92 Lisa Feldman Barrett A2W4

The Knowledge Project
Lisa Feldman Barrett:
Balancing the
Brain Budget
E PI S O D E #92
Shane Parrish: Lisa, I’m so happy to get a chance to talk to you today.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Oh, it’s my pleasure. I’m so thrilled that you’re
interested in our work.
Shane Parrish: Can you tell me how you got interested in emotions? Where
did that come from?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Wow. Who’s not interested in emotion since we all
have them. When I was a graduate student, when I went to graduate school,
I did not go to graduate school to study emotions, I went to study the self,
your view of yourself and why that matters. I was using some measures of
emotion that were not behaving themselves. They just weren’t working the
way they were supposed to work. So, I thought, all right, I’m going to use
very objective measures of emotions. So I’m going to rather than asking
people how they feel, which is what I was doing at the time, I thought, all
right, I know that there are universal facial expressions, that’s what every
textbook says. So, I’ll just learn how to measure emotion in people’s faces.
Then I went to the scientific literature and I read and I realized, even though
people claim there’s a lot of evidence for universal facial expressions of
emotion, that everybody scowls when they’re angry.
Shane Parrish: Are those the micro expressions that people talk about?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, these are actually not micro expressions. The
idea that there are micro expressions and the idea that there are full blown
facial expressions of emotion, scowling in anger, smiling in happiness,
pouting in sadness, come from the same theoretical view. Although there’s
a lot of claims that everyone in the world scowls when they’re angry and
everyone in the world recognizes a scowl as anger, that’s not actually what
the data show. So I thought, okay, well, I guess I can’t measure emotion in
the face, I’ll measure emotion in the body because everybody knows that
there’s one bodily pattern for anger and one for fear and one for sadness.
So your blood pressure goes up and maybe you flush a bit in anger, but
THE KNOWLEDGE PROJEC T / FS.BLOG / © 2021 FARNA M STREET MEDIA INC. PAGE 1
your heart races and fear and so on. So again, I went to the research literature and I read
what the papers said, and then I read the data and they didn’t match. In fact, there is no
universal physical signature for any emotion that’s ever been studied. I thought, okay, well,
I guess I better figure out how to image the brain because everyone knows that there’s going
to be one circuit for fear, one circuit for anger, one circuit for sadness, that everyone in the
world has, these circuits are born with them and maybe even some animals have them too.
What I found for the body and for the face is also what seemed to be emerging from evidence
from the brain. I thought, wow. Many people believe that there are these diagnostic signs,
objective signs for emotion. But they don’t exist. We feel emotions. I feel angry sometimes,
I feel happy sometimes. These feelings they feel, emotions feel like they happen to you, like
they hijack you and take you over and cause you to think and do and say sometimes things
that you rather would not have. So I thought this is a real mystery and I just abandoned the
work that I was working on and I completely switched my research program at that point
because it was a real puzzle. Here I am almost 30 years later.
Shane Parrish: Let’s start at the beginning. What are emotions?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: That’s not starting at the beginning.
Shane Parrish: Where’s the beginning?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, here’s the thing, the linguist, George Lakoff calls emotions
essentially contested concepts, which means we all think we know what emotions are
but no one can define them. No one can agree on their definition. For example, scientists
the way they typically define emotion is a package of thoughts and feelings and facial
movements and bodily changes that are all coordinated with each other. That’s the way
they define anger and sadness and fear. But the evidence from science tells us that those
coordinated packages don’t exist. There isn’t one coordinated package for anger that when
you’re angry, you always feel the same way and your body is always doing the same thing
and your face is always doing the same thing. All the pieces are coordinated but they look
different every single time. Well, maybe not every single time, but they look different in
different situations. It’s not easy to scientifically define what emotions are. If I gave you a
definition, I don’t think it would be meaningful to you or your listeners. The way I would
define emotion is the way I would define thinking what is a thought or what is a belief,
what is memory? Your brain is conjuring all of these events in exactly the same way. It’s just
using different information to make sense of what’s going on in the immediate moment.
Shane Parrish: So there are no telltale signs that you could see even, if you could see inside
somebody, would you see that this is anger or is there something in our blood or physiology
and it’s not cultural either?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: It’s not completely a big random mess. I think the way to think
about it is this, first, I’ll give it to you by analogy and then we’ll say it by emotion. Before
Charles Darwin wrote his book on the origin of species, people believed that a category
of animal, like a species of animal, like say a dog, there was a particular perfect dog. It
was kind of like the dog show view of dogs. There was a perfect Cocker Spaniel, there
was a perfect Dalmatian, there was a perfect Siberian Husky. Every dog had some of the
features of what made that breed perfect. But there was a perfect animal with the perfect
tail length and the perfect coat thickness and the perfect eye color. All the individuals that
you would see of that kind of dog varied from each other. But that was just error, it was just
mistakes. That really there was this perfect dog out there. Philosophers would say there
was an essence, an essence of cocker spanielness that was there. But what we saw in the
world, all the cocker spaniels, they had varying features. So, there was a lot of errors in the
mix. Charles Darwin came along and said, no, actually, what a species of an animal is, like
a breed of cocker spaniel is a collection of highly variable individuals. That what’s real and
meaningful is that variation, and our idea that there’s this ideal cocker spaniel is actually
a myth, it’s a fiction, that doesn’t really exist in nature.
So, scientifically what Charles Darwin was saying was that there aren’t fixed types of
animals. Each category or class of animal is a population of highly variable individuals.
And the variation is really important because some animals will do well in one context
and some will do well in another context. And they’ll differentially breed based on how
well they’re doing.
So you can look at any biological category that way, like anger or sadness or fear. There isn’t
a perfect example of anger with a perfect facial scowl and a perfect change in the body and
a one particular circuit firing or pattern in the brain. Instead, what your brain is doing is
it’s making instances of anger that fit the situation that you’re in. Sometimes when you’re
angry, you might shout, you might raise your voice, and sometimes when you’re angry, you
