that distinct of pattern for fear and so the way that scientists defined a motion for a long time was these kind of states where you'd see this diagnostic on sambo of signals. And that would mean that anytime someone showed one of those signals, they may move their face in a particular way or their heart increased at a particular time, you'd be able to diagnose them as being in a state of fear as opposed to a state of anger or sadness, whatever the empirical evidence um just doesn't bear that out. And so I was kind of a mystery. The mystery is, how is IT that you feel angry or sad d or happy or you know, full of gratitude, or, oh, how is IT that you experience these moments? But scientists can't find a single set of physical markers that correspond with each state distinctively right, that in in a way that you could tell them apart, that that was a really big puzzle for a really long time.

I have to ask you about this perhaps myth, perhaps truth, about facial expressions and emotions. Because as you were explaining the core components of emotions. I had to think back to the classic textbook, images of the different faces associated with fear, with delight, with confusion, on and on.

We will get to that in your opinions on that scientifically informed opinions, of course. But there is a bit of a myth that the emotion system and the facial expression system run in both directions. For instance, people will say, if you smile, it's harder to feel sad or anxious.

I can't say that's been my experience, but I very well could be wrong. So we know that when people's emotional states change, their facial expressions often will change, right? If you see someone crying on the street, where is somebody smiling really big? We can make some assumptions about what might be going on internally for them. But put simply, is IT true that changing one's facial expression can direct shifts in the brain and body, perhaps that change our emotional states?

If you'll permit me, what I would say is that your question is ill posed. So first of all, IT presumes that there's an emotion system and that there is a facial expression system. Now, clearly is a system for moving facial muscles okay, but a movement is not the same as an expression. A movement is a movement.

An expression is an interpretation of the meaning of a movement, not all movements of the face, our expressions um and this is um you know a problem is a problem in science um in is often in the case uh I think in my experience in the science of emotion but elsewhere to that scientists in their efforts to make their work um meaningful to people will try to interpret their findings in in ways that uh the average person would um find interesting or uh the way that a physician would find interesting or a teacher or what have you to be able to use this information but then they forget that they're actually making an interpretation and they start to refer to their observations with the labels of interpretation. So facial movements are facial movements. People move their faces and that those movements have meaning, but they're not always to express an internal state.

In fact, one might think that they're very really to express in internal state. So I don't know that there's a facial expression system either, so that there are certainly like I said um there the circuit tory for moving a face. But um but what those movements mean um is highly variable. And so that would be my second point that where I would say when you see someone crying on the street, you are not looking only at their face. You might be aware um that you are focusing on their face.

That might be the part of the entire century on sambo that you are focusing your attention on but your brain is taking in an entire on sambo of signals, as you know, it's taking in not just the movements of the face, the tears or whatever, it's taking in all of the the entire sensory way, the sounds that smells, what's going on inside your own body. Your brain is being a bombarded with signals from from all of those sources and when it's making a meaning out of any signal is doing IT in an on semble of signals. So research shows that babies cries aren't acoustically specific to when they're tired or hungry or right um that you can I can show you a video without context and show you someone crying and um you might make a judgment, you might think make the stereotype c judgment in the west of that person is sad and then we pan out and really, you know it's a little girl whose dad just came home from iraq or something, right?

So brains are always interpreting faces in context. They're making guesses. This is something that i've talked about quite a bit, that we don't read movements in people, we don't read emotions in facial expressions.

We make inferences about the emotional meaning of facial movements. And we do IT in an on semble of other signals, the context and as you if you will and that's really what what's happening. So um do I think that um that there is feedback from the face to the brain? sure.

I mean there's feedback from every muscle, but there is this constant conversation between the brain and the body. The brain is sending motor commands. The body is now has sensory surfaces which are sending signals back to the brain.

So if the face is influencing, the brain is doing so in a way that's not special. IT is doing IT in a way that that works for all other part of your body too. And I guess what I would say this kind of a long winded answer. But over time your brain has learned that certain patterns of signal over time um recur. And so if you're smiling, if your brain is you know telling your your facial muscles to move in a particular way that looks like smiling, um it's happening in a larger on sample signals and then the brain is predicting what's onna happen next because it's learned over time what happens next. So familistical so if you think about that is cause then sure but it's not it's not this simply list c kind of idea that an emotion is triggered um uh IT causes facial muscles to move in a particular way and therefore if you just post your face in in those in that particular arrangement, if that will somehow feedback to the emotion system and change that system because there are no, there is no emotion system in your brain and the the causation just isn't that it's not that simplicity, cally mechanistic.

that make sense to me. I Frankly never bought the idea that just smiling would make me feel happy, especially if my internal state was not one of happiness by fighting the internal state. Also, in the early two thousands, I think IT was there was a lot of discussion about how positioning the body in certain ways you know taking up more space would allow people to feel more powerful and they some of these studies um and uh argue that the even hormonal shift associated with taking up more space that were associated with feelings of empowerment and then when shrinking of oneself was in associated with elevated courses.

All states ince I say all this I I want to be clear that um I do not take a simplistic view of the error system or undergoing system and I I didn't I don't think you that you were implying that either so I make sure that anyone listening, watching isn't thinking that for instance, that court is all is bad. Court is all is wonderful and essential. You just need a regulated properly or that um the idea that the body and emotional states are are extricating link makes a ton of sense me but the idea that you could just you know grab under one of the nodes in the are to be careful not say emotion system like position of the body, like being hunched over makes you depressed.

Now that never made sense to me. Taking up more space makes you feel more a powerful that doesn't IT can't be that way. And yet we were told for about a decade through, especially through popular press, that this stuff was true. And so what I love about your work is that IT includes a new roomal psychological, a network perspective that that there isn't one seat of emotions and so on. Um so we could go a little bit further into the facial expression piece for a moment. I was taught in my psychology in news science textbooks because he was right there in front of me that there were some core categories of facial expression that were universal across cultures, that conveyed something about the internal state of the person, that the downward lips and corner, and and maybe even in the throwing of the brow, was associated with negative, violent states like sadness, perhaps even depression, that the opposite of upward turn corners of the mouth and widening of the eyes was delight in excitement. Someone that feels pretty true to have my experience but how do you in other serious scientists of emotions view that somewhat classic literature .

now yeah so i'll just say that my um my journey here my scientific journey was not one of attempting to overturn um a century is worth of are we like to swear bullshit basically I mean it's just it's like its its stereo it's basically western stereotypes in shined a scientific uh fact and that sounds like a pretty harsh thing to say.

But I think I pretty much stand by that at this point um but for me when I was A A graduate student, when I was an undergraduate in uh in psychology and in physiology and an anthropology, you know I also had read that Darwin said that there were these distinctive facial expressions that um were coordinated with specific emotional states, the specific states of the nervous system this was Darwin's view and I assume that was correct um until I started to try to use that information um in the lab and everything fall apart, you know. So when you show someone in uh a laboratory like a student or um somebody for the community of face, a disembodied face, where there the person's eyes are widened in the face and they're gasping like a story to big fear expression, most of the time they don't know what that is. And so I would try to use these faces and um as stimulate ments.

And they they rented, working the way that they are supposed to work. And there were really going all the way back to the beginning of psychology. Gy, there were always debate about whether or not this was actually accurate and there is a really interesting story about how Darwin came to this idea um which I can tell you about but IT it's not because he cared about emotion and he was basically taking his own very western views about emotion to make some claims about evolution actually so um I am more to say about that and about why it's a problem to take anything that anybody said, even Darwin from you know hundred and fifty years so years ago or whatever IT is and treat that like it's a modern text know he was writing at a particular time for particular purpose um and that doesn't necessarily mean that whatever he wrote is true um but i'll just tell you what the evidence says.

Um that there has been in psychology a debate, really vicious debate actually for probably fifty years about the nature of facial expressions and whether they are universal and whether there's this one to one correspondence between a particular face and like a facial configuration in a particular emotional state, smiling and happiness and scaling and anger of recalling your nose and disgust and so in two thousand sixteen and I think the association psychic ological science um tasked me and some others seen your scientists uh with a attempting to write a White paper, a consensus paper on what the literature actually show. So what is the research actually show he read all the research, you know, can you find a pattern there does IT actually reveal anything about whether or not facial expressions or universal, particularly for emotion um and the way they do this, they have a journal for this purpose, for taking a widely help belief that is highly debated and bringing together a panel of experts who disagree with each other at the outset. And they have to work together to see if they can come to consensus over the data.

And this is something that, you know, people have tried in the past. And I mean, there really vicious people have been vicious with each other over this question. So when we brought together A A group of people, so several people refuse to serve, seeing your scientists who deserve .

on this panel losing their funding or something.

you know that's a whole either conversation about why such as certain scientists would not want to engage with um with um people who disagree with them.

Um that's an interesting conversation to have but um I don't think it's simple actually as just their their careers or they they care about you know their money or or funding or whatever I thought would be an easy answer, but I don't actually think that's what's going on, but that's another sort. But anyway, so there were five of us. We got together um all senior scientists, all from different fields.

Some of us hadn't met each other before. We all knew of each other, of course, and we met over zoom for two and a half years. This is precoe because people were all over the world, right and we we read over a thousand papers.

So, so I was the only one in this group of the five of us who my starting hypothesis was that facial movements are meaningful, but there are not. There's no one to one correspondence between a particular facial configuration, like a scale and anger. Not not just that IT would vary across cultures, but that IT vars for you across situations.

I mean, do you scale every time you're angry? I don't scale every time i'm angry, in fact, and I also scale at times when i'm not angry. So and there are scientific reasons to think that that the that the the collection of facial expressions that people make when they're angry or when they're sadder, whatever, would be highly variable.

So that was my starting position. And and then the they were varying before guys. So they were I just refer them as good because IT was me and four guys and the guys they all, uh to some extent thought that facial expressions were universal, but they had differ.

Reasons end up for for for apotheosis that they also had different commitments, degrees of commitment to that position. But we write off the bad sort of agree that we didn't matter who was right. That was just not relevant.

The only thing that mattered was that we could come to the consensus over the data. And if we couldn't, we had a really pinpoint why, like, so what would be the critical experiments that would have to be done in order for us to come to consensus over the data. And we also agreed that um we had all kinds of contingency set up.

So you know you've got five scene in or people who are all running big labs and they're investing, you know, upwards of three years working on a paper. So if we can come to consensus, what are we going to do? Or we gonna write one paper and to write about the process, or are we going to write separate papers? Or, you know, but we we had all these contingencies laid out.

But the key here, I think, is that we agreed that we were not going to be adversarial about IT because IT didn't matter who was right. And in fact, if somebody had to admit they were wrong and someone was gonna have to admit they were wrong, I mean, IT turns out all of us were wrong about something, but we were gonna be like supportive of each other and and really encourage each other. Because, you know, being wrong is no one likes to be wrong.

But for scientists to admit their wrong is hard, and it's something that we should encourage each other to do. I think more and and more publicly. And I think the people who do that are really brave. And so that was my position, and they all agreed.

And the long story short here is that two and a half years, a thousand papers later, we all very reasonably came to consensus that there was no evidence for facial expressions of emotion being universal and that instead what is what there is clear evidence of is um that facial expressions, the way that people move their faces in in in moments of expression, is highly variable, meaning sometimes in anger. You skull meta analysis. So statistical summary ies of many, many, many studies, even in the west, show that people scale about thirty five percent of the time when they're angry, which is more than chance.

So get you good publication and you know the proceedings of the national academy. But that being sixty five percent the time people are moving their faces in other meaningful ways, that's not scaling. So if you actually used a scale um or even you know a scale in blood pressure or you know just maybe not once signals but silica couple signals, but you would be wrong more than half the time, you would miss more than half the cases.

