Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., is a leading researcher and author in psychology and neuroscience and one of the most-cited scientists in the world for her discipline. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Her TED Talk on emotions, You Aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions – Your Brain Creates Them, is nearing 6 million views. Her latest published book, “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain,” is available now. You can learn about Dr. Barrett’s work at https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com.
1) Since I am interested in the science of fun, I am often asked for my definition (of fun). For the sake of keeping it broad, my answer is usually, “any activity on the positive side of valence.” Given your in-depth expertise on emotion, what’s your definition of fun?
I think that the traditional way of defining fun is a little bit similar to the way people define play, which is to engage in an activity because it’s enjoyable, rather than because there’s some serious or practical pursuit or outcome or goal trying to be achieved. But I’m not sure I agree with that, because I think sometimes something can be pleasurable and be serious—have a serious goal and be fun. I think neuroscience is incredibly fun, for real. I wouldn’t call it easy. And I definitely think there’s a serious goal I have in mind in doing science, neuroscience in particular. But I still find it tremendously fun. Also, sometimes things are maybe challenging in the moment to the point of feeling a little yucky, actually. But still, you would say they were fun. For example, if you are a weightlifter like I am, I wouldn’t say that I am always feeling pleasantness in every moment, but if you ask me, am I having fun? I would probably tell you that I was. That’s not true of all kinds of exercise.
People might play a really hard soccer game or a challenging tennis game, and they might be sweating, and they might be feeling pretty tired or pretty wound up—they wouldn’t necessarily tell you they’re feeling pleasant. But they’re really enjoying themselves nonetheless, and they’re having fun. I think the answer here is that fun isn’t one thing. It’s a population of variable instances, like any emotion category. Sometimes when you’re angry, you feel unpleasant, and sometimes it’s pleasant. Sometimes when you’re angry, you scowl, and sometimes you cry, and sometimes you laugh in the face of anger. A category like fun isn’t really one thing. It’s multiple things. These different features of fun, what they have in common, and the different instances of fun that vary in their features may be the one feature they have in common: they carry you away from yourself.
You’re not really focused on who you are or deliberating on your value as a person or thinking about how you look to other people. You dislodged yourself from the center of your own universe for a few minutes, and maybe that’s what it means, to be carried away by an activity where you’re not very self-involved about it.
2a) Your new book “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain” just came out—an exploration of how our brains can be and develop as we age, as well as how the brain functions to create everything we experience. Coupling the concepts of tuning and pruning with the assertion that our brains predict almost everything we do, how does deploying the agency we have in creating positive experiences in any given moment play into increasing the probability of positive experiences in the future? For instance, the idea in the movie “Inside Out” that we operate from core memories and trying to bias the indexing of positive memories is a worthy pursuit.
What you’re asking is a, really, fundamentally interesting question. I guess what I would say is that if we accept the scientific evidence that brains are predictive—meaning our brains don’t react to things in the world, they predict what will happen next. They prepare our future actions from our past experiences. That incoming sense data from the body, sense data from your heart beating and your lungs expanding and glucose surging around in your bloodstream, the light rays hitting your retina and the changes in air pressure that are detected by the cochlea and your ear, and so on and so forth. These things send data to your brain. What they’re doing is really confirming the predictions that your brain is generating or modifying these predictions; that’s what learning is.
If we accept this idea, which has a tremendous amount of evidence to support it, and we accept the notion that our brains are predictive, then where do the predictions come from? They come from our past experiences. Your brain doesn’t store experiences. It doesn’t store memory. It doesn’t retrieve memory. What it does is it’s re-implementing memory, in a sense. It’s taking bits and pieces of past experience, recombining them and re-implementing them to assemble a prediction.
The prevailing scientific thought is this is what our brains are doing—reassembling or assembling bits and pieces of past experience into predictions. This is called generativity in neuroscience, or it’s called conceptual combination in psychology. It suggests that the past is always, to some extent, guiding our present. What we’re doing right now, when we experience things and when we act, and so on, is we’re cultivating a past that will control, to some extent, who we become in the future. If this is the case, what do we do with that?