might laugh. Sometimes when you’re angry, you might cry. Sometimes when you’re angry,
you might sit quietly and plot the demise of your enemy. Sometimes, when you cultivate
anger, it feels pleasant, actually and sometimes it feels unpleasant.
Shane Parrish: Wait, say more about feeling pleasant.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, you’ve never felt aggressive and felt it was really good to
express that aggression, like when you’re playing soccer or you’re trying to beat somebody
in cards. So there are some people who, for example, when they’re about to debate someone
or negotiate with someone or they’re about to enter a competition with someone, they get
themselves pretty worked up and angry. So it feels good to be angry and to express that
anger. But at other times, it doesn’t. That’s not error in the system, that’s not stuff happening
randomly, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature of how your brain works. It’s a feature of how
brains work. There is no essence of anger. There’s no essence of sadness. Your brain is
creating instances, based on what you learned in the past, it’s creating instances that will
work in the present.
Same thing is true for fear, the same thing is true for happiness and so on. So sometimes
when I say that, people say, really, when are you ever happy when you’re afraid? And I’ll be
like, well, have you ever been on a roller coaster? Have you ever gone to a haunted house?
For 13 years, we had a haunted house in my basement right before Halloween. We did
it as a charity. All my graduate students and postdocs, we would get all dressed up. We
orchestrated the whole thing because we’re really good at scaring the crap out of people in
a lab. So we thought, well, hey, we’ll scare little kids for money and then give all the money
away to the Boston Food Bank, which is what we did for many years. We would all get
together and we would just scare the crap out of people, like little kids again and again and
again. They loved it and they were really enjoying themselves. One time, I talk about this
in my book, I threw a birthday party for my daughter when she was 12. It was a disgust
party. I made these kids like exuberantly disgusted. They were having the time of their lives
and they were totally grossed out. So disgust is often unpleasant but sometimes it’s really
pleasant. Often when you’re disgusted, you withdraw from something, but sometimes you
approach it because it’s more interesting or it’s fun or it’s a challenge. So I think the point
is that when it comes to emotion, as with almost everything in biology, variation is the
norm. There isn’t one anger. You have a whole population of angers that you can feel and
your brain doesn’t conjure them randomly. It conjures them according to your brain’s best
guess of what’s going to work in a particular situation.
Shane Parrish: Is there a difference between feelings and emotions or are those
interchangeable?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: So again, I have to give you the wishy washy science answer, which
is that some scientists want to define emotions as actions, behaviors, not as feelings because
they would like to search for a common physical basis of those actions in humans and in
non-human animals.
Shane Parrish: Because they want the pattern.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: They’re looking for the one pattern of that emotion. So for example,
oftentimes you’ll hear about fear learning or fear. Then when you read the article in the
newspaper or you hear it on a podcast or whatever, it turns out that the scientists have
studied a fly, or they’ve studied a rat. What they’re studying actually is freezing behavior.
If you create a situation where an animal freezes because the animal is uncertain about
whether or not a threat is present, they call that fear. The assumption is that the circuitry
is very similar across all different species. Well, it turns out that the circuitry, it’s more
complicated than that. But it turns out that in mammals, for example, the circuitry for
freezing behavior is somewhat similar across rats and monkeys and humans, but the only
way you can say that’s a fear circuit is if you define fear as freezing. What about all the other
parts? What about when animals try to escape a situation or what about when they attack
a predator, which happens often. So rats, for example, if they can’t escape the situation,
they’ll attack the predator, particularly if it’s a mother and she has pups.
Shane Parrish: And in humans, it can motivate us. Sometimes fear drives us to do, because
it’s a particular type of fear?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Right. That would be the old way of doing things. You could say,
okay, well, instead of saying, I have this category with highly variable instances, a population
in the Darwinian sense, you say no, okay, really, I just have to find types of fear. I’m going
to take the category fear and I’m just going to chop it up into smaller bits because of what
you’re trying to do is say, okay, all the instances in this kind of fear are the same. No matter
how small you make those boxes, there’s still variation in the boxes. You just can’t get rid
of the variation because it’s inherent in the phenomenon. So, there are some scientists who
define emotions as behaviors. There are other scientists who define emotions as feelings.
In our culture, colloquially, as people, we tend to define emotions as feelings. In other
cultures, emotions are the action that’s predicted in a particular situation, and feelings
don’t really play into it at all. It’s in fact seen as kind of disrespectful to presume that you
know how someone feels by how they act.
In our culture, we very much think that we know how people feel and what they think by
what they act. That’s why words like microaggression or microexpression exist because
we make an inference. Your brain is automatically making inferences about the internal
thoughts and feelings of people based on their actions, but we are blinded to the fact that
they’re inferences, that they’re guesses. We think we’re reading people, when in fact, really
all our brain is doing is guessing.
Shane Parrish: Is there a way that we can check ourselves on that?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah, ask.
Shane Parrish: But how do you remember to do that in the moment because you just
instinctively, somebody is acting, do we learn that? Is that cultural? We’re taught that?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: It’s cultural. You’re taught that. When I say this, well, yeah, we’ve
learned it. We need to understand a little bit what it means to say that something is learned.
So, they’ll say, oh, so it’s not hardwired, it’s learned. But actually anything which is learned
is wired into your brain. If it wasn’t wired into your brain it wouldn’t be learned. So the
question is, were you born with it or was it bootstrapped into your wiring by experience? I
have a book coming out in the fall, it’s called Seven and a Half Lessons about the brain. It
covers some of these ideas because I think they’re really fascinating but also most people just
don’t know. So most people don’t know, for example, that an infant brain is not a miniature
adult brain. It’s a brain. When human infants are born, they’re born with unfinished
brains. Those brains are waiting for wiring instructions from the world. Little brains wire
themselves to the world, to the physical world and to the social world. For example, the
brain needs information from your eyes in order to finish wiring itself so you can see. If it