And even more importantly, I think that's the reliability question. So there is no reliability for um the correspondence between a scowl and anger is above chance. So scale ling is one expression of anger but it's certainly not the dominant one and there is no dominant one is just highly variable depending on the situation that you're in.

So sometimes when i'm angry, I sit quietly implant the demise of my enemy. You know, sometimes I smile in anger. Sometimes I cry in anger.

IT really depends on the situation um but more importantly, half of the scale ls that people make are not related to anger. That means that the specificity is again higher than chance. But not that much higher than chance.

So if you see someone scaling, the chances are that they might not be angry, they might be concentrated really hard or they might have gas. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why people make a scale um and with we found this for every emotion category that had ever been studied. And I want you to notice what I just did there.

Not i'm no longer referred to unemotion as if it's an entity, a thing. So anger isn't one thing. It's a category of things, a grouping of .

things not mistaken. IT includes verbs right like anger as a set of verb actions in the in the brain and body. It's a process. It's not an event exactly.

It's not a known as a verb and it's and it's a process. But the point is that um it's it's a highly variable grouping of instances if you if you are talking about all instances of anger, all instances of anger the you have ever experience or witnessed um is a highly variable grouping of instances that vary that they that doesn't mean a random, but what the body does in anger depends on what the physical movements will be in anger and that depends on the situation that you're in and what your goal is.

And um and there are ways to talk about that in newer science terms, which are a little more precise. But the important thing to understand here, I think is that we're only talking about western cultures now minute that you go outside of the west to at or even to the east I mean so you know there are other cultures you know that have been studied um like uh china and collars in china and japan and korea there they all have access to knowledge about western cultural practices and norms. So what happens when you go you know to remote cultures which um have much less access? So they they sound like they have no access because we live in a globalized world.

So even hundred gathers in tanzania. The huda have access to western practices and norms, but much less, much less. And we did do that. And um and all beats are off there. I mean, most of the time they don't even they don't even understand or experience facial movements as having anything to do with emotion.

So if they saw in a mog of a smile face what they just assume IT was a couple, they might think it's a face because as we would know there some apparently hard wired brain circuit for the the two eyes and a line beneath IT and something in the middle that soda knows that organization of just spac features cues up face for most primates.

including you say that because yes, of course that's true, but it's not there at birth. What birth is a preference for that configuration, right? So it's like they're some and we can talk about why that's there is actually very controversial.

But um but what babies went newborn's oriented to the orient to that or they went to that configuration, but IT doesn't have to be a face. And then very quickly they start learning faces because they are exposed to fate. That mean, really, the first three months of life is almost like a massive continuous tutorial on what faces are because they are, you know, being fed and .

and everyone's in your face, baby last night, and you see the baby of friends of, I have unbelievably cute baby, a big cheeks and you want, and there's this desire to see the baby smile, right?

So you do the things that, and if that the baby shows some sort of facial expression, that things that seem like it's a little bit like resist and what do you you stop doing IT you change up your strategy and then when baby cracks a smile, like now I going to assume that the baby mayor may not have been happy inside. That will baby head. Um but when they do, there's a reciprocity y then we smile and so there's a temple that's very .

robot I want you to notice. So that so first i'm not saying that that recognizing face a face as a face is not hardwired IT is but it's hardwired by not by genes alone, right? And in fact, there's a really wonderful book called not by genes alone.

Basically, there's cultural inheritance. We have the kind of nature that requires the nation. We have the kind of genes that require early learning.

We have we need wiring instructions from the world to get the rest of the information that we need to be competent, culturally competent in our in our in our lives and that starts at birth IT probably starts before birth even um but um in third trimester, there is some evidence of learning feet to learning even in the third trimester. So um the point is not that people aren't hardwired for viewing faces or recognition faces. Just just where does that hardwire ing come from? It's not by genes alone.

Genes aren't the blue crying. The brain is expecting certain inputs from the world. And IT needs that because infant brains are wiring in themselves to their world, and part of that world as people making faces of them smiling, and those people happen to also be the ones who are main, who are maintaining that baby's nervous system.

Mean, there is reward learning, right? A reinforcement learning right off the bat, because these are the people who keep you comfortable. They are the ones who feed you. They're the ones who help you get to sleep and so on and so forth. And so you're gna be very, very sensitive to changes in the contingencies of their behavior.

Your brain as a pattern learn or is just onna learn those patterns? If we know that smiling more, you know, smiling is A Q for happiness, is because we've learned IT. And that doesn't mean that that learning isn't hardwired IT just means that that information got into your brain by cultural inheritance. Ance, which is a part of evolutionary theory in the extended evolutionary synthesis, not in the original, you know, not in the original formulation that some people still kind of stick to.

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Well, I just mention one thing. Now this is really serious stuff. Like sometimes people think, well, you know, what's the big deal? This is such a big deal. I'll tell you what is a big deal because in our culture, people believe that they can read mental states of other people buy their face and they believe is so much that it's in shined in the legal system.

And there are people who lose their lives because juries believe that they can read remorse or or the lack of IT and in fact there was just a case um you know last year I believe where um you know the innocence project god involved because there was a woman who is on death row and what put her on death row was a police officer claimed that he could read her emotions by her the comportment of her face and her body and um and you know IT was possible to get a stay of execution so that he could be retried and you know so i'm not saying he was guilty or not guilty, i'm just sing what put her on death row was evidence that would not be admissible in a scientific um way now um and there are there are lots of cases where judgments are made that end up of impacting people's lives in pretty serious ways. So this is a really serious thing and it's um it's puzzling to me why it's so it's got such traction, this idea that there are these universal um expressions that we can use to read each other, you know um it's it's just not true. I mean the science just is so overwhelmingly, I feel like, you know, scientists, I don't like to use the keyword, you know the afford fact, you know the scary word tea word truth.

But I think in this case, I feel like I can, I can really, at least with a little tea, I can, I can use IT. You probably have particular facial movements that you make on a regular basis that are tells for you. I know I do, you know my husband can look at my actions and he can make really decent guesses about what's going on for me upstairs, right? But that's because he's known me for thirty years, actually thirty years today.

I should just make sure thirty years ago today, but his, you know brains are pattern learners. So i'm not saying that everything's random and that there's no it's all noise. I'm saying that they're just aren't these you know universal templates. They just it's not like that. And we really have to stop assuming that that that there are well.

i'm so glad that you're getting that message out there, there. And i'm very thankful that you highlighted the seriousness of this, these myths that are propagated and that's a perfect segway into what I was already going to ask, which is um it's based on something that I think is in very much agreement with what you're saying.

Previous guests on this podcast, this was our first guest episode doctor called this roth colleague, good minit stanford incredible bioengineer. Um really, you know, point one percent in his, you know category of science as well as a practicing psychiatrists, said something which really stuck with me over the years, which I once heard him say, we don't really know how other people feel at all. In fact, most of the time we don't even know how we feel and that prompted the question for me about how good or poor we at aging our own emotional states and in particular at labelling them both to others and for ourselves and and so here's the.

The direct question is language sufficient to capture this incredibly complex thing that we're calling emotions? So for instance, the other day I was in new york with my sister and SHE left ed, I went out for a bit. I was having a pretty good day, and I returned to the place where I was staying.

And I was hit with this feeling of intense, lonely ess, and I don't know why. And then I had a bunch of ideas about how that related to drawing up. And I was to see friends the next day, and i'm an adult, so I could use some stop down regulation.

And h, you know, maybe i'm a little tired, right, because I hadn't slept as well the night before. I've been pretty arrested recently. And then I actually wrote my journal.

I said, you know, maybe most of feeling good is being pretty well arrested and not in any physical pain. That's a big part of feeling good is the absence of fatigue and the absence of physical pain. And and then I thought, well, that's just so basic.

It's like two building blocks that is clearly insufficient. But then I couldn't think of a word to adequately describe the emotion that came about an hour later when I was feeling a little bit Better, but not completely Better. So was I lonely? Not really, not anymore.

Was I said, not really. But you know, as a head added out into the city of saying, I don't really have a word for how I feel. I'm sort of OK not not low.

And so I think that we have emotional labels. I certainly do for people, you know, these peak emotional state. Super happy.

I love to the time with my sister. We do this every year. This was a particularly good year for us to do this.

And and IT went really well. We're texting back and forth how great IT was. I certainly know what IT feels like to be really down in the in the pets. I've got language for that, but then there's a huge range in between. And so I guess the simple question is, should we even trust the language as a way to understand how we're feeling or their additional, if not Better, signals that we should perhaps learn to elaborate on our understanding of emotions with?

So i'm gonna give you A A simple answer, and then i'm gonna give you a more complicated answer. So the simple answer is not, language is not sufficient, period. I think the way that you have, well, I should say one, language is not sufficient.

So english is not sufficient and probably french on its own is not sufficient and probably swiftly on its own is not sufficient. Although it's very interesting that the the states that we mark with words in each culture, some of them overlap, but a lot of them don't. And it's very, very useful to have labels of emotion concepts from other cultures that that capture configurations of our state that we we don't really mark. We don't mark those and and for distinctively pull them out as as different from other states.

I'd love to know .

there I should have brought them with me. I mean there there are some like there's a german word which I can't remember them over the word but it's like um the experience of someone having a face that deserves a punch.

I'm sure someone will tell us in the comments someone someone who knows german or spend time there, please put that word in in the comments .

but don't punch another one that my favorite is legit which is um it's a pollination, an headhunting um emotion word than IT means um exubera aggression in a group like soccer or her or head hunting right where you're basically i'm or I should say also in the military. So when I was listening temper one day a couple years ago must been more than that existing my book.

So I was probably more than seven years ago I was listening to these guys talk this former um um military personnel talk about being deployed in a war, whether with their buddies and their they're basically hunting the enemy and they feel exuberant like their you know and and there something they're happy. But there is pleasant and it's very intense, very high rise le you know and in the moment IT IT seemed right and then they come back um you know when they ask themselves like they come back and so they are now you know their deployment ts ended now they are backup and they're like, are my a psychopath like I enjoy killing people. What is this about? And I was thinking, no, no, you just experience ed legit.

And if you had a word for IT, you would understand that it's a group y feeling where you're all in its together and it's really intense and you know they were experiencing the um the intensity of of having their life on the line and and being responsible for their for their brothers you know and sisters in in in their truth for so um the the what they would realize this is a perfectly it's perfectly within the range of Normal human variation. It's just in english. We don't have a word for IT really but there are words, there are concepts in other languages, right or not. The other one I like called jiggle, which is where when you see a baby who's really cute and you just want .

to like yesterday evening that he was so cute as cheater, just like jumping at you and yeah and the parents are delightful people too and they was just facing out because they one of those, yes, outward facing baby things and it's so sort like.

yeah and I think .

go it's called goal or eagles is from the other episode .

that we did way are there is one in japan. I think there's a japanese word for the despair that you feel when you got a bad haircut.

Really yeah because it's I mean.

it's really is a different kind of feeling then you know because you've got to wait for IT to grow, you know whatever. Anyway, the pointing that words for us, mark, particular states and they're not they're not always the states that other people in other cultures care about. But I there is a but the even again the freezing of your question I just want to come back to and i'm not trying .

to pick at you feel what I love is what you said before when you said my question was also posed in your in the answer that followed IT made me very clear why. And I learnt something about how they are the not emotion system, but the things plural, that that create emotions work. So feel free.