It’s a really hard question. Is there a set of core memories that really guide who we are, like seeds from which a tree grows? Or are we prisoners of our past? And how much flexibility and control do we have over who we will become in the future? I think the thing that I’d like to point out is that it often feels like we don’t have a lot of control over what we think and how we feel, and sometimes even what we do. But we do have more control than we realize. We might not have as much control as we like or as we want. But we do have more control than we realize in the following way. The two most expensive things your brain can do is move your body and learn something new. Those are just metabolically very, very expensive things. Although you are not aware of it, your brain cares very much about how metabolically efficient everything is running. That’s an important constraint on health and well-being. We’re not aware of it, but it is very much the case. There are times, though, that we make big expenditures metabolically as an investment that we think will pay off in the future—like exercise, for example. Exercise is a huge metabolic cost, but usually, we prepare for that expenditure. We might make some deposits beforehand, like have a protein drink, or hydrate really well before we go for a run. Then we have a huge metabolic expenditure through exercise. It doesn’t always feel pleasant in the moment, but in the long run, it’s a really good investment for a healthy brain and a healthy body in the future.
Cultivating experiences, new experiences, being curious about your surroundings, and maybe even about your own brain and mind. That is inviting opportunities, creating, curating opportunities, to learn something new. It is similar to exercise in that it’s expensive. It’s not always fun, like exposing yourself to ideas. It’s not always enjoyable, in that you could be exposing yourself to ideas that violate deeply held beliefs, or you might be trying to curate a really challenging experience. But in the end, it’s a great investment because really what you’re doing is you’re seeding your brain to have more opportunities for flexibility in predicting the future, in a really automatic way. The more you practice curating new experiences for yourself, the more automatic those experiences will become in generating predictions in the future.
This is my long-winded way of saying I wouldn’t necessarily always try to focus on positivity or what’s pleasant. I might try to focus on what’s curious or cultivating curiosity or cultivating wonder or cultivating an interest in learning something new about yourself or about other people or about the world. These are the things that will increase the probability that you will have flexibility in what you think and how you feel in the future.
2b) Have you personally used the insight to experience things differently, mindful of how it might affect the future?
Absolutely. I have to tell you that I came to this practice really very, very skeptical. I am a scientist by training, and so nobody had to train me to be skeptical. I think I’m a scientist because I’m inherently skeptical. When I started to read research papers about cultivating gratitude, compassion, or experiences of awe and wonder and that these things are really good for your health and good for your well-being—I was skeptical of that. But then the weight of the evidence started to become pretty clear. Once I really understood the neuroscientific basis, it became obvious to me that many of these practices are a really good idea. And in fact, it works! It’s not always easy, but it works. I’ll give you an example. I practice just for five minutes a day, and it’s never necessarily the same time of day, but whenever there’s an opportunity to experience awe or wonder at something, I do it.
Sometimes it’s just looking up at the sky, at beautiful clouds, or the stars. If I were by an ocean, it might be looking out at the waves. It can even be something if I’m taking my daily walk, and I see a weed like a dandelion poking through the crack of a sidewalk, I can cultivate an experience of awe at the awesome power of nature to be unconstrained by human attempts to contain it. Or if I’m having a Zoom meeting that falls apart, because I lose an internet connection because some satellite moved somewhere, or my computer freezes or what have you. I try in those moments to remember to cultivate an experience of awe because I have to remember that even if my connections to the person who I’m speaking to in Belgium or England or China is really shitty. I’m still talking to somebody in England or in China, or in Belgium, and I can see their faces, and it might be blurry, but I can still see their faces. Isn’t that amazing?
Because even ten years ago, that might not have really been something that we just assumed that we could do every day. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that experiencing awe, experiencing yourself as a speck for a minute or two, really gives your nervous system a break. Because if other things are more majestic than you and you’re just a speck, that means your problems are just a speck. And just for a minute, if your problems are recognized as unimportant that actually gives your nervous system a break. It just lets you readjust and put things in perspective.
It doesn’t always have to be a positive, emotional experience. You can look, there is a huge catalog of experiences available to the human mind, in our culture and other cultures, and some may be really appealing to you, and you can practice them. Like driving—you practice something hard like learning to drive; at first, it is really hard, and then eventually, you get pretty automatic about it. Cultivating emotional experience can be viewed the same way.
3) In your latest book, you give some great examples of how we use metaphors to explain complex concepts in the hope of making them easier to understand. In my upcoming book, I use dopamine and oxytocin as metaphorical guideposts—comparing perceived fun through activities that primarily trigger dopamine (e.g., solitary social media consumption) juxtaposed with fun prosocial activities that presumably release both dopamine and oxytocin (e.g., coffee with a friend). I theorize that many of us feel empty because we are over-engaging in activities that our minds perceive as pleasurable but ultimately leave us empty because we miss the opportunity for oxytocin without real interaction with others. How does the underlying neuroscience support or contradict this metaphor? And how does body budgeting potentially support the distinction between artificial connection and true prosocial behavior?