doesn’t receive that information after you’re born, you will never see normally. It’s learned
something that’s been wired into the brain. If you live in a culture like ours where there
are rooms with corners and buildings and square things with corners and edges, you learn
to see the physical world in one way. If you live in a culture where there’s nothing square
and there are no corners, you learn to see the world in a different way. So much so that
some things for us that are visual, we have these visual illusions. We see two lines that are
exactly the same size, but if one line has arrowheads pointing inwards, and on the other
line pointing outwards it’s called Muller-Lyer Illusion. The one with the ones pointing
outwards look like a longer line than the ones with the arrowheads pointing inwards, but
actually they’re the same. So that illusion doesn’t happen for some people in the world
because they weren’t exposed to buildings and boxes and corners and things when their
brain was finished wiring itself to be able to see. So similarly, everything you do, everything
in infant experiences is fair game for it to learn about, and that shapes its wiring, including
when you label things for the child or you speak to someone else in the child’s presence
with words. For example, in our culture, we do a lot of curating of objects for infants. We’ll
hold up a dog, a toy dog, and say “look a doggy” or “look a truck” or “look a train.” We
do that kind of labeling. But then we also say to kids, “oh, you’re crying, don’t be sad.” Or
when the kid throws his Cheerios on the floor, “oh, don’t be angry” or when he cries when
someone takes his toy away. Those incidental things, the child’s brain is picking it all up
and learning it. So, what the brain is doing is it’s learning patterns and then those patterns
are available for the brain to use later to make sense of what’s happening.
Shane Parrish: That’s really interesting. Should we label emotions with kids?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Absolutely. In this culture. I think that kids have to learn, they
have to become culturally competent in the categories that are meaningful in their culture,
otherwise, they can’t communicate with other people. So remember, what a word is referring
to is a whole event that’s occurring, that is how the child feels, what’s happening in the world
around the child in that moment, what’s going on in the child’s body in that moment and
then what actions happen next and what the consequences are. For example, when you feel
bad, do you know what to do next to make yourself not feel bad? Not really. It’s a kind of a
crapshoot. But if you know that you’re sad or angry or afraid, well, there might not be one
thing to do when you’re sad, but maybe there are two or three and your brain can kind of
make a pretty good guess based on the situation which one of those you should try. So in a
sense, emotions are ways of understanding what’s happening in your own body in relation
to what’s happening in the world as a prediction for what to do next to make yourself feel
better or worse or get yourself into a state that your brain thinks would be a good state to
be in. I say it that way because people don’t consciously do it a lot of the time. That’s just
business as usual for how brains work.
There’s research which shows really clearly that in western cultural contexts like ours,
knowing a lot of emotion concepts and a lot of emotion words and being able to use those to
create very nuanced precise emotional events actually is really helpful. It’s helpful socially,
it’s helpful in school. Those kids do better, they perform better in school. It allows you
to be resilient when bad things happen to you. It helps you cope. We call this emotional
granularity, meaning your emotional life is very precise and granular. So one grain of
sand is not the same as another grain of sand. So one instance of anger is not the same
as the other instance of anger. Those kids tend to use alcohol less when they’re stressed.
People even recover faster from physical illness when they’re more granular. And that
sounds like magic but it actually isn’t magic. If you understand how the brain works and
you understand what’s going on under the hood, it makes complete sense that these things
would be true.
Shane Parrish: Do we unconsciously send the message that you shouldn’t be feeling when
we say don’t be angry or don’t be sad?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, I think that’s really complicated. So, I think often times, so
here’s the thing, you and I are not in the same physical space. I’m in my office at home and
you’re in your studio. Let’s just say we were, let’s say we were both in the same studio or
maybe we were having a cup of coffee. Even though we don’t know each other, if we like
each other, if we’re getting along pretty well, if we trust each other in the moment, our
biological signals will start to synchronize. Our heart rates will synchronize, our breathing
will synchronize. If we know each other really well, when I get a little worked up, you might
get a little worked up. Actually, we don’t even have to know each other that well. We just
have to be around each other for a little bit of time. People call that emotional contagion
but it’s actually not emotional. What’s happening really is that human nervous systems
regulate each other. We’re social animals, we evolved that way. So, we have lots of ways that
we affect the nervous system of another person. When I affect your nervous system in a
way and you’re not aware of it, your brain’s just going to try to make sense of it. So it makes
sense if it sometimes is emotion. So my point is that when someone else gets worked up,
you’re more likely to get worked up too. If you don’t want to be worked up, you don’t want
that person to be worked up. A lot of times when people say don’t be sad, don’t be angry,
really, what they’re saying is, I don’t want to deal with you being angry or sad, and I don’t
want to feel that way so I want you to calm down.
Shane Parrish: That’s fascinating. I’ve never heard it explained that way before.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. I trained as a therapist a really long time ago in another life.
One thing I learned is that it’s really hard to sit with someone else’s distress and just let them
be distressed. It’s like one of the hardest things to learn to do. Instead, almost your knee
jerk reaction, is to help them regulate because really, what you’re doing is you’re helping
yourself regulate. You don’t want them to be upset because you don’t want to be upset. It’s
not a completely selfish act, it’s just that part of the mechanism for you to have empathy is
to feel what someone else feels and that can be a really challenging thing.
Shane Parrish: And often, we don’t even want to feel it in ourselves, let alone with somebody
else. It seems like we suppress a lot of feelings. Talk to me about that. Does that come back
to bite us? Does it make them linger? Does it cause other behaviors later on?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: The idea that suppressing feelings is really bad for you is part of a,
is part of an old hydraulic model of emotion that an emotion triggers in your brain, you
need to let off steam, have catharsis, kind of get it out and if you don’t, something bad
will happen. And that’s not really true. Here’s more the way it works. You can think about
your brain as running a budget for your body. You have cells, those cells require energy.