I grew up in the same culture that you did. I'm not canadian by birth, but but in the academic culture, you know I mean that the stuff that we take online, by the way, folks, is nothing compared to the kind of hazing that I experience growing up in in academic culture as IT was done then, I don't know if it's still that way now. So feel free. Yeah I think I feel that I look well.

No, I think my point is that i'm trying to get out here is that when we ask questions, any of us, me too, anybody ask a question, there are certain assumptions that we're making in order to to allow us to pose the question.

And sometimes what i'm taking issue with is not the question itself, but it's the s behind the question, right? And this is a very classic thing in philosophy of science, which I know I just said the pee word philosophy, which scientists, unusually, they roll their eyes back in their head and fall over when you talk about that. But I think it's really important.

You can language is language sufficient to label or to to gage emotional states. Kino sounds like. And this is the assumption that people make, that there's a state in here called the emotion.

And now I have to label IT. I have to identify IT. That is not how IT works, like that is not what your brain is doing at all.

And in order to explain what I think is happening and what I my best available guess you know like based on what I understand, it's like not even remotely that that is just not a meaningful question at all. Um I do think words are important. I just don't think that they have to be insufficient by virtue of what the brains actually doing and the way that I come out.

This is just really different from a lot of my colleagues. So really for one hundred years at least. I hate when people save things like that, like for one hundred years, but he really is like for one hundred years at least, what psychologists and neuroscientists do have, are, did and are still doing is they start with a folk experience is a four category a comment and experience.

I feel angry and I making a decision um having a memory and remembering something. They start with their experience and then they go looking for the physical basis of that experience in the brain and you know, in the body. I think that's really problematic because not everybody in the world actually uses those categories or has those experiences.

A lot of that has to do with the scientific publication process, one of the most important statements I ever heard he's from the late ted Jones one of the greatest neuron animals of probably the last five hundred years um which was the following he said a drug is a substance that when injected into an animal or a person produces a scientific paper and in many ways, yeah, you can catch catch square in the face. Can you go? Oh, right.

yeah. I mean, basically every drug disrupts, if taken an hour to before sleep changes, the amount of rems that you get. So so I could imagine that almost any privation of the language system, the body, the facial movement system, could give you according effect, that you could write a paper about. Yes, but that doesn't mean that has any sembLance whatsoever to what's happening in the world when we are, other people experience emotions.

Here's the here, you know there's so much in what you said that I just want it's very saying to talk to you. So first thing i'll say is that um you know we often will identify we we is in the you know people but also scientists identify biological um signals um by what we believe them to mean psychologically. So serotonin is is a happiness chemical no seaton an evolved as a meta lic regulator.

IT is a meta lic regulator. And whatever it's doing, it's allowing an animal to spend resources when the animal that the animal's brain isn't sure there is a reward at the end of that, right? So you were saying before, you know, the absence of fatigue, the absence of discomfort, that's that's a pleasant feeling, right?

Well, yeah, so maybe serotonin has something to do with pleasant ness because IT has something to do with energy. X right. Cortile cortile is not a stress hormone.

It's not a stress hormones mean, it's a hormonal that is secreted more when the brain believes that there is. A big metal abc outlet that's required. And that's what stress is.

Basically, it's the brain believes there is a big metabolite that's about to be required and IT matters. These kind of like little semantic tweet, like they matter a lot because of how we do, because of how we do research. So I would say I don't start with the categories that derive from english and my own experience, and I start with the nervous system. I try to learn what is the best available evidence for how that nervous system evolved, how IT developed, how it's structured, right? Anatomy to me is very important.

Some of my best hypotheses come from just learning the anatomy and realizing only there is a connection there the direct that me that should be something you know I mean um I can give you lots of examples of uh, where we've had we've made discovery solely because we noticed and and a set of anatomical and and we're really curious about what they might be involved with. But if you start with that premise, then you think about the brain and I think about the brain a really different way, right? So I don't think about the brain as a stimulus driven organ.

Um I think about IT more like this that the the brain is um first of all, the brain is not running a model or or making inferences about the world. All the brain knows each are signals from the sensory surfaces of its body. So your brain is modeling your retina, and it's modeling your colia, and it's modelling the sensory services of the skin.

And sure signals, you know, you know, hit those surfaces and those surfaces, trans duce, those signals, and send them up to the brain. But the brain only knows the body. And anything that knows about the world, IT knows about the world through the body, through the sensory surfaces of the body.

So that's the first, for me, really big important point. The second important point is that I think about the brain is being trapped in a dark, silent box called your scholl, you know and is so we're not saying these things to you. You're so much you like. You're this really esteemed like neuroscientist. And here i'm explaining to you how I think the brain works is just very no that's important .

for our audience is also important for me even though yes, I I know I know these facts but it's I believe it's always a informative to go back to the fundamental because we forget no, actually I would say that the someone wants described um that allow him the great because he's a great visual neuroscientists visual neuroscientists tony motion who found in the department of a neurosciences why you once you know a real intellectual is somebody that can appreciate and work with a topic at multiple levels of granularity.

First read is not about often times the more expertise is associated with more focus on detail. So I love returning to the core basic. So I I think it's please please continue.

So I think about the brains being trapped in this box and um it's receiving signals continuously from the sensory services of the body, but those signals are the outcomes of subset of changes. And the brain doesn't know what the changes are. IT doesn't know the causes of those signals.

IT just knows the outcomes. IT knows the signals that's what is receiving. And so IT has to guess at what the causes of those signals are in order to stay alive.

Um and so that's influx. He called an inverse problems. So the brain just has a massive continuous inverse problem that IT has to deal with all the time like you can't .

have IT doesn't have access to all the information. No, it's just a guessing machine.

It's a guessing machine. So for example, um you know if you hear a loud bang, what is that loud? And could be a car door slammed IT could be funder IT could be a car back firing IT could be a gunshot.

The brain doesn't know. IT has to guess. And it's not making a guess like, uh, intellectual gas. The guess is a motor plan is a plan for changing the international state of the body in order to support motor skeletons, motor movements.

Do I need to run? Do I need to shut the window? Do I need to get an umbrella? Do I know? Do I need all my breath because the car is backfire? You know, what do I need to do? So where does that plan come from? Well, IT comes from past experience.

The experience has been wired into the brain. But the but I think that the evidence suggests that what the brain is doing is basically reinstated bits and pieces of past experience. So remembering, although we don't experience ourselves as remembering ing, but basically it's reimplement ting on symbol's of signals from the past that are similar to the present in some way.

Now a bunch of things which are similar to each other in psychology is a category. So what the brain is doing is it's creating it's constructing a category. And in fact, we think about the brain as a continuous category constructor.

It's constructing a category of possible futures, possible outcomes, possible motor plans. And how does IT know which is the right one? Because it's not just picking one.

There is going to be some sample that it's it's reimplement ting. But how does IT know which one which is the right one? Because there can only be one.

Well, I feel like in the example of a loud noise, what I immediate thought of, as you were describing, that is that my system would become aware of IT. I will become aware of IT, but then it's a question of is there another loud noise? How closely are those loud noises spaced? Is IT getting louder or less loud? And then and saw a bunch of categories.

It's like a book shelf with an infinite number of books. But then with the second loud noise, now it's just, you know, one wing of the library. And then with the next thing that happens in the context that starts narrowing and then pretty soon you get presented with the book that says, you know.

the roof is about to cave in. And and I think your you're your analogy there is pointing out two weeks. One is that um really why why the what the brains attempting to do is to reduce uncertainty, because uncertainty is super expensive.

Now sometimes we like deliberately cultivate uncertainty, right like we do not you know we deliberately try to learn things. We don't you know that we don't know. We you know put ourselves in novel situations. We seek novelty and because it's fun and interesting and whatever. sure.

But imagine every single waking moment of your life was like that where you didn't know you couldn't narrow things down from the library to the wing, to the bookshelf, to the, you know, to the the particular shell phone, that bookshelf to the fuck. Yeah, very fine. yeah.

That's the label I would give IT. I would be terrified, right? Because I couldn't plan anything or do anything .

because all possibility, right? It's and it's just actually met a ably unsustainable. And you know there are some there are some brains that are wired in a way that they don't predict very well.

They don't create these categories very well. And so they're they're dealing with in really unbelievable amounts of uncertainty. So that's one thing. I is the part of what's the goal here.

If you could say there's a goal is to reduce uncertainty, and i'm going get to why this has anything to do with a motion in a minute. But I I just need to set up the ground rules or the assumptions you know of what i'm what i'm working with here. So the other thing though that you point IT out, which I think is really important, is that the um none of this is static.

It's all evolving over time, but the signals are evolving over time. So both the signals that are constantly hitting the sensory surfaces of the body and making their way to the brain, but also the intrinsic signals in the brain, is all changing over time. So when we talk about context, that's important.

How is the brain making a decision about similarity? Like what are the features that are similar? It's it's not just at a single snapshot in time.

It's always happening dynamically over time, right? And most of the time though, you don't ask you, you don't wait to hear a second sound. You don't you, you deliberately attempting to figure out what the sound is.

Your brain is just sorting IT out, right? And it's sorting IT out by narrowing down the possibilities. And there are some selection mechanisms in the brain that helped guess Better, but also the signals coming from the world um are are also helping to select which possibility is the right one.

There is the scene that comes to mind from that movie. I think I was saving private ryan where like the the the guys that are about to hit the ground on d day are flinching with every crack of gunfire like there just everything's a students less to move in to end. And then some of the more seasoned soldiers are literally having bullets wishing by their head. And people are dropping that all around them and they're moving for stealing and stable and right and in part, we look at that in and say, okay, they're courageous. Their season, maybe their desensitize in certain ways but actually fits much Better with the idea based on what you're saying that fits much Better with the idea that um they have intimate knowledge, both conscious and unconscious knowledge, that something right next to them is a threat but not a threat worth responding .

to if .

we head straight for them. Yeah they were so quite .

understand what I say is that it's not you know I keep referring to things as signals and really i'm just i'm that's like my generic word for a quantities energy of some sort, you know, but your brain, my brain, every brain, is constantly making signal noise. Distinction, you know, like distinctions.

Do I need to care about this? Do I do I not need to care about this? right? And we have ways of learning and we also have ways of killing each other.

So um you know humans use I gaze to kill each other about what is signal and what is noise, right? So if you and I were sitting or let's say we were at a coffee shop and we were in a part of town that I had never been to before, and we were sitting having coffee, and, you know, a loud ion went by, if you turned and looked, i'd probably turned and look, because you just cute me, that that was something I need to care about. If you ignore IT, i'd probably ignore IT because you just cute me that I didn't need to worry about IT.

I didn't need to care. And we're constantly doing that with each other. And we also do IT with little babies and with kids, and that's how we teach children.

This is signal. This is noise. This you need to worry about, this you can ignore. And so, yeah, your your description is perfect.

So what does this have to do? Any of this have to do? With emotion in order to answer that part of the question. I, I, I want to say, so okay, you ve got these signals.

The brain is like, has these electrical signals going on? And we'll just ignore the hormonal signals for the moment because that one is complicated. So it's got all these electrical signals going on.

It's when it's remembering something, it's just basically reinstating a pattern of signals and it's got these signals coming in um from the sensory services. Okay, so what so what is the brain doing? It's a signal processor.

So what is IT? I don't mean a computer, I mean a signal processor in the engineering. And so what's what is he doing without getting into all the dynamics of prediction? And you know whatever what the brain is doing is it's it's assembling a set of features.

It's some of the features that its assembling are very close in detail to the sensory surfaces of the body. So in primary visual cortex, there's a written a topic map. The details there are very, very low level like a lion and edge.