I think that the underlying neuroscience is generally supportive of this metaphor. I’ll say a couple of things, which might sound a little bit like caveats, but I’m not sure that I mean them to be. I think there are huge debates really about what oxytocin does as a chemical. It’s not really clear that what oxytocin does in the body is the same thing as what it does in the brain, in the sense that it’s similar to serotonin, right? Serotonin is a chemical, it’s a hormone in your body, and it’s a neurotransmitter in your brain. What does that mean? It means it’s a chemical that acts differently in different places. It has different actions in the body and in the brain. The same may also be true of oxytocin; we’re not really sure. Dopamine is not a reward chemical. That’s often how it’s described. I’m not saying that’s how you described it, but that is often how it’s described. To the best of our understanding, it’s not really a chemical for reward as much as a chemical that involves effort.
When your brain believes that you have to burn a lot of glucose, either because you’re going to move your body or learn something new, there’s a secretion of more dopamine because also dopamine has evolved as a metabolic regulator. Both oxytocin and dopamine evolved as metabolic regulators, as did serotonin—and many of the other chemicals that scientists study. The question is, well, what are they doing then?
What we know is that we’re social animals, that we regulate each other’s nervous systems, and we evolved this way. Suppose a human brain has to regulate its own body and its own nervous system on its own without any help from anybody else. In that case, that human is at risk of dying many years earlier than if that human was attached and securely attached in a supportive, loving relationship. That’s what the meta-analyses on the subject support.
Regarding the metaphor of body budgeting, it is trying to describe the idea that one of our brains’ most important jobs is to control the body’s systems. And you have many, many systems in your body, and you really need to have a command center or a financial center, hence the budgeting metaphor. If you can think of your brain as managing the deposits and the withdrawals from your body—and it’s obviously not budgeting money—it’s budgeting glucose, and salt and water, and so on. Your brain is attempting to anticipate the needs of the body, the need for glucose and salts, and so on.
That’s just one example of your brain basically making predictions. It has a really fancy name, it’s called allostasis, but body budgeting is a reasonable metaphor. You can think about eating and sleeping as deposits in your body budget, and you can think about exercising as an investment and learning something new as an investment for the future. What’s really interesting is, figuratively speaking (as humans), we also make deposits and withdrawals into each other’s body budget.
In fact, one of the reasons why support animals work as support animals is that those animals are making, figuratively speaking, a deposit into your body budget. Those animals are in a sense lightening the burden, figuratively speaking, of running a budget for your body. Your point about oxytocin may have something to do very directly with body budgeting, particularly when there’s actual social engagement or strongly implied social engagement.
There’s some evidence that oxytocin isn’t always positive, meaning even when someone is making a, figuratively speaking, withdrawal from your body budget in an unkind way or not being helpful, oxytocin is sometimes also involved there, too. That’s why it’s a really complex story that I think people don’t completely understand yet, exactly what oxytocin is doing. In fact, it’s probably doing multiple things, making it part of a complicated issue.
But the idea that you’re engaged in solitary social media consumption, that this is not a real replacement for actual authentic social engagement, I think, is absolutely right. In part because there’s a lot of ambiguity actually in solitary social media consumption. Even when you’re talking to people on text or on Twitter, or what have you, there’s a lot of context missing. Your brain has to fill in the gaps for a lot of that missing context. Ambiguity is really hard on us. It’s very expensive for a human body budget, particularly when that ambiguity comes from other people. The best thing for your nervous system is another human. But the worst thing for your nervous system is also another human. Particularly when we are unpredictable to one another, that’s really expensive actually, from a metabolic standpoint.
4) We’ve come to learn that our sense of pleasure is often felt in anticipation (prediction, if you will) of a reward, rather than the reward itself. What strategies exist to sync your sense of pleasure to the actual activity at hand? And, how does this practice (e.g., attempting to truly live in the moment) benefit us (if at all) in the way we experience pleasure?