You’re thinking, what the hell, I just asked her a question about is it bad not to express
emotion, she’s talking about cells. I’ll get there. I think the problem is, if you really want to
understand it, you have to start-
Shane Parrish: Oh, yeah, let’s go into the weeds.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: We’re only going to briefly glimpse the weeds and then we’ll get
right back out. But my point is that, what’s your brain’s most important job? Why do you
even have a brain? Why did a brain evolve? It didn’t evolve for you to think or feel or see.
It evolved to regulate your body. As brains get bigger, bodies get bigger. As bodies get
bigger, brains get bigger. What is your brain doing? Your brain is regulating, it’s running
a budget for your body. It’s not budgeting money, it’s budgeting oxygen and salt and water,
and sodium, and all these hormones. All this junk that your body needs to function. So,
in a sense, you can think about your brain as kind of the financial office of a very large
company that’s like a multinational company. And so, it needs to try to get the resources
where they need to be before they’re needed. Just like if you’re going to spend a lot, you
want to go buy something really expensive, it’s better to have the money in the bank and
buy it than it is to buy it on your credit card and try to pay it back with interest. And so
that’s how you brain basically tries to work.
So what’s bad is if you make an expenditure, so let’s say you buy a bunch of stuff on your
credit card and you pay the bill really fast, there’s no tax, you haven’t paid any interest.
There’s no additional tax. There’s no interest, you just pay the bill and it’s paid. That’s your
brain preparing you to do something, to yell, to talk, to breathe, to run on the treadmill,
to get into an argument with a friend, to have sex, to do something, to eat. Your brain
makes an expenditure, and it’s preparing to get something in return, like to have the bill
paid. But let’s say that doesn’t happen. Well, then your body starts to run a bit of a deficit,
and then there’s a little bit of interest. If that builds up over time, that’s very bad for you.
So the thing is that when your brain is about to make a big expenditure, those happen
to be the moments that we call emotions. When your brain is preparing your body to do
something or even thinking about it, you have a big cortisol release in your bloodstream.
People think, oh, that’s the stress hormone. No, it’s not. It’s a hormone that is secreted in
what we call stress. But basically what cortisol does is it gets glucose into your blood really
fast so that cells can use it really fast. When you get up in the morning, you have a cortisol
surge. When you’re running on the treadmill, you have a cortisol surge. It basically means
your brain is preparing to make a big expenditure. And when you do that and you don’t,
as a consequence, there are sensory changes in your body. Your heart is pounding, you’re
starting to sweat, whatever it is. And you feel that as emotion, you feel that as emotion.
If the expenditure doesn’t come and the reward doesn’t come, you don’t replenish. That’s
actually really bad. So if you’re continually getting stressed over and over and over, you’re
getting mad over and over and over or you’re getting afraid over and over and over, and that
expenditure isn’t paid back, you’re not sleeping enough, you don’t eat healthfully, you’re
not getting hugs from your loved ones, you’re not exercising sufficiently, you will start to
run a deficit. What that translates into is illness. It translates into depression, anxiety, heart
disease, diabetes. They’re all metabolic illnesses that come from running a deficit in your
body budget.
Shane Parrish: What are the actions that we can take that might prevent us from, or build
up some of that account balance or prevent the deficit from accumulating? You sort of said
sleep, exercise, sex, what else?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Usually what I say when I talk like this, I don’t sound like a
neuroscientist, I sound like someone’s mother. And I am someone’s mother. I think one
of the really big changes in neuroscience in the last decade is the realization of just how
important sleep is. So literally, if there was only one thing that you could do in your life,
only one, it would be sleep a decent amount every day, whatever that means for you. It’s
usually somewhere between seven and eight hours for most adults, and it’s longer for kids
and adolescents. For example, one reason that the rate of adolescent depression is so high
in this country is because adolescents go to bed late. They’re on their computers and their
devices, which has light at a particular frequency that stimulates their retinas to keep them
awake. So it’s disrupting their circadian rhythm, which is the rhythm that helps your sleep
wake cycle. So they can’t get to sleep and then they have to get up at a really early time in
the morning to get to school. So whereas an adolescent brain might need 10 hours a night,
most kids are getting five, six hours. That’s really bad. It’s not just bad because they won’t
learn well, I mean, they won’t learn well, it’s not just bad because there’ll be more impulsive.
It’s not just bad because they’ll be a complete pain in the ass if you’re their parent. It’s also
bad because there’s this small metabolic tax that’s being charged every single time. And
those kids when they become adults, middle aged will be more likely to develop diabetes,
heart disease, metabolic illnesses, which by the way, are also at record numbers in this
country. Of course, it’s not the only reason why, but it’s one reason. I think the issue isn’t
whether you express your emotions or not. The issue is, don’t get riled up with any emotion
without paying the bill. Part of paying the bill means getting enough sleep.
Shane Parrish: So are some people actually more emotional than other people? Is that a
thing or do they just have a bigger deficit than other people?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yes. Both. So here’s the thing. I sort of skipped over one piece
because I’m already giving you all this complicated science stuff, but I’ll just complicate
things further and give you one other piece. So, when your brain is regulating your body,
your body is sending sense data back to your brain that your brain needs in order to keep
that regulation going. You don’t experience those sensations typically in a very precise way.
So when your heart is beating and your lungs are expanding and everything else that’s
going on in that little internal drama. Right now, for example, you’re sitting there, you look
like you’re sitting quietly, but you have a whole symphony of physical changes going on
in your body, and your body is sending that sense data to your brain. Can you sense your
liver functioning? Can you sense your heart beating?
Shane Parrish: No.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Even now? No, you can’t. Exactly. We’re not wired to be able to do
that and there’s a good reason why. And that is, if you could, you would never pay attention
to anything outside your own skin ever again. It’s a big drama going on right now. For
example, if you’ve ever been in one of those deprivation tanks, like a soaking tank where
they block out all the external sense data? So it’s completely dark, you have earphones that
you can’t hear anything, you’re floating in salted water, you can’t feel any touch. It’s like
this symphony of internal sounds just emerges. You can hear all this stuff going on inside