You know same thing in primary auditory cortex, right? It's china topic. So there are tones, but very, very, very low level details. And we might there are many, many, many, many of these little feature. So we would say there there's it's a high dimensional ara, lots and lots and lots and lots of features.

And then and let's just talk about one structure, just the rebel cortex that's not worry about love just but what i'm about to say is basically true of really the rest of the brain as well. If you take the cortex off the surface, the cortical sheet off the that way, ticket off the rest of the brain, the sub critical parts, and you stretch IT out like an napkin, you can see there's a compression gradient there in the architecture of the neurons. So at the primary sensory areas there are these tiny, little criminal neons that are representing these, these very low level features.

And they feed into bigger neurons, which feed into bigger neurons, which feed into more bigger neurons. So what's happening is you've got this very detailed array being compressed in its dimensionality until you get to the middle of the brain at the front where there are many fewer neurons, but they're bigger and they have many more connections. So it's a dimensionality reduction that's happening.

So just stop. Make sure I understand um correctly and that the audience understands the physical world obviously transformed by our sensory upper eye, the retina, the cochlea, the the sensing neurons in our skin, its physical things, mechanical pressure, light foton, sound waves, OK that's translate into neural code which is chemical and electrical yes and and those sensory inputs are fairly vast and that these high dimension dimensionality so lots of different orientations of lies so not even even though IT originates with just three a coon photo pigments, lots of opportunity for encoding different shades of color contrast, okay, in all of that.

And so you have lots of little neurons to represent all the possibilities of the physical world that are occurring. But as that information is passed further up along, you have to be careful with height of the use of heroes, because that's controversial ades, not for political reasons, but for accuracy reasons. As that information is passed along, there is more convergence onto a smaller number of larger neurons. So these are names that have access to a lot of information.

but in course or form, right? So there are low, you know, like like compressing and M P three, like have an M P three compresses information, for example. So the cortex is representing features.

So and I represent, i'm just using that an generic way because that's also controversial but exactly how the k yeah, for now i'm using IT just in a generic way. So you go from lines and edges to a shape like a round shape to a face to a right. You basically your you're um you're going what happening is there are summaries of summaries of summaries of some I hope everyone .

hears that because i've been in this field of neuroscience a long time. As you move along the neurosis from the sensory empathetic um that sounds very, very Normal literis h but from the surface of the skin in word, you're getting summaries yeah actually more and more summaries. I think that's so important at that's that's a like a zillion dollar statement for understanding the other system.

So but each of those points correspond to some mental feature like a line or an edge or a circle or a square or a face or right. But but now then you when you when you're in the midline at the front, what are those features? While those features are things like there, there are multimodal summaries, meaning they are summaries of the site and sounds and smells and right, but they and they are lower dimensional, meaning their course.

So there's things like threat, reward, pleasure. I mean, really abstract. That's what abstract means. IT doesn't mean that those representations have no sensory or motor, meaning that that that means that threat, for example, a summary can have many different patterns associated with IT, and the brain is treating them all as equivalent.

This, this, to me again, feels so, so important for people to understand. Because, as i'm hearing this in this word, summaries is just ringing. My mind is so important because one of the core components of my experience, of my emotions, because that's all I can really say for sure. My subjective interpretation and label lings in my own emotions, is that they are pretty broad .

bins like I describe that that's where I was, exactly where I was going. So what about the world anger? Where's that represented? Like, well, that's that's a one of these multi model of abstractions.

In fact, anger is just a couple of phone names. It's a couple of sounds. But those sounds, the sound of anger corresponds over thousands of instances that you've learned in your life to very different patterns of sensory motor features.

This, right, because what's going on in your body during anger can vary. What the way you move your face in anger can vary depending on the situation. What you see someone else doing in anger can vary in. So the word anger, or any word, is actually just a multimodal summary of many, many, many, many instances, which are in their sensory and motor features. The sensory and motor meaning very different.

And that seems to me, are highly constrained by developmental and cultural experience. Because just today I learned that there's a word in japan for the feeling that one has of having got ten a haircut they don't like. There's a word in germany that pertains to the feeling of wanting to punch someone specifically because of the look on their face more like you.

like you to you IT feels like they're asking to be punched in the even.

So you added yet more dimensional me too. So upon learning just those things just today, there is additional dimensionality brought in such that if I were ever want to point somebody in the face simply because of the look on their face, that I wouldn't necessarily label that as anger alone. IT now has another dimension to IT. And so I think i'm finally I think i'm finally starting to understand how the developmental and the cultural influences, plus the fact that language is a pretty crude description for this neural process that .

you're describe. Absolutely, absolutely, but OK so bit but before you use the word granularity and so i'm gonna that word too. In fact, i've i've coined that phrase, emotion granular. Um this is an a side, you know I coined that phrase almost thirty years ago and now people study IT like it's a phenomenon which is cool in a sense but also I kind of want to we keep reminding them like that's a word that refers to process. It's not a thing.

It's a process and the but the process is, so when the brain is a category constructor, how fine grained are the categories? How precise of the categories, right? If you're using if you're feature of equivalence that your brain is using a threat, you're in really big trouble. There are like a gazza ilian different sensory motor patterns that could go with threat. So your category is gonna massive.

So how does the brain figure out which of those massive number of options is the one to use in this, in in this instance, if on the other hand, you don't just want to use sory motor patterns as the features of equivalence of the features that you are using, to say, this instance right now is similar to these past instances. If I had to search like right now what is similar to right now, IT would be me sitting across the table from somebody who has a beard and is um dressed in black. And you know there there are a lot of details that they probably don't matter, right? So you you'd be searching for a specific match from the past that's not very efficient, deeper. So you need something in the middle and you then be that is to say you need to have at your brain has people to make categories that are more fine grained but not super fine grain, but they have to be more fine grained .

than just threat yeah, you want to keep the in the library analogy that I made earlier, you want to keep the rest of the library accessible at some level. yes. So you're not just staring at that one book.

But if you use the category bad, this feels bad, then your brain is basically um going to be partially constructing an entire wing full of books, like entire wing full of options. If you use the word angry um then maybe it's a bookcase. It's constructing a bookcase full of options and a category that the size of a bookcase.

And if you were using the word frustrated, then maybe it's a shelf. The brain can learn to construct categories at different scales of generalize ability. So I in an instance, and my brain is making a guess, is IT drawing from past instances that were associated with the word anger, uh, were associated with the word fear.

Maybe it's some combination. It's the words are just features, are just sounds. There are also all source of other features, like, what was my heart doing? what? what? What kind of motor actions did I make? What did I see next? So the point being when i'm trying to bring here is that it's not like your brain creates a an emotional state and then labels IT. What your brain is doing is creating a category of possible futures of what's gonna, what it's gona do next. And that state is largely determined by the what the brain is remembering and how it's drawing from that huge population, that huge library of options, which books is at sampling.

I love this so much because IT explains so much that Frankly is as perplexing to me and also somewhat troubling to me like IT for insinuation um we hear about emotional intelligence, you know and and sometimes I wonder whether not true emotional intelligence would be what you described, the understanding of how this process work so that you can work with IT.

And I definitely wanted talk about how one can work with this knowledge because I think it's incredibly powerful in its explantatory power, but also it's actionable power. Um the other thing is that it's clear to me, just based on my experience today of hearing these words from other cultures that relate to different emotional states, that the system, unlike a lot of systems in the brain I like to think is fairly plastic. Like the moment that you know that there are additional dimensions to sadness, anger, eta, there's something comforting about that.

What's really unsettling is the idea that we have such broad bins that we are, we would define a near infinite number of situations as just fear that would suck. That's not a good existence. And yet, I have to ask whether not you think that as a species, not as a culture, but our entire species, whether not we are taking the exact opposite approach that were moving into the ization is that word i'll make IT a word and people can assault me in the comments um the emotion ation of this very richa complex system were starting to get into this mode of like i'm going to post an angry face and therefore like this is a bad i'm angry you this is a bad interaction.

We're gonna potentially combat tive or and you know maybe um twitter x or instagram or other social media sites are kind of the epidemic. This where you reduce this high dimensional space in you, you keep that the sensory stimulation very high, movie after movie after movie and color and sound and people doing crazy park ward stuff and bar eating giraffe, whatever. This seems not barzy in giraffe, but you know what I mean, and you can see stuff that sexual and violent and political and emotional and sweet.

And then the cats are kissing the monkey and near like, or the monkey is kissing the cat. And so it's high dimensional in terms of sensory space. But then what do we call we're like, oh, this is an a mog. You assign A G, you're hearting something, you're giving a thumbs up or thumbs down. So I must feel like were trying to we were regressing to a state where we're kind like an infant trying to figure out like what the health going on and we're saying, you know what you get like six categories of response when in reality um we should probably be expanding the number of different responses that we can have in order to accurately match the way that our nervous system actually works.

Yes, exactly. There are many different things we can talk about with respect to the summary that you just gave, which I I think is completely accurate. So what I would say is that if you look through even just the last, I don't know, hundred or so years like the nineteen, you nineteen, twenty eight centuries, maybe you can see that the complexity of the of people's responses expands and contracts, right?

So for example, this is something that i've britain really specular vely about um but one of the things that I found really interesting um is that authoritarian ism, authoritarian thinking is the reduction of complexity of some things that are really, really simple like you're getting rid of all the complexity too you know basically these very, very course low dimensional dgm and things become black and weight. It's the avoidance of complexity um so that there can be simple single answers to things and IT have ens in human culture at times and then then there is an expansion of complexity at times too. So what predicts that like what is that in the human nervous system or our collective human nervous in a liquor, we're just a bunch of brains attached to bodies interacting with other brains and bodies, right?

So like what is IT that causes these ripples of? And and I have some thoughts about that, that are really, really, really speculative um but I think the other thing that's that's really important is that we've talked about to go back to our our cortical sheet that we've by the way, this is just one compression gradient in the brain. There are others too, right um there at least four others that I can think of um so this is just one, but all compression grades work the same way, which is that now we've talked about going from the low level details.

Compressing to these multi model summary is really like simple um features that are right. But that compression is what engineers would call lossy, meaning you lose the information. You lose the information.

So when you go from lines and edges to a face, those neurons, they just know the face they don't have. They lose what theyve thrown away. The details theyve thrown away. Those details are gone on for those neurons that are representing A.

I don't have access to .

they don't have access to IT. We don't. So we said, all the brain is making a guess, is making a guess about what this what this big, very, very high dimensional, you know, soup of signals in the world and in the body, like, what do they mean, right?

When the brain makes, I guess IT starts with the compressed, low dimensional signals. IT starts with the features like anger or like threat, or IT starts with these summaries. And then IT has to infer or gas at every synapse.

There's a guess that's being made about what the details are at the next level because what's happening is the guess is basically the brain going from these really general things to these very specific sensory motor patterns. IT happens along the cortical sheet. IT happens also down the nera's, down the number, you know, from the cortex to the mid brain, to the brain stem to the spinal cord.

You have to go from a representation of, you know, run to the actual physical movements of muscles, spends and you know angles of joints and things like that. So what you're doing is you're going in the other direction. You adding detail, your particularizing and the brain is guessing. It's guessing. Well, if it's using anger as the general feature, will which which instance of anger is IT and what are the specifics that are gonna happen and .

and what are that? And forgive me, but and what are the adaptive steps that what I might take or not take, because quoting a lot today. So forgive me. But in the words of the great sharing ton, nobel prize winning physiology, the final common pathway is movement .

with movement.

And movement is nuance, right? Humans, I suppose, have among the greatest variety of different speeds and types of movement. I think about park core gynt CS.