There are so many, many interesting points to make packed into a very small couple of questions. Let me just say, first of all, we have these amazing predictive brains. These brains that can imagine the past and predict, as well as imagine the future. We can do mental time travel. All animal brains predict, and they predict in a way that is in the timescale or timeframe that’s consistent with their niche. The parts of the environment that matter to their well-being. For us, that can be plus or minus hundreds of years. We can read things from the past and imagine what that was like. We can recall things from our childhood. We can imagine the future. But because it’s so easy for us to do mental time travel, it becomes much harder to stay focused in the present. A lot of people have difficulty with this.
And it sometimes requires effort, tremendous effort actually, to remain in the present because it’s so easy to drift off into the past or the imaginary future. One of the greatest discoveries of the past couple of decades is the idea that anticipatory pleasure is distinct from consummatory pleasure—consummatory pleasure meaning the pleasure you feel in the moment. There are even some scientists talking about anticipatory motivation versus motivation in the moment.
I think it’s really important to understand that these are somewhat distinct, and we can see from illnesses that they are. For example, in schizophrenia you see a problem with anticipatory pleasure but no problem with consummatory pleasure. Somebody who has ever had schizophrenia on average can enjoy something in the moment, but they have trouble predicting or anticipating pleasure, and as a consequence, they are less likely to engage in pleasant events because they aren’t anticipating that anything is going to be pleasurable.
This is also often true to some extent with people who are depressed. It’s even the case that some physical ailments like Parkinson’s disease are thought to be a problem with anticipatory motivation. If you put a Parkinson’s patient in a fire, they’ll run away. If one of their loved ones is at risk, they’ll do something herculean to save that person. They don’t have any trouble, on average, with engaging in quick action, very energetic action when there’s no motivation and planning required. When I say motivation, I mean anticipating the body’s needs and meeting those needs before they arrive.
It’s important to distinguish between anticipatory and consummatory aspects of experience because you can use different strategies to maximize both. The strategies that help you maximize anticipation are somewhat different from the strategies that help you maximize pleasure or reward in the moment. The strategies that help you anticipate pleasure really have more to do with doing mental time travel and remembering details of past events that are similar to what you’re anticipating. This will help you savor what is about to come.
You can even put yourself in context, which will more automatically lead your brain to predict and imagine the future in a certain way that makes it easy for you to conjure and savor by anticipating the pleasure you will eventually experience.
When you’re in the moment, it’s really important to get outside of your head. When you’re anticipating pleasure or reward, you’re really inside your head. Your attention is focused inside your head because your brain is reassembling or re-implementing the past in order for you to anticipate the future. In the moment, when you are actually in the event that is supposed to give you pleasure, it’s really important to get out of your head and be paying attention to what’s happening in your body and in the world.
That may seem like common sense because being mindful means paying attention to what’s out in the world, and that’s what mindfulness is all about. But there’s really something to it because every experience you have, every action you take, is some combination of what’s inside your head and what’s outside your head—outside your head meaning within your body and what’s in the world. If you can maximize, or at least nudge, one ingredient over the other depending on what you’re paying attention to, you could play a hand in increasing your pleasure. Your ability to pay attention and focus is like tuning up or tuning down the dial, essentially.
In the moment, you probably want to be less inside your head and more in your body and in the world. When you’re stuck anticipating, you really are in your head, and there’s no other way around it because you’re imagining what’s going to happen in the future and not simply enjoying the moment.
5a) What is the relationship between affect and emotion?
I’m going to make a statement, and then I will unpack it. Affects are a set of simple feelings that are with you all the time—from the moment you’re born until the moment you die. They are properties of consciousness. They’re linked to your brain’s belief about the conditions of your body—the sense data coming from your body.
Emotions are complex constructions of meaning-making that make meaning of those sensations from your body in relation to what’s going on around you in the world. Let me unpack that for you. Your brain is always running a budget for your body, and your body is always sending back sense data to your brain. Your brain’s always tweaking your heart rate and changing your respiratory rate and modifying how your immune system is functioning, and so on. It’s always tweaking, nudging, and controlling.
The cells and systems in your body are always sending back sense data to your brain. You and I, and most humans, are not wired to feel our sensations and be aware of them in any really specific way. When we see things in the world, for example, we see things in a sharp, high dimension. When you think about your vision like a high definition TV, it sets the stage to think about the sense-data coming from your body.
You’re basically wired to experience life more like a 1950s television, with bad reception—like black and white TV in the rain. You have a vague sense that everything is OK or everything’s not OK, that you’re feeling comfortable or you’re not feeling too comfortable. Appendicitis, for example, your whole abdomen