your own body but you can’t feel it because we’re not wired to feel it. So instead, what we
feel is a simple physical feeling that scientists call affect or we call mood. So you feel good
or bad or pleasant or unpleasant or worked up or calm. It’s like a general barometer for
how your body budget is doing. We make sense of those sensations as emotions sometimes
but only when they get really intense. But they’re with us all the time because your brain
is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sense data to your brain. So
you’re always, affect is a property of consciousness, it’s not emotion. It’s an ingredient, it’s
a feature in emotion. But it’s also there when you’re having thoughts or perceptions. So
you’re driving on the highway, somebody cuts you off and you’re like, your reaction is like
that guy’s an asshole. Well, that’s a very affective perception. If you ask people they’ll be
like, well, no, I’m not mad. That guy’s an asshole. Like assholeness is a property of that guy
who just cut me off. And you might say, well, you’re just angry, you don’t know it. Well,
how can you tell? There’s no objective marker for anger? Who’s right? The answer is that’s
a bad question. You’re perceiving anger and that person is experiencing assholeness in that
driver. They’re both actually valid perceptions.
So my point is that do people differ in emotionality? Sure. Why? Because first of all, some
people just differ in mood, and they differ in mood because some people, their brains
prepare them to expend energy just more frequently than other people. It’s something that
in babies we call temperament. It’s called arousability in babies. Some babies are perturbed
by every little thing, and others, not so much. So there are some people who sort of swim
in a sea of drama. Every little thing is meaningful to them. Every little thing their brain is
reacting to preparing the body for some expenditure. And for other people, that’s one end
of the continuum, and the other end of the continuum, people are kind of like floating in
a calm sea of tranquility. Occasionally, they might get perturbed, but mostly, they’re just
sailing along. And then there’s everybody in between. For example, my husband is one of
these people who floats in a sea of tranquility. Mostly I admire it. Occasionally, it irritates
the shit out of me, but mostly, I admire it. I don’t react to every little thing but my nervous
system is a little more on the other, somewhere on the other end, where I react to more
things.
The thing is that you can take anybody, deprive them of sleep, maybe they get five or six
hours a night instead of eight for a couple of nights, and they just become more reactive.
It’s just the nature of the system for that to be true. If you take a person and you add some
testosterone to their bloodstream, they become more reactive. And here’s a contentious
thing, but I will say it, if you take a woman who’s still fertile and you start to withdraw
estrogen and add progesterone, she will also be more reactive. So it’s not just women, men
have it too. For men, it runs on a daily cycle. Your testosterone goes up and down on the
daily cycle. It might not be extreme enough that you can tell but it is observable by careful
scientific means. Do women have, do they get uncontrollably emotional right before they
get their period? No, that’s a myth. Are women unable to make good sound decisions
right before they get their period? No, that’s a myth. But is it the case that they are even
in a minuscule way, their brains are more likely to prepare them to do something for a
challenge for more things than when they’re at some other point in their cycle. Yeah, on
average, that is true. In my data at least it’s true.
Shane Parrish: I want to go back to something you said. Is the brain just constantly
interpreting the outside world and that is the process of sort of like how we construct
emotions?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: The brain is constantly interpreting the meaning of internal
sensations, and external sensations.
Shane Parrish: And it’s making meaning, it’s a meaning making machine.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: It’s a meaning making machine. And sometimes it makes meaning
as a thought, and sometimes it makes meaning as a perception, and sometimes it makes
meaning as an emotion. I should say, that’s our understanding in this culture because
we have events that we experience as thoughts and feelings. But in other cultures, or as
physical symptoms, like a stomach ache. But in other cultures, some cultures don’t make
a distinction between thoughts and feelings. It’s all one thing to them. It’s not that they’re
wrong and we’re right. It’s that their brains have learned a way to make sense of their sense
data in relation to what’s going on around them in their world in a fundamentally different
way than we do.
Shane Parrish: And neither way is right or wrong, they’re just different.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Right. And so, let me give you an example of one way that we make
sense of things that’s really not helpful for us. And that is the idea of there being mental
and physical illness. You have a mental illness, you see a psychiatrist. You have a physical
illness, you see an internist. There’s actually no fundamental difference biologically between
a mental illness and a physical illness. In depression, you have a metabolic problem, and
you also feel bad. And those two things are related. In heart disease, you have a metabolic
problem and you feel bad. And those two things are related. So sometimes you’ll hear
people say, well, the comorbidity of depression and heart disease is about 70%, meaning
70% of people who have heart disease also developed depression. They talk about depression
causing heart disease or heart disease causing depression. Actually, there’s probably a
common metabolic problem that’s causing both. Both a problem with your heart and a
problem with your mood because they’re related. Or Alzheimer’s disease, for example.
Alzheimer’s disease also is the result of a pervasive persistent metabolic problem.
I made this conjecture probably, I don’t know, 15 years ago, and now there’s actually starting
to be evidence for about what I’m about to say, which is, the most expensive organ you own
is your brain. Your brain costs you 20% of your metabolic budget. There’s no other organ
that comes close to being that expensive. So, neurons are really expensive little cells to keep
alive. There are certain cells in your brain, certain neurons that are much more expensive
than others. When you are running a deficit in your budget, in your bank budget, what do
you do? You stop spending. So what does a brain do when it’s running a deficit? It’s also
stopped spending. So what does that mean? Well, it might mean you’re too tired and you
don’t move as much. It might mean that you stop learning about what’s going on around
you in the world because it turns out learning is expensive, metabolically speaking. So let’s
say you do that, you slow the body down, you make the body tired, you stop moving so
much, you stop really paying a lot of attention to what’s going on around you in the world.
You sort of just use your internal, what you’ve learned before to help you make sense of
everything and that’s not enough. What do you do? Well, you start getting rid of some of
the really expensive parts. You start killing off neurons.
Shane Parrish: That’s where these things start cropping up?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: So neurodegeneration that happens in Alzheimer’s disease or even