Think about then what, like A A cheetah t can do. Cheats are impressive. A gym. Myst is truly impressive in terms of the range of movements and speeds and that in any event, the ultimate choice is in a resistant mater make is whether or not to move which direction, how fast or stay still, move forward, move back. And and I just i'll just add because I am hoping that you'll expand on this. Um it's been said before that ultimately the nervous system is trying to make decisions about Young yak or may like like my going move toward something I am gonna move away from IT or am I just going to stay put?

Well, that's only that's only the that's a very I would say that those are very low dimensional features. So those are those compressed features. But that's not the only thing the brain has to decide. That's just a mno mer.

Well, I can get out of slow pickle that I just put myself in by saying that I didn't say that. Now I won't quote who did because he's a very famous neuroscientist, but he tried to reduce IT all. He's at col.

tech. He's not somebody who studies emotion, studies the visual system. But he said that know that there's a, that the the neural circuits. My music, as he states, mice are, are essentially been into Young yang and my outputs and and I, I always liked, on the one hand, could freeze work, and its simple, but rarely is the way that we describe things.

the way that actually worked. So we, you know, in studying humans, we would say, well, that affect the affect that's moved or you know, just like, is IT is IT um should I move towards IT is IT pleasant? Should I move away from IT is IT unpleasant or you know is IT irrelevant? Basically, I don't care.

Okay, think about when you're feeling horrible, you just feel you feel, you just feel you feel bad. What do you do? You don't know. You don't know because you don't have a plan of action.

And that's ultimately that is what those those compressed like some mary features of very low q course features, they have to be decompresses into details, otherwise you don't know what to do. So ultimately, what the brain is doing is IT sampling from the past based on similarity to the present to plan in action. And when I say action, I don't just mean sa little motor action like moving a limb.

You, the first actions that planned are the actions of coordinating the heart and the lungs, and you, all of the internal actions that are required to forth the motor, the skeleton, to motor movement. So your brain is making, uh, is categorizing, is making a is is creating a category and is their options there those options, the motor plans begin with should the heart beat faster, should be slower as blood pressure needs to go up to the, you know, should the blood vessels constrictor, should they dilate um should the breathing be deeper or more shallow? I mean, those are the first plans that get made.

And then milliseconds later, there are the skeleton motor plans. And then your experience of the world derives from those motor's plans, those visual motor, that is the plans for the viscera, for the internal organs and the skeleton motor. I'm just going to fer to them as motor.

Those motor plans actually give rise to your experience of the world. There's not some state that exists as an emotional state, which then you apply a label to. The label is a just a set of features that are useful for generalizing from the past to the present.

And the bin size are the the you know of of what the word refers to can change. I can change its different for different people, and you can change in your lifetime. And you can add newbies, that is you can use self for example.

There is a there is a concept gissin look, which I probably just butchers so if you speak turkish, i'm sorry but it's like IT has features of IT of like lost and um like people locking your goals. So we would say it's anger and sadness together that you can look when you lose something in your pissed off about IT. Um that's a but that's a category on its own right is just a different way of passing that that really detailed soup.

And the more words you know, the more words are just useful for pointing to a set of features that are similar to each other. So what I mean by that is if I say to you, Andrew, I had pizza last night for dinner. Pizza two sounds. Two symbols that those two syllables SAT they stand in for, like fifty different sensory motor features. Because I don't have to say to you, I had a food.

I didn't have piece, listen, but let's say that I had a food that was round and flat and had sauce and also cheese and IT IT had muster le cheese and also little permit on cheese and IT had mushrooms on IT and a little bit of uh, olive and you know that's like really, really a detail and complicated but instead I can just say, and pizza, two features, two sounds, slabes phone names. And with those two phone names I have just communicated to you in your brain, my brain had fifty features. IT was representing of details. And now I have just communicated those to you, or some number of them with two sounds very efficient. Now of course, you might think that I was from chicago and had deep dish pizza and i'll just resist I don't want to offend .

anybody from chicago that's .

not a pizza. That's a right. So you could then ask me, uh, was IT, but you're from chicago is a deep dish pizza and then I would say, no, no, i'm actually from toronto, which is just like new york and so no is thin k pizza which is really the only of piece of there is just saying but you know but my point is that words are just standing for there are just low, these like low dimensional features, these kind of growth features that stand in for many, many, many, many little detail features. And that's how we communicate with each other.

And and we are constrained by, you know what we know and are yes, so and what we can say and are at the extent .

of our and i'll just say that little babies three months old, they don't speak yet and they don't understand language, but they can use words to learn abstract categories. So what abstract just means that that the word refers to many different patterns of sensory motor features. So the word is or the category, the things that make the instance is similar um are a function um or goal, not like the sensor matter features. So you say to a baby very explicit like a because we're tag three, four months old babies right babies can also do this implicated to um but in experiments you said your baby looks sweet, this is a bling and you put the blame down and IT makes a beeping noise and then you say now this looks different fields, different rates, smells different, looks sweet this is a blame IT beats now you take something else which also is different and you say, looks, sweety, this is a blame now the baby expects this to beep by the way .

folks just listening. Lisa just gave three examples, first with a pen, then a coffee mug, and then her very own watch, a three very distinct objects, but all of which make that are told, the baby is told, make a blink sound. And they will distinct objects, functionally distinct objects.

into one single bin, because they make, because they are sharing a function, which is to be.

I think this is so, is so important. And I, and if I may, I I want to ask whether not we can take this incredible understanding of emotions, because that's really what we're talking about.

really talking about how the brain, my version of how the brain works, and how emotions emerge out of this system. Basically.

in absolutely, he described IT far Better than I could in an anchor, that to this concept of movement, that the movement is the final common path, with the understanding that the movement system, and forgive me, but that we have systems in the brain and body that allow us to move that for sure, systems that they run in both directors. In other words, how we feel what we feel our emotions, has some bearing on the movements that are more less likely for us in a given context. And our movements clearly can also influence the way that we feel internally.

Well, well, I mean, so if if we just look at how things are happening, here's here's what the anatomy tells us, that when the brain makes a guess, that guess starts as a motor plan, starts as a visual multi plan and a skeleton motor plan.

So heart rate changes, breathing changes, lood pressure changes and potentially skeletal .

muscle movement, right? And literal copy, literal copies f and copies of those signals are sent to, they propagate to the sensory areas, telling the brain, telling those neurons. This is the last time we made this in this context, when this other stuff just happened.

The, like, this temporal context, right? The, and we made these movements. Here's what we saw next. Here is what we've felt next year, what we smell next. So yeah, I think of this.

The image pops in my mind. We should explain to people what inference copy is um in neuroscience and neurology. Y uh the connection to a structures called an affair into with an a and the connections out from a structure called the E F IT .

does even matter. It's just basically the point here is that in our experience, in our in the way the brain, your brain cons and experience, okay. And and that experience is that you feel something first, you see something, you feel something, you act.

That's not what's happening. What's happening is your brain is preparing the action first and the feeling what and your experience comes from that action preparation. So it's a copy. It's like literally you have axons that are sending motor signals down those you know brain stem to the spinal cord, and literal copies of those axons, like those axions, have branches that collateral branches that just send acts on other places.

The same signal that is being sent to your spinal cord to move stuff in your body, that same signals being sent to other neurons in the brain as predictions of the sensations that are gonna happen in a second from now, a moment from now, public faster than second, but, you know, in a couple million seconds if you move. And so, yes, IT is the case that what you feel is linked to what you do. And what you do is linked to what you feel, but not in this simple, mechanistic way that that neurotic scientists and psychologists have been using for ever.

You, it's not like you are, you, are you, you, you probed by a stimulus. You you see something, you hear something, and then you process IT and evaluated and then you react to IT. No, that's not what's happening.

What's actually happening under the hood is that based on how things are right now, your brain makes a guess or some guesses, and those guesses as start as motor plans. And the consequence of those motor plans are predicted sensations. And then, of course, sensory signals are coming from the sensory surfaces.

And this end, here's the really, here's to me the really the most mind boggling thing about this call explanation. If your century neurons in your century areas are already so, they're firing the, the, the action potentials. The spiking has changed based on these prepared motor movements.

These are sensory predictions. And you know, when I give talks and on my website, I have some cool examples of of how this works. You can experience IT yourself, you know, who start to experience, uh, no, you hear things that aren't there.

You you feel vibrations in your chest that aren't there because your brain is predicting, it's predicting these sensations. So let's say the sensations come that the sensory signals, I should say, let me so the sensory signals from the sensory surfaces of the body make IT to the brain. If you have if your neurons are already firing in a way to anticipate those signals, those signals just confirm the firing and then they're done.

They don't make IT any further into the brain. So when you're predicting well, your experience is constructed completely by your brain, the signals from the century surfaces are there just to confirm or to change the signal. So if there's things you didn't anticipate, then those um errors of prediction, those are the signals that are propagated and become compressed and stuff. And we have a special name for that in science we call IT learning. You know andy Clark is a philosopher who D D rights a lot about prediction, predicting brain and and so on and he talks about Normal a everyday experience as being uh controlled fluctuation.

That's true. Yeah I described to that um it's a fairly adapt of in most circumstances controlled illustration but IT has its limitations and IT I mean what you are talking about um if I could be somewhat of a summary iron, you can tell me if what my summary is too course is the first one that that neural systems in the brain, let's just got the nervous system because we're turning about brain and body are incredibly dynamic.

There's buts of inputs. Those inputs gets are incredibly laborat. They get summarized. Summary prepares the body for a certain action that's a motor commands, promoter commands, and then some action, mayor may not be taken. But already, as soon as that the action is taken or not taken, the whole state of the neural system is different. It's change as a consequence of what has happened, of course, when people hear that.

And when I hear that, indeed, I I feel like, well, it's a tough system to study because these are dynamic and neural systems and and we have the technology to put people in functional scanners and look at what lights up, so to speak. We have the capacity to ask people how they feel based on question, nair. But you can imagine that incredibly crudes are then you give them liquids scales of you rate from one to ten how happy or sad you are.

And so you're adding some, some depth dimensionality to but it's incredibly crude, is nothing like really experience and is somebody he's more verbal, less verbal, maybe they some matis ze more less mean. The example comes to mind your ocean. You learn from social media, which often I learned from social media.

And someone once said, I don't think in thought, I think in feels. And I thought, okay, great, that you're probably also from northern california. I said, wait under stopping.

So judgmental, what do you mean? And I ask, and I said, I experience emotions in their mind first as a, as a bodily state. Then the label comes much later.

That's not how t works for me. IT feels fairly more integrated of brain body for me. But other people started timing.

And now I think of experience. I experiences emotions clearly as a verbal label. It's all in their head. And so you started to realized that we might all be coding the world slightly differently or very differently, and it's changing in time.

So then the question becomes, you know how what are the anchor points in terms of our understanding of emotions that we can work with? And and and the following questions come to mind neither you or our clinicians. As far as I know, i'm certainly not I was .

actually trained as a clinician.

Oh, there you go.

I'm wrong again. But I no no, no but I mean I vents. I haven't practice in like really.

Gazillion of you're more than qualified to answer the question i'm about to ask, which is to me, there is a great conflict of information in the psychology, psychiatry and this just call IT wellness and mental health space, which is when we are feeling lousy, like not good, let's put Violets on IT just lousy.

I don't want in a state that we or having an emotion that we don't want to have, there's an entire category information that says you need to feel your feelings. You to feel you your feelings. You need to acknowledge that they are there.

You need to go into the feeling, maybe even full, cathartic. You need to amplify the feelings until they leave your body. After all, Steve jobs was in the stream therapy, and he helped mix bunches. anger.