normal aging is really about trimming your metabolic budget basically.
Shane Parrish: That’s super interesting. And so, just to recap, the things that we can do to
make sure we have the money to spend is sleep is number one, sex, exercise. What are the
other things that we can do to sort of recharge?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, there are lots of things you can do. Having sex is good. Who
doesn’t like that? But even just a hug.
Shane Parrish: Physical connection.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Physical connection is good. Any kind of social connection can
help. It can also hurt. One thing we can do is, you can be kind to someone. That actually
helps your metabolic budget. It actually is helpful when you are kind to someone. It also
thankfully increases the likelihood that that person will be kind to you. And that also
diminishes the burden on your budget. The degree of animosity and casual brutality that
we see in the media and so on, that’s like a, people think of it as this sort of decrease in
civility as a social problem, but it’s actually a public health problem too. I’m not saying you
become like milk toast and let people walk all over you. I am saying though that treating
other people with a certain degree of human dignity and kindness and having them treat
you in the same way is actually really helpful, physically, biologically helpful to you. And
I’m not saying this because I’m a bleeding heart liberal academic, I’m saying it because I’m
a neuroscientist. That’s what the data show.
If you exercise and you expend a lot of energy, you have to recuperate. You have to drink
enough water, you have to eat something, you have to rest, you have to let your muscles rest.
You have to recuperate. A big argument with someone is sort of the same thing. Not even
sort of the same thing. It’s pretty much the same thing from a metabolic standpoint. Your
heart rate will go up higher if you’re running probably. The expenditure will last for longer.
In principle, the dynamics are the same. So, you have to replenish yourself and if you don’t
and you’re just sort of swimming in this sea of icky conflict all the time, it’s actually not
good for your physical health. One thing we can do is we can sleep, we can eat healthfully,
we can make good social connections to other people, who we like and who we trust, and
who we value and who value us. We can generally just be kinder to each other.
Shane Parrish: What do we do when our partner or friends are feeling something? When
they have anxiety or anger, what are the ways that we can be helpful in our response or
what are the most helpful ways I guess to respond in those situations?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: So I think the first thing that you have to do, which is actually a
really, really hard thing to do is to figure out what they want. So sometimes what someone
wants is just empathy, and sometimes what they want is help. They want you to help them,
instrumentally help them figure out how to solve a problem. If you offer your advice for
how to solve a problem to someone who in that moment really just wants a pat on the back
or a hug, do you know what happens?
Shane Parrish: Not good things.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Not good things, right. Anyone who’s ever been in a relationship
or had a kid knows exactly what we’re talking about here. So the first thing I do, the first
thing that we do in my house is we say, do you want empathy or do you want a solution?
What do you want?
Shane Parrish: And how does that skew? Is it 50-50 between empathy and solution? Or is
it mostly empathy?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: It depends on the person. If you ask my daughter who’s 21 now,
she will tell you almost 100% of the time, I want empathy. And if you asked her, she would
say, and my mother is constantly trying to solve problems, and all I really want is just a
little empathy. But if you ask my husband, he would almost always say I want a solution. I
want you to help me find a solution to this. I want instrumental help is what we would call
it as a scientist. I think I probably am more like him in that sense. I certainly want to feel
understood, but usually what I want is help with a solution. That actually makes me feel
better. I don’t need someone to just give me a hug and pat me on the back. But occasionally,
that’s very welcome. I think it really varies from person to person, which is why it’s really
helpful to ask.
Shane Parrish: What’s the next step if that’s the first step in your house? Walk me through
that whole tree.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I think it really depends. So for example, and it’s a little hard in
this culture at this particular moment in time to say walk up and give somebody a hug
because that can land you in jail. But sometimes for someone who you’re close to and you
have permission to do it, what empathy can mean is really just giving someone a hug or
patting their arm.
Shane Parrish: Just being there with them in that moment.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Just being with them in the moment and sitting with it.
Shane Parrish: That’s really hard. I agree with you.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: It’s really hard, it’s really hard. Sometimes it means letting them
talk. But then you have to reflect back what they said and not add anything. Just really
let them know they’ve been heard, and that they’re understood. Again, that may sound
like psychological mumbo jumbo but there’s a real biological consequence to doing that.
Sometimes, literally, it means in my house, it means doing some breathing exercises because
breathing is really the only way that we know of, biologically speaking, that is the only way
that you can kind of deliberately get a handle on your nervous system.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: So, you’ve got this nervous system in your body called the autonomic
nervous system. You have the sympathetic side and the parasympathetic side, and they
work together in a complicated kind of dance. It’s called the autonomic nervous system
because it’s automatic and you have no control over it. There is one way to get control, a
little bit of control. And if you practice more than a little bit, or a little bit more I would
say, is breathing. For some people, it’s six second or seven second breaths, for some people
it’s eight seconds. But if you breathe regularly and deeply diaphragmatic breathing, after
a couple of minutes, you can slow your heart rate. Basically it sort of calms your system
down.
Shane Parrish: Let’s do that right now. Walk me through how we try this.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Okay, so first of all, a lot of people know how to do this, they just
don’t realize it. For example, you know how when you cry, you have a big cry and then
there are times when you just take a big breath and you let it out. Crying feels cathartic
because everything is calming down. It’s those breaths actually that are calming you
down. Or in yoga for example when you’re doing a yoga class, even in something like hot
yoga where you’re just drenched in sweat, you’re pacing your breathing. So I think people
intuitively know how to do it. What I should say is, for some people doing this causes them
to hyperventilate.
Shane Parrish: You’ve been warned if you’re listening to this or watching this.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: So, put your hand on your torso, on your tummy. So you’re not
going to be breathing from your chest, you’re going to be breathing from your diaphragm.
When you breathe in, you don’t want your chest to expand. What you want is your stomach
kind of to expand. So breathe in and have your stomach expand. So what’s happening is
you’re actually taking in breath down to the bottom of your lungs, instead of just the top.
So you breathe in on account of say three or four and out on account of three or four. So
let’s do that one breath. Okay, ready?
Shane Parrish: Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: And you try to push all the air out.
Shane Parrish: It feels different like to breathe that low. Is that how we’re supposed to
be breathing all the time? Why don’t we breathe that way all the time? It’s like we’re lazy
breathing almost.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: If I could answer that question, you know. I think there are lots
of reasons. Here’s one. I can’t actually see how you’re sitting right now because you have a
black T-shirt on and I can only see you from here. Are you sitting straight up or are you
slouched over?
Shane Parrish: I’m pretty close to straight up. This is like fully straight.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Okay, so for me, I’m sitting fully straight right now. This is how I
normally sit. I’m pretty crunched up. If I try to expand my diaphragm right now, I wouldn’t
get very far because I’m kind of hunched over. I’m not supposed to sit like that, it’s very bad
for you to sit like that. A lot of us do a lot of the time. I actually really admire people who
have great posture all the time.
Shane Parrish: Yeah, me too. I also hate them in some way.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I know. I do too. Right, exactly. So that’s one reason. I think another
reason to be able to breathe like that, for most of us, requires a lot of mind, we have to
really pay attention. We can practice and practice and practice, but then eventually, we
can breathe more like that. But that’s a really kind of a, for lack of a better word, mindful
breathing. It really requires a lot of attention. Most of us have other things to do in the
day. It turns out that there is research which shows that if you breathe that way say for five
minutes in the morning and five minutes at night, so you take a period and you kind of do
it a couple of times a day, over months, your resting heart rate will go down. You’ll be able
to calm yourself faster when you get really worked up. It’s a really useful strategy.
So that’s something we do in our house, we call it a yoga breath. Let’s do some yoga breaths.
When my daughter was a little girl, that’s what I would call it when I wanted her just to
calm down and breathe a bit. And that’s actually really, it’s a really, really helpful strategy.
Shane Parrish: Yeah, breath is really interesting when it comes to emotion and feeling
too, right? It helps you center, it helps you focus. And sort of like, not only that, there’s the
physiological response of just breathing in a deeper more connected way.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: It also though helps you learn better. Because if all of your brain’s
energy isn’t tied up here, there’s a lot more left over for learning stuff. So, taking some
breaths actually affects even how you learn in the moment.
Shane Parrish: What are the core emotions? Are there universal emotions? How many
emotions are there? Are there millions, are there four, are there five?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Some scientists will tell you that there are six and some will tell you
that there are 22 or 24. I think if you look at the evidence, there’s not really good evidence
for either of those answers. In fact, there’s evidence against both of those answers. I would
say there are no core emotions and there is no set of universal emotions. What’s universal
is affect. Your brain regulate your body, your body sends sense data to your brain, and
you feel it as affect because that’s how you’re wired, that’s how everybody’s wired. Affect is
like this kind of general barometer that lets you know how your body budget’s doing. And
that’s true for everybody.
As far as we can tell from all the cultures that have ever been studied, that’s universal.
But more than that, how you make sense of, for example, there’s one culture where the
prescription for what you’re supposed to do when you’re afraid is go to sleep.
Shane Parrish: Interesting. Yeah, that’s way different than what we do.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Right. If we were to translate that into a Western meaning making,
the analogy would be play dead so the threat doesn’t take any interest in you. Go to sleep.
That’s not typically what we think of as the modal response to fear, the stereotypical response
to fear in our culture. If you don’t understand that, that just means that you don’t have
that kind of mind that was pickled in that kind of culture. You have a different kind of
mind that was pickled in a different kind of culture. In a neurotypical brain, everyone is
equipped to run. But when you run, how you run, that’s not universal.
Shane Parrish: Is love an emotion?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Here’s the thing, to people who believe that there are different
mechanisms for emotion and for cognition, for thinking, and for perceptions, for seeing
and for thinking and whatever, that’s a really meaningful question. To me ...
Shane Parrish: Not meaningful at all.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Not meaningful. Mechanisms are all the same. It doesn’t matter
whether you’re thinking or feeling or seeing or hearing or whatever, it’s all the same
mechanisms. Your brain is taking in sense data from the body and from the world and it’s
using past experiences to make sense of what that means. Is love an emotion?
Shane Parrish: We’re labeling it that through our brain almost.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Sometimes when people ask that question, they’re asking because
they’re looking for evidence of something. So for example, sometimes people ask that
question I’m guessing because there’s this belief that we are less in control of our emotions
than we are of our thoughts, which is really false, actually. So this is something I talk
about in how emotions are made. My book that is in print now and my new book, this is
something I talk about in both books, although in a bit of a different way.
The idea that you’re not in control of your emotions, the moments of emotion, and therefore
you’re less responsible for them. And you’re less culpable for them. So, if we say that love is
an emotion, then it means that you’re sort of less responsible for what you do.
Shane Parrish: Well, no. Can’t love be an emotion but you’re still responsible for what you
do?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: You can but I’m saying when people ask that question, that’s usually
why they’re asking. It’s like, you can’t help who you love. Well, okay, sure, but you can help
who you put yourself in proximity to. If I don’t want to eat potato chips, I don’t put potato
chips in my cupboard and then try really hard not to eat them. I just don’t have them in
my cupboard. You can’t help who you love, you can’t help who you become attached to is
sort of not true. But what it means to be in control is different than what people usually
think. They think about overcoming something in the moment as opposed to making good
decisions to architect your environment in such a way as to not let certain things happen.
Shane Parrish: I like the architecting environment angle. How do we work to overcome or,
we still have to function. How do we make good decisions when we’re feeling emotional?
How do we architect an environment? Those are sort of like three separate questions.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well I think the first thing I would say is that, when you’re in an
emotional episode, people often do make really good decisions. The idea that emotions
are foibles that they kind of trip you up is a really old view that is not supported by the
evidence. It’s not supported by the evidence. Do emotion sometimes trip you up? Yeah. Does
thinking sometimes trip you up? Absolutely. So there are just times when you’re making
good decisions and times when you’re not. But it’s not really aligned with whether or not
you’re emotional or whether or not you’re being rational or thinking. Even the whole idea
that your brain is a battleground between emotion and reason battling it out for control
of your behavior is a very old story, but it’s a myth. That’s not how your brain works. You
brain didn’t evolve that way, doesn’t work that way, it’s not structured that way.
Shane Parrish: Talk to me about that because we tend to think there’s this continuum
when we’re making decisions between emotional brain and rational brain. And you sort
of want to know where you are on that continuum. And society sort of seems to nudge us
towards more rational and less emotional as if they’re sort of less valuable in some way.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: You have one brain. You don’t have two brains or three brains.
You don’t have an emotional brain, you don’t have a rational brain. There’s no part of
your brain that’s devoted to emotion that isn’t used when also in moments when you
are being rational. That’s the first thing to understand. Certainly there are times when
you feel more in control of your behavior and times when you feel less in control of your
behavior. Meaning there are times when your behavior feels more automatic and there are
times when it feels more effortful. Your actions feel more effortful. There are times when
affect is very, you’re feeling it very strongly. Those are moments where we would typically,
the brain would typically be making emotions. That can trip you up, it can also lead to
great moments of heroism and great moments of valor. We tend to think about emotional
moments as hot and intense and rational moments as cool and not intense. But that really
just has more to do with how much affect you’re feeling in that moment. And in fact, you
can have very rational decision making when there’s a lot of affect going on.
Shane Parrish: Are there certain things that we can do to make better decisions when we
are feeling emotional?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: This is what I say to my students too actually, whenever you hear
something or you see something and you have this intense reaction of I love it, this is
awesome, or a really negative reaction, intense negative reaction, like I hate this, that’s stupid
or I hate that person or whatever, those are the moments to just stop. And use the intensity
of your affect as a cue to stop and interrogate what’s going on. If you love something, you’re
reading something or you’re hearing something on the news maybe or you’re watching a
YouTube thing or whatever and you love it, whatever was just said validates some deeply
held belief that you have. And whenever you hear something that you hate, that just violated
probably some deeply held belief that you just had. So stop and take a moment and think
about it, and try to observe what’s going on. If you take a moment before the heat of the
moment has you in its grip, you will make better decisions. But that’s not about really being
emotional or being rational. That’s about using your affect as a cue, using it as a barometer,
what it was designed by evolution to be, as a cue, that this might be a moment where you
want to slow down for a minute and take stock.
Shane Parrish: What are the things that we can do environmentally? You mentioned sort
of not having the chips around. Are there other things that you’ve learned that we can
increase our environment to nudge us toward or put us on the path to success?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: A lot of things that we know of that help to put us on the path to
success are things that are only easy for people to do who have enough privilege to have
control over their environments. So things like getting enough sleep. I said, if you could
only pick one thing, that would be the thing, but not everyone actually has that luxury.
Ambient noise is random kind of loud bangs and kind of loud noises. What happens, for
example, if you live in New York or whatever. Eventually your brain stops hearing that
noise. It just becomes background.
Shane Parrish: But every time I go there, it’s like, holy cow, what is going on?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Right. It’s really hard on your nervous system because your brain