Who knows? You get these examples. He's pride the worst example, because that seemed like he was angry a lot from what I hear.

But then there's another category of thought, which is you need to use your ability to top down control inhibition, or the cortex on lower structures again, and deliberately using crude language here to say, wait, you know, this is an emotion. Emotions pass. This is not real.

This is just a limited set of high dimensionality stuff that's been summarized. And, you know, like, I don't need to feel this way. I can make myself feel differently. Maybe i'll go for a run. In fact, I always feel Better after I go for a run. So even this question as simple as should we feel our our feelings, or should we not feel our feelings in of course, you would hope that this would be answered appropriately, such that people don't go harm other people for themselves. But assuming that they're not can harm other people themselves, verbally or physically, then you really get yourself into a bit of a pickle, like we don't understand what to do with emotions, hours or other people's, because clearly we don't understand emotions.

say, so I would say i'm gonna answer your question and then I want to also pick up the world that I want to pick IT an assumption um because IT it's come up actually a couple of times. There's something super important in your descriptions that I just want to pull out for for the listeners because thing is really important and you're doing IT very naturally. But I think some people IT just bears commenting on. So let me just deal with the question, how should we feel our feelings or use our words? We say a little kids user words like don't throw a tantrum, but then there resolved through the other feelings, just feel it's important to feel and you don't want to get IT have be .

put up and use your body and like hit a pillow I think the screen there be bite the pillow screen the plot, tell the pillow and there's you can pay five .

known a week answer there is wrong like flexibility is important for everything always right so um first, well you don't have you don't have emotions in your body. Your body doesn't keep the score you know .

yeah great book title because is super catchy. With all do respect to, I think, the important work of ventral, I think IT oversimplified and let people to believe that their back pain was trauma and that all trauma is some atis. Zed, but and it's not no.

it's not. But I I would go further and say, like, first of all, your body does keep the score. Your brain keeps the score.

Your body is the score card. That's super important. And he has done really important work.

But his explanations for why things work is scientifically incorrect IT just is because we don't feel things in our bodies. We everything we feel, we feel in our brains, we don't see in our eyes. We see in our brains. Of course, we need our eyes, but we don't see in our eyes.

Just like if you, you know, pinch your your hand with, you know take skin and pinched between two two fingers, the skin, you don't feel that actually in your hand you feel that in your brain that's the magic of the brain in a sense. So what I would say is IT um uh IT depends on the situation and what your goal is. Sometimes that is useful to use your words and sometimes that is useful to go for a run IT just depends on what your goal is when both .

those cases you are that you gave both those examples excuse me, you um it's a way of shifting off the emotion. I guess what i'm asking is.

well, sometimes you don't want to shifting off the emotion. Sometimes sometimes the wise thing to do is live in the emotion that is, you know sometimes, uh, discomfort. Sometimes when something feels bad IT doesn't mean something is wrong IT just might mean .

that you're doing something hard. Early emotions that I wrote down, you know, simple as good. When IT feels good, you like, I just feel really great. But then when things feel loud, that's where new ones could be beneficial.

absolutely. Because work, because emotions are recipes for action. The when you go from bill and feeling bad to feeling angry or sad, it's a recipe for action. And I would also say this just this is an analogy but I I sort of I stand by IT. Um you know when I was um I had major back serge a couple years ago and I know something about chronic pain.

It's not my area of study but I know something about IT because i've aren't we analyze data sets and i've read a lot so i'm none an expert but you know I have ideas. And I thought to myself, well, I just I don't want to end up with chronic backend in. So what I did was I made sure after I got through the first couple of weeks where I really needed oxy code on so that I could walk, you know, I was up and walking the same day head surgery, if you could call a walking a sort of a uniform m for like hobby around dona with a Walker.

But um I made sure that I felt the pain that is I dozed myself with discomfort quite deliberately because I wanted to make sure that i'm sorry for using you know partition language. I don't know how else to say this. I wanted my brain to be taking in the prediction air.

I one of my brain to to feel the to to I wanted to focus attention on the changing, you know, the changing discomfort over time, because IT meant that my body was healing as the discomfort got less. But my brain would never feel that discomfort changing if I A took painkillers. And because the prediction error, the things that the brain doesn't predict are teaching signals.

And I think it's true also in your life like sometimes you wanna feel IT because you you want to feel that is comfort because it's instructive about something and sometimes it's not. And that maybe that's not really an answer, but the only way that you can figure that out for yourself is to do IT sometimes if you're always getting rid of discomfort, you never know when it's useful. And IT is useful sometimes.

But now I want to get to this point that I was making before, like we are talking about feeling and emotion interchange, like they're interchange able and they're not right. So here's how I would say that your brain is always regulating your body twenty four, seven, and your body is always sending sensory signals back to the brain about the sensory state of the body. And our nervous systems aren't wired for us to experience those sensory changes that are happening in the body in any degree of detail.

We're just not. And it's a good thing like right now as we talk here, our hearts of beating and are you know in crease is wishing stuff out. You know you liver is no filtering and like you oxygen concentrations are changing like there's a whole DRAM going on inside each of us and our listeners.

And we're largely we're not aware, and I hope our listeners aren't aware because if they were, they would not be listening to anything we were saying theyd be completely, you know, in in rap shirt or or in discomfort at what's going on inside them. Instead, the brain creates a low dimensional summary, this growth kind of like parameter, which is feeling effective. Feeling, we call IT, or you could call IT mood, but scientists call IT affect with an a feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling worked up, feeling calm, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable.

It's kind of a general parameter of the state of the body, and it's not a motion that those feelings, those features of feeling, are features of consciousness, because your brain is always regulating your body. Bodies always sending signals back to the brain. The brain is always representing them in this low dimensional way, whether you are paying attention or not, like what the brain is focusing is, you know, applying attention to those neurons or not, the those signals are there.

And even when we're not emotional, you know, like if you're driving on the highway, somebody cuts you off and you think what I ask all the award ness of that person, that intensity of that negative effect is you experience IT as a property of that person, but really it's coming from you. It's it's not a property of that person. Is that a feature of your experience in that moment? And effect is always there.

Sometimes it's in the foreground, sometimes it's in the background, but it's always there. And is a summary of physical things, which is why IT helps to if you take ib profit or thailand, all IT will. I mean, study show IT reduces negative feeling if you go for a run, if you go for a walk, if you shift your attention to the outside world, then the features, that of the experience that are derived from the inside world diminish.

That's why going for run helps, or going for a walk helps, or, you know, getting sleep helps, right? These are all things where you're changing the state of your body, and so the sensory state of your body's changing, and so your affect changes. But emotions are the story that the brain tells about what caused the sensory signals that affect derives from.

So what caused to those changes? What do I need to do about those changes? That's that gets it's a much bigger event than just these features of experience, which are all features of consciousness, are always there.

They're always there. And in fact, in our culture, we we pathologies people when they just experience their bodies as physical sensations and not as emotions like we saw that person is matis zing or so matiz ing. They're not.

they. They really there they should be experiencing in emotion, but really there, you know, just experiencing a stomach cake. And that's bad, but that's actually a judgment call that is probably sometimes wrong.

Sometimes it's probably Better to experience a stomach cake. Sometimes it's more productive. Part of being emotional intelligence is knowing when not to construct an emotion. You know, like, uh, right before the COVID pandemic was announced officially ally, I was in new zealand giving talks and my daughter, who was who was in college at that time, was flying.

Uh literally like I think less than a week before the pandemic was announced, SHE got on a plane and SHE flew a new zealand to meet me because I was spring break and I always would bring her with me on spring break. And in that, and I remember really vividly, I was in new zealand, there was only one case, one case of covered in new zealand at that point. And I I got on the phone to my husband and I said, i'm experiencing a very high level of our all and it's very, very unpleasant.

Now my husband knows me very well and he said, yet there is a lot of uncertainty and I said, I know now he didn't say to me, well, you're anxious and you just don't really know IT. I cause I wasn't anxious. I was feeling uncertain.

And as you know, or maybe people are know, that when there's a lot of uncertainty, there's also a lot of arousal because the brain is attempting to learn. And the new modulators that are important for learning new things happen to also cause of a subjective sense of a al. Then some, they actually also modulate your organic nerve system so your heart can beat fast and ever.

And are go to explanation for what that is, is to experience that a resell as anxiety. But I was uncertain. And remember that how your brain, the story is telling itself, the category is making, is a plan for action.

Or what do you do? An anxiety and fear. You freeze or you run away.

What do you do? An uncertainty? You forage for information. You tolerate the discomfort and you forage for information, which is what I was doing when I called and said, what should we do? Should I meet her, the airport and turn around and come back or should we have a vacation like I don't really know um and you know what I ended up doing was forging for information another couple days and then made a split second decision in the error when we were flying from one island to the other and I just rerouted us and we went home and then the border was closed like two days later.

You know but my point is that this is not just you know, a psychological mumbo jumbo. You can train yourself to experience your heart pounding in your chest as determination when my daughter, this is all in how emotions are made. These examples, but they're true.

Mean, my daughter, just this book I read a couple years ago when my daughter was two thousand years old, he was testing for a black building. Kari SHE was five feet, not even. And he was testing against these like massively large at of less employees, okay, who were like a foot taller than her and her son, say, who was attempt to grey black bell didn't say to her, don't be afraid.

He said, get your butterflies flying information and I was like, in rap shirt, I was like, oh my god, this guy is totally brilliant. That is the best you meaning to give to arouse. That changes the meaning of IT. What you do when you create an emotion is you're giving meaning to those effective feelings, and you have more control then you might think. And how you do that, you can do IT by changing the physical state that gives rise to those feelings.

But you can also change IT by learning more how to make more categories and how to make them more fluidly um so that you do something different and the it's not the things will necessarily feel any more unpleasant or any less or or any more pleasant. Is that. The feeling becomes a source of wisdom. It's a cue to do something different.

This is a case, uh, where I absolutely believe that a knowledge about how emotions in effect and states of the brain body work, which is what you're beautifully describing for people today, is extremely useful in and of itself. And I think and I it's a Frankly, it's a refreshing and welcome departure from a lot of the conversations that we Normally have on this podcast where know we talk about about protocols, we talk about tools.

So I think that people can do ways they can implement the knowledge. And here this is certainly one of those cases as well. But um it's a beautiful one in a very important one where the knowledge itself, just the knowledge of additional words for different states. I love the example of butters putting butterflies in the formation because IT inherent to that is that you're not trying to get rid of the butterflies, quite the opposite.

You're deploying them in certain ways and there's an action step in a psychological step there, of course that's required but that IT isn't um you you morning sunlight for an average of ten minutes to set your skin rythm, which is something that I say over and over again. I'll go to the grave saying that we'll to put a window over my grave the sunlight can get in at this point but what should be fine with me but in any case um knowledge is power, something that we hear but it's not always true. Often its knowledge is power but you need to do X, Y, N, Z in a certain order but hear what you have provided and you you're continue to provide is knowledge that people can use that real estate within their brain.

I'm deliberately not giving in a name because its its distributed real estate that allows them to take an unpleasant feeling and work with IT. Um that IT has more dimensionality than we probably realize. That's becoming clear to me that rarely, if ever, is their less dimensionality.

You can always give IT more dimensionality by just shifting your attention. And you can practice this really. So you there is a story that I tell about when I the brief moment when I tried to learn how to paint, you know and so there is an object like a cup, and you have this three dimensional object and you want to render IT on a two dimensional canvas so you could just try to draw the cup and then what you get is a pretty shitty looking, you know, cup.

Um but what what a realist painter will teach you to do is to take the cup and to break IT apart into pieces of light. And then what you try to paint or the pieces of light. So you're transferring your first, what you're doing is you're taking this very low dimensional course object called the cup, and you're breaking in in a tiny little pieces of light.

which what the visual system.

which what the visual system doesn't. So what you're doing is your categorizing IT differently in order to emphasize the features that are more high dimensional that are in there right there are in there in in the brain but you can but what you're doing essentially is your you're having the brain.

Your brain is applying attention to basically um focus more on those details and then you transfer the details on to the two dimensional canvas and what you get is a pretty decent looking three dimensional cup on a two dimensional canvas and unless you me and and then IT still looks beauty, uh you know and so maybe i'll take IT up again sometime uh in the future. But my point is that you can do that with your own sensory condition of body in emotion. You can deliberately focus on what your heart is doing to the, to your, the best of your ability that you can sense IT, right? Or you can deliberately focus on your breathing, or you can deliberately focus what your muscles are, how they, how tense they feel. You can, you can change the dimensionality of your experience by the shifting of your attention.

Love IT. And forgive me for giving another example, but I think it's one that will resonate with both of us and hopefully with our listeners as well. Which is um the great Oliver sex neurologist and author um talked about and rote about know he had worked with these patients that were either had locked in syndrome or severe autism or severe to ATS or parkinson's and know most people would even clinicians who specialize in those areas would look at those people say that they're living in a diminished world is the lack capacity that other people have and um and it's all about the the absence of certain abilities and um and then what he did eventually was incredible. He loved animals.

So he would spend time thinking about what IT would be like, for instance, to be a bat hanging in the corner of a room, and experiences the room not through vision, but mainly through echolocation. And he would spend a lot of time thinking about, he also did a lot of drugs, at one point is clearing and stopped, because they were very destructive drugs, not just psychiatrically, but also matter veteran. So yes, he has that.

But eventually changed his practice to trying to experience human emotion, but first think about animal sensory experience. And he would do that for lots of different type of animals, octopus and bats and all these different things. And then IT allowed him, in his words, IT allowed him to then interact with patients in a way where he could feel, maybe even empathy, a little bit with how they experienced life.

And then he would write books about IT in a way. And here i'm borrowing someone else's words that storage these people into almost greater, larger than life characters. And of course, he wasn't trying to detract from their suffering, but he was trying to give people an understanding of what that suffering was like through their actual experience. And he did, in my opinion, and the opinion, many other people, a master ful job, been doing that. And but IT came through much in the same way that your art teacher said, you pay attention to the way the the changes in light across the the object is supposed to trying to dry draw the object themselves. That when we so the take away here that I I think are arriving at is that that you've provided is that if we take a if we add dimensionality to our description of our experience of the sensory inputs and there's a ton of IT to reach to, and we may even come up with some new internal labels or language base labels that we can experience the world in much richer and much more active voice.

absolutely. And I I love I love your stories and I love this story in particular about all our sex because um IT resonates with my experience when I was reading um .

ed Young new book at first he wrote we contain multitudes which where I think one of policy and then um uh what is the recent right with animal .

what I was thinking was, you know, it's a first vote. It's a master ful, master ful, master ful book. I I wish I had read in that book. I I wrote him a fan letter. I was like this, that amazing book.

it's amazing book.

but because he helps you experience. So what what I wanna say is this, that there are all these animals that have different sensory surfaces than we do, and they can detect signals in the world that that we, that are not relevant to us because we don't have sensory services for them. And IT reminds you, first of all, that what you experience as reality is really not in the world alone, and it's not in your head alone.

IT is in the transaction between the two. You know, you're the neurons in your brain and in your nervous system are also part of the reality. And the reality is the transaction reality are the are the features that are the transaction between signals in the world and signals in your brain and the parts of the world that some other animals experience that we will never experience.

They're not really part of our reality because they don't interact with any of the anything that we have. But for those animals is part of their niche, is part of their, you know, niche is just the word for the parts of the world that matter to you, basically. And I was thinking that if people read this book, and, you know, maybe we will help them have empathy for other people who don't have minds like theirs and who don't experience the world in the way that they do. Your description of what what um Oliver sex heah with his his actions were in his goals IT did occur to me that this book by a dion would be a great tool for helping people to understand that the way that they experience the world IT might be different than how other people experience the world. And even a little bit of a window on that IT would be a good thing.

So i'd like to ask you more about this word effect, and then i'd like to discuss how things that we do or don't do might be useful for putting us in broad categories of effect so that we might experience, particularly a race of emotions. So this is my attempt to understand affect in an effort to think about some actionable items.

absolutely.

I love the word affect the way you described IT, as were setting up a potential or a series of potentials for different emotions to occur. I make IT a point to get sunlight in my eyes in the morning to try to wake up my berlin and body, because indeed, IT does that. Broadly speaking, I make an effort to get good sleeps at night because that makes everything Better.

If and when i'm not sleeping well or enough IT makes everything worse. This is non clinical, non nuances language. But I think most people, when they hear affect and they think about the examples I just gave, kind to understand like yeah like when a kid is tired to kid, they get crackey when worthy before I get crackey.

Indeed, there are times when i'm sleep deprived and little things great on me, they are like a splinter, just feels super annoying and maybe even painful. But when I was arrested, things are going Better. It's not that bad. So tell us more about effect because I think it's a really important anger point for us to understand emotions in ourselves and other people.

Nar, scientists think about. The sensory systems for touch and proprie exception, which we call so ata sensation as being in the service of motor skeleton motor movements. You really the our sense of touch and even vision actually also works this way. Um and he and actually auditioned us to these senses actually serve and um the brain's ability to and control the movement of the body and the same thing is true um for the um regulating the systems of the body.

So brains, one of their fundamental jobs are the coordinate and regulate the systems inside your body, your heart, your lungs, your gut, you know all the moving parts and the information, the the sensory signals that that those um organs and and tissues and so on send back to the brain. Um as I said before, those sensory signals are important to the brain's ability to regulate the body, but we don't feel them directly. We usually experience them as effective feelings, these very simple physical sorts of feelings, and then we elaborate them in very ways.

They they really when they get very intense, that those are the moments the brain create a create a motion out of them. So the brains regulation of the body, the predictive regulation of the body, is, the technical term is allow states. But when i'm explaining this to the public, I use a metaphor. And, you know, all metaphors are wrong, but some metaphors are less wrong and useful. So the metaphor that I use is um your brain is unna budget for your body and it's not budgeting money, it's budgetary glue coasts insult in oxygen and water and all the nutrient that you need to stay alive and well and so you can think about withdrawal from that budget like burning glue cos or using up oxygen. You can think about deposits like sleeping and eating um you can think about you know savings um so when you're with a friend who you trust and you know everything you do actually is just slightly less metabolite right and you can also think about taxes um like if you are stress socially stressed within two hours of eating a meal, that same meal will cost you uh and the equivalent of a hundred and four more calories in the efficiency that you will notabilities IT because of that stress .

um you will burn more energy.

You'll be more inefficient in metabolite ing the food. So it's as if you had eaten one hundred and .

four more calories. So I and over .

the course of a year.

that's a eleven pounds. So when we say that .

people are taxing on us.

yeah, we'd like it's literally little.

So describe me. You can think about aft as a quick dirty summary of the state of your body budget. If things are going reasonably well, then you'll feel okay.

You might even feel pleasant if your writing a deficit in your body budget, then you're gonna fatigue or or distressed. And that doesn't mean something is necessarily wrong. Like for example, when you exercise, you get to a certain point where you've reached your mental tory load.

Usually it's like you know twenty minutes in or ten minutes in or whatever, depending on Harry are working and you started to feel unpleasant and fatigue. But that doesn't mean that something's wrong. That just means that you're working really hard and you have to push through IT.

And then you know when you drink water and you know you eat afterwards and replenished and then you're fine, right? In fact, you're Better. It's it's A A way of on building a Better, stronger future. You so affect is basically, you know when things when you feeling really worked up IT probably means that something certain somewhere.

So I just think about this is like quick and and dirty ways of thinking about your your what your what your aft means and um and then often times, as we've said before, emotion regulation that is controlling a motion really actually is not so much about changing the meaning of affect is changing the affect um and um so is useful to understand that affect is tied to the state of your body or actually what is tied to is your brains beliefs about the state of your body. Your brain is modeling the state of the body and that's in the reception. That's the technical word.

And the reception is not your awareness of your body. It's your brains modeling everybody what your brain believes to be true about the metaphor state of your body. And that's how I think about effect.

That's how I think about my own effect. That's and my daughter actually who um you know was depressed for IT. So I should say depression is like a bankrupt body budget like you just can't move.

You you feel fatigue sophie gue that you can't move and you're very distressed is like bankrupcy. And actually if you I mean depression is a metal bolic illness and if you look at the symptoms of depression, they really are about meta lic um uh having meta lic deficit basically. And it's interesting that one .

of the hallmark features of depression, subjectively speaking, is lack of positive anticipation about the future, which makes perfect sense from the perspective of a depleted yes, exactly.

You and you're basically think about the fact that prediction error, right? If you're feeling unpleasant, you're not going to be anticipating pleasant things. And even if those things that are in the world could give you pleasure, you won't notice them because learning from prediction error, things that you didn't predict is expensive.

And if you don't have the resources, you're not onna, right? So it's but anyway, my daughter came up with this um after we had this very interesting thing that happened to us another trip um we were in sweden because I was giving A A keynote at the Caroline sqa institute and we went I took her a sweden and this is when he was recovering from depression and like you know, he is just one of the millions of Young adults who you know at a lessons and the Young adults who are experiencing depression and a we got to sweden and SHE was very, very jet lag. We both were was like one of these like, you know we had to like, you know, planes, trains and automobile, they just know getting there.

And he woke up the next morning and SHE SHE looked horrible. SHE felt horrible. IT actually seemed to me like he was about to enter another depressive episode.

And I said to her, I basically got out of bed. I fed her a meal. I gave her four I B profit, and I put her back to sleep, and SHE got up five hours later, and he was absolutely fine.

Her mood was fine. Now i'm not telling you that I be profit is the n any depression that you should take of your depressed. But what i'm telling you is that, you know, you said something, Andrew, that was so interesting at the be beginning.

You said, and my fatigue, does my body, do I have pain somewhere as my body hurt? You know, these are well, right? When basically what he was having was he was fatigue and he was having what I would call um is called the technical word is visual, no suspect which means her stomach heard her, you know everything hurt and sure you know her muscles probably hurt too but I was really hurt in erds really SHE just was distressed and the um the ibi profit helped her get back to sleep and then SHE slept and he got up and SHE was completely fine and then we walked around stock com for the rest of the day talking about this experience which for her was like flipping on a lighter witch.

You know how motions are made? This book that I referred to, I wrote that book for her. I wrote that book for her, but also for me, because I was a way of putting down on paper all the things that I wanted her to know that and that I thought other people should know about their kids, you know, and maybe even their kids could read IT.

But what he did with that was SHE came up with a new concept called the emotional flu. And the emotional flu is when you are having a bad body budgeting day and you're just like you didn't enough sleep maybe or you know there's some stress at at at work correct school that you can't get rid of otherwise. You know my husband likes to say, well, you know other peoples opinions of you are just electrical activity in somebody's head, which I love.

I guess just another way of categorizing IT is sort of like taking apart the taking apart the cup into pieces of light, right? And so whatever there just these moments were you feel depleted and you could use that. I mean that we usually, we often use effect to as a, as a indicator of how the world is. You know, if I feel bad, something must be bad, wrong in the world. But you have to resist that sometimes, because sometimes there's nothing wrong in the world is just that even get them sleep or you know you need to have a little bit more you know, protein or maybe you have gone for a walk and you're stiff or whatever, you need to do some stretching.

Are those starting interact? But I think people are going to want to anchor to a few of these um positive steps that they can take to to I don't want say we're plenish, but to shift effect in positive directions, sleep movement, nutrition. And i've heard you say before that we are essentially a mino acid forging machines.

So you I know you said protein, you didn't say you need a bal said protein. Um we could go down that rabbit hall. Maybe maybe we do, maybe we don't.

But I want to use this also just as a quick opportunity to say, as you're saying, all this one can immediately understand why alcohol and drugs of abuse are both so compelling, right? You're not feeling well so take IT. You're feeling tired.

Take a stimulant that releases dover and up and ever, but you're taxing you're already tax body budget, yes, in a way that then puts you in a more depleted state later. Or alcohol like, yeah, you feel louy alcohol never did this for me. But friends I have who are recovered alcoholic will tell me that I was like a magical lecture and made them feel right thus at their language. But then of course, there's a Price to pay later because then IT drops your baseline .

absolutely one hundred, one hundred and ten percent. But I just also want to say that so is there, tony, like so are so is so our accessorize? Maybe when I say maybe what I mean by that is if you really have a meta lic problem like say, somethings wrong with your medical dia or you're recovering from an illness and you know that or there's just a little problem in your body that possible problems is real.

If you start to feel unpleasant, you will I mean, feel unpleasant, you will feel your mood will be negative. If you start taking care, if you start taking access, arise, which will leave more satan in the synapse is of your, uh, neurons before is is taken up again. That will juice the system.

You will be able to spend, you'll be able to move. You'll feel like you have more energy for a while. But your nervous system is is a complex system.

And so it's gonna adjustments elsewhere to try to deal with that budgeting problem. So exactly what happens when you take drugs of abuse, and what happens on the short term can happen for some people with S, S, or eyes. On the longer term, we are the first to starts to work, and then that s stops working and you start to gain weight.

And you know and you because your metabolic is slowing, because your brain is attempting to deal with that, with that budgeting problem. So that really matters what the you know what the sources IT could be that your brain beliefs, you have a budgeting problem, but there really isn't one IT could be that there really is one. These things matter to how you treat IT.

One thing uh um just mentioned about accessories and night. Unfortunately, for reasons of confidence, I can't cite the source on this, but let me just say that somebody is highly informed in the in the landscape of of form macur al treatments for psychiatric chAllenges has told me that there's an emerging theory among psychiatrists is kind of a collective emerging theory that um one of the reasons why nowadays you hear about so called treatment resistant depression but you did not hear about so called treatment reason depression prior to the adventure sarians is that there is a growing body of thought in the psychiatric community. The assess ariz. May over time, as yours pointing out, deplete the very neutral systems that subserve enhanced mood. So it's it's different than a drug of abuse that gives you a very acute fact like mEthane amine or cocaine or alcohol but that over time you may actually be pulling the very neural circuits and news chemicals that would allow for a positive effect deeper and deeper into the trenches um yeah so to speak and so there is a growing number, people who simply don't respond to the drugs any longer or other treatments, right?

So I wasn't trying to say the mechanism that I was specially the theme .

is the same that yeah .

what happens over the short term with drugs of abuse happens over the longer term with for some people with us as arise because IT hasn't been recognized yet that the that at the basis depression is a medaba problem.

And when you have a metal ability problem like the betes or obesity or like uh or um heart disease, it's not that that causes depression is that there is a common problem which is that somewhere in this very complex system of your metabolic there is a drag and IT produces negative mood and that's how you experience IT. Sometimes it's good not to turn its productive not to turn ah that negative affect into a on emotion. Sometimes you know sometimes the cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes you just need to deal with the effective problem by dealing with the physical your physical state and that's the tRicky bit is knowing when is affect telling you something is wrong with the world and when is the telling you that there's something wrong with your physical state that you need attend to?

I think everything to me at least starts with a good nights sleep on a consistent basis in in every psychiatric chAllenge and indeed suicide itself um is seems to be associated with and often preceded by chAllenges in sleeping, changes in in insecurity, an rythm so I think um that's why to meet sleep is the foundation of mental health and .

physical health. Yes, absolutely. And so when I tell people, when they say what, what can I do?

If there is only one thing pick, I would say, get, get a good nicely on a regular basis. If you could pick two more, I would say, eat helpful league. Like, stop eating suda food.

Don't get me wrong. Like, I love franchise. I love franchise. They are like that, like god's most perfect food, I mean, really, but eat helpfully, like eat real food and get exercise. And if you do those three things, I know I sound like a mother, and you so feel free to roll your eyes at me. But as in our scientists, those are the actually before you start with all the ano mental zing jet ettrick, you could just start with this and that would actually take you .

pretty far and and um and that will resonate very well with our audience. The basics of sleep, exercise, food, sunlight and social connection are the ones that we just ankle to. Those five were the ones that that we just keep returning to over and over again.

And I think people say, oh, it's just simple, a motherly advice. But I would I think that those five things, even just the one thing around sleep, there's some work that's required to get that done. So it's not as simple.

The categories are simple, but the work that's required to get great sleep as often as one can on a consistent basis. If you're raising kids, have a career, live in the world, um there's a lot there. And so that's where I think there's there's a there's an elaboration of of things, what needs to learn to be be flexible like we are traveling. How do you do that when you know friends are visiting? How do you do that when weather off and so on at the relationship .

piece of I was so glad you mention that.

so glad because you said before and and this was another one, those moments I listen to a listen to many of your podcasts, I possibly can. But yes, I think he was the first of the second one freedmen um where you said, you know we are regulating each other other's nervous systems. I will never forget that and you know I imagine that you married your husband for a number of different reasons but when people pair up with romantic partners, with friends, with co workers, the ideal situation is one in which we are not text. Where maybe even people and just being around them or just knowing that they are in our lives, provide a sort of deposit to, yeah.

it's the savings. IT is the saves. sure.

And then I think that's a lot what emotional resonance to put kind of pop language on IT yeah is is all about who feels good to be around who doesn't feel good.

I would say the best thing for a human nervous system is another human. And the worst thing for a human nervous system is also another human. And so you really want to be around the people who make you the best, the best version of yourself that you could be.

And that doesn't mean that you always get a savings like sometimes you, sometimes you are taking care of that person. And so you're you're absorbing some of the their burden, right, and vice versa. But I would say the research on you know social isolation and loneliness and someone shows us that well, along with research on synchrony and there's just a whole bunch of research to to suggest that um we are the caretakers of each other's nervous systems.

And IT doesn't matter what your opinion is like, IT doesn't, you know IT just, but we just that's how we evolved the species. And so you get to decide what kind of a person are you gonna be, you know, are you gonna a? Are you gonna be a savings? Or are you onna be attacks?

And in general, IT seems that people who decide that they're going to be a savings tend to because people gravitate towards that, want more of that and hopefully would provide that also. I mean, I think the rest of process dy pcr feels really, really strong.

Well, that's a really interesting thing about um about the synchro work, right? So there is worth that if you research that, if you put people together who don't even know each other, but if they if they like each other and they they have have a sense of trust, even after a couple of minutes, they start to synchronize their physical signals, are heart rate starts to synchro ze.

Their movements start to synchronize their hard rate, probably synchronised, because their breathing starts to synchro ze right? And is really interesting to see what you what you typically see is that who is passing and who is leading, like one person is the leader and then the other person is the picture. And I got that language from when I learned his nose is, by the way.

And but IT switches back and forth like who's the leader? Like in a good in in what we say good. Like in an interaction that looks productive.

It's switching all the time. Who is who is paying in, who is leading. It's not that always one person is, is, is in charge, so to speak. Psychologically speaking, we did a serious .

recently on mental health with paul to who, a psychiatrist and the word narasimhan a few times, because people have a lot of question about that. He emphasized that narcisse are not confident that they Operate from a place of of a deficit of pleasure is never enough in an intense envy, although that's not how they present in their often, usually not aware of IT themselves. But it's what leads healthy people to feel as if the interactions with those people, nurses often can be very compelling in the moment, but they feel very tax afterwards and kind of confused by what happened yeah and that sounds like it's ties back to this lack of synchro. Um on the positive side of things, it's also clear from what you just said that when people regulate each other, others and are our systems in way where people are making little deposits and providing savings for each other or maybe things are just neutral, that those nervous systems are then in a position to like pay attention other things too and and and not just trying to work out the dynamics .

oh for sure oh and that's very true at work. So there's research showing that um especially in the creativity in sector innovation sector of the economy, the best predictor of performance on the job is the extent to which people feel, I mean, after you account for sleeping and watering and sleeping and feeding right like the that um the best predictor is the amount of trust that you have in your team and in your managers because if the world is predictable, IT could still be things can be hard or even when things are unpredictable, you have people you know who have your back.

And so basically what you're doing is your your um they're making you know deposits or savings are causing savings in each other other's body budgets. So there their resources can be spent on the harder things, which is you know fAiling and you know like having to pick yourself back up and try again, which is you know partly what you do when you're an innovator. So I think that there's also researchers to show that in your personal life, when you do range max of kindness for people or when you're kind in general, you dive also a body budget benefit from that.

Um you know so. For a while I had a friend who um we would meet each other for lunch once a month. Then you know we would take turns paying. I mean, we could both pay for ourselves, but we've ta got a double hit, you know he paid for me one month, then I would they for him one month and then you know so we get the double hit of you know being kind to someone else and um you know and also they got the no benefit of someone being kind to them and i'll just say I think kindness is I don't know that we have so many conversations about that in our culture right now, but I think kindness is very, very underrated and should be you know like when I when I when I feel like shit, I big bread for my neighbor who's in his seventies, him and his wife.

That's what I do when I know, when i'm not feeling good and you know if I I mean, after I ve taken care of the physical, the possible physical causes, I and then I feel great because he's always so. He's always so grateful and and then I felt like I made his day Better. And then also he helps me other ways, like with my garden and stuff because he's just like a master gardener.

And so I feel like we have this relationship where we help each other. And I know IT sounds really happy, but and even though all the research backs up what i'm saying, I IT doesn't quite describe the feeling of when someone is just really happy because you just gave them a little surprise. And there you know like that. There's just some juice in that.

I think on some culture out there, there's a word for that. And someone will .

tell us this. sure.

There will. I have to say, i've thornly enjoyed this conversation. I mean, I have been looking forward to IT for a long time, and you've provided us with a really bark, but also a deep dive into not just how emotions are made, not just about effect, but as you mentioned earlier, not really how the nervous system works.

And I am certain, in fact, that eroding answers, taking this in, in realizing that that knowledge is incredibly powerful, the addition of nuance, but the language into self reflection states as extremely valuable. Often times when one gets into a conversation that has some level of reductionism, and you get into knowing clatter and things like that, I can really pull away from the the real life experience of something. But this is exactly the opposite.

What you have done for us today is you have provided such a ritual information that adds Richard and depth to the real life experience and um and that is really invaluable. So on behalf of myself and all the listeners and the people watching this, I want to say thank you for today's discussion. Thank you for the books you written, which we provided links to in the shown of captions.

Thanks for showing up on social media despite the um the the the chAllenges that exist there. Sometimes you always handle yourself so well there and we will for people to your uh excEllent social media accounts as well. And and just for all the work that you're doing in that your laboratory and you're now director of various things and really to A I and more, and we will talk about this hopefully in future episodes, but just a really enormous thank you.

Thank you.

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your interesting signs.