is trying to figure out what is signal and what is noise. What do I need to pay attention to
and learn and make sense of and spend on and what can I ignore? That in and of itself, the
amount of uncertainty is actually really hard on nervous system.
Shane Parrish: It’s so weird, like there’ll be a firetruck that will go by my bedroom at night
and I won’t notice a thing. The window could even be open. But if my kids cough, I’m
alerted right away to what’s going on. I often can’t even go back to sleep because if I wake
up, I’m on high alert. It’s not even like I wake up and it’s like what happened? Oh, they
need me. They don’t need me at all. They’re back asleep and I’m wide awake and wired.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: This is the reason why when my daughter was six weeks old, I told
my husband, she cannot continue to sleep in our room. I will never get another night’s
sleep ever in my life while this kid is in my room. Because every little thing, I would hear
every little thing. And now we have a puppy and it’s exactly the same thing.
Shane Parrish: Talk to me more about sort of the brain interpreting things, and it’s almost
like a reality distortion.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: No, it’s not a reality distortion, it’s a reality creator.
Shane Parrish: Reality creator. Okay, so what can we do, understanding that, I’m thinking
is there anything thing that we can do to get closer to truth or reality, like understanding
that our brain is sort of stimulating and interpreting and sort of making meaning, is there
anything we can do to make to get closer to what’s actually happening or closer to some
sort of objective truth if you will? Like when that person cuts you off, or you’re going to
make meaning out of it and make sense of it, is there anything that we can do to get closer
to the reality of the world versus the reality of our head?
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, the reality of your head was wired by the reality of the world,
of some world that you grew up in. So oftentimes, what happens is that the micro-wiring
of your brain is shaped by one kind of world, and then you move to a different kind of
world. And then it’s really expensive to retool. Some brains do it well and others don’t.
Then mistakes are made and things become very expensive in various ways.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I’m going to answer your question assuming that your question is
valid, which is that we want to be closer to reality, whatever that means because sometimes
I don’t know that that’s always really the right thing to do. So here’s an example. So
somebody cuts me off, and I’m really rushing to get someplace and someone cuts me off.
But the initial meaning my brain is going to make is from my own personal perspective
because of course, that’s how we all see things. You can practice trying to see something
from another person’s point of view. So, maybe that person just didn’t see me. Maybe that
person’s rushing somewhere. Maybe that person has a kid who’s in the hospital. Maybe
that person has a really important meeting to be at or something really important to take
care of.
There’s this saying that comes from contemplative philosophy, which is that anger is a
form of ignorance. And what that means is when you only see something from your own
perspective and you fail to acknowledge that there’s another perspective, you are ignorant
of something. What you’re ignorant of is the fact that you exist in a complicated network
of connections to other people.
Shane Parrish: You just can’t see something and therefore you’re ignorant and angry.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. But you can try, you can practice. What it means to have
control is not to then really try hard to take that person’s perspective in that moment,
because that’s really hard. What it means to have control is that you practice taking other
people’s perspective before that moment so that when that moment comes, you can do
it very automatically. It’s like, if you need to build a skill, you don’t wait until the exact
second that you need the skill and then try it. No. What you do is you practice the skill
in advance until you get, really practice at it, really automatic at it, and then you can kind
of do it without a lot of effort. For example, taking somebody else’s perspective is one way
to get closer to reality because it dislodges you from the illusion that your way of seeing
things is the only way. And in fact, in science, there’s a wonderful book by this historian
of science, her name is Naomi Oreskes. And the title of the book is called Why Trust
Science. And her argument, which is a really intriguing argument is that the way that
we know that something is “true” in science, is that a group of scientists who come from
diverse backgrounds, and have diverse beliefs, and diverse values, all come to consensus
about what the evidence says. Then you can really have much more confidence to call that
finding a scientific fact.
Scientists don’t like to use the word fact, and they don’t like to use the word reality usually
very much. But fact is a real no, no, it’s an F word we just don’t use in science because it’s
always conditional, it’s always probabilistic. There’s a wonderful phrase by Henry Gee, who
is a paleontologists who works for the Journal Nature. He wrote, science is the quantification
of doubt. It’s not about finding facts, it’s about how likely is this observation to be true in
these circumstances. If you get a group of scientists who all have different backgrounds
and different assumptions and they come together in consensus, you can be much more
sure that what you’re observing is very likely to be the case in this circumstance. However,
you have no diversity in science and you have really a bunch of people with the same
background and the same history and the same assumptions, and they come together
in consensus, what you’re likely there to have is bias. Usually bias that upholds whatever
advantage those people who are making the decision actually have. But the same principle
is useful in your own life I think. And that is that you can choose to try to take somebody
else’s perspective. You can choose, like right now, you can look around the room, you can
listen, if you pay attention to your body, there are some things that you can focus on that you
weren’t focusing on a moment ago. And you can change your experience. Right now, what
I’m about to say, there’s something that you and I are both doing right now that our brains
were not tracking, our brains were tracking but we weren’t really aware, it wasn’t in the
forefront of awareness. But the minute I say it, it will be in the forefront of your awareness.
And that is your legs pressing against the seat of your chair, or your back pressing against
the back of your chair. That sense data is always there but you mostly don’t pay attention
to it unless you’re in discomfort in some way.
Shane Parrish: Your focus determines where your attention goes. Yeah.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: So here’s an example of something that’s similar that I do almost
every day. I’m just trying to build a skill, build a muscle. Every day as I’m walking on the
sidewalk, say, I look for a weed. I look for a moment where I can feel awe over the power of
nature that just will not be repressed, will not be contained by humans need to try to control
it. And for me, the perfect example is a weed. When I see a weed popping up through the
crack of the sidewalk, I almost always now practice trying to see that as a really wondrous
beautiful thing because it’s a symbol of the fact that nature is irrepressible. There are many
things in life which are much bigger than you. And when you cultivate those moments,
where you realize that the world, that the natural world is much bigger than you, well, at
least for me, anyways, I don’t experience that as an existential crisis. I experience that as an
existential break. Okay, something’s bigger than me. Many things are bigger than me. That
means my problems in the moment are really small and conditional. And that gives my
nervous system a break for a minute. I really try to cultivate every day at least one moment
where I see like a speck.
Shane Parrish: Because it puts everything into perspective.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. Exactly. And I try to do this whether I’m feeling stressed or
not, whether my brain has been busy trying to prepare me for expenditures or not because
I’m trying to build a muscle and keep it fit for when I need it.
Shane Parrish: That’s an excellent place to end this conversation, Lisa. I really want to
thank you for your time. This has been phenomenal.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Oh, it’s my pleasure. It was so much fun talking to you.
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The Knowledge Project

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Shane Parrish: Let’s start at the beginning. What are emotions?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: That’s not starting at the beginning.

Shane Parrish: Where’s the beginning?

Shane Parrish: Wait, say more about feeling pleasant.

Shane Parrish: Because they want the pattern.

Shane Parrish: Is there a way that we can check ourselves on that?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah, ask.

Shane Parrish: Oh, yeah, let’s go into the weeds.

Shane Parrish: No.

Shane Parrish: That’s where these things start cropping up?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: So neurodegeneration that happens in Alzheimer’s disease or even

Shane Parrish: Physical connection.

Shane Parrish: Not good things.

Shane Parrish: Just being there with them in that moment.

Shane Parrish: That’s really hard. I agree with you.

Shane Parrish: Yeah.

Shane Parrish: Yeah, me too. I also hate them in some way.

Shane Parrish: Is love an emotion?

Shane Parrish: Not meaningful at all.

Shane Parrish: We’re labeling it that through our brain almost.

Shane Parrish: Because it puts everything into perspective.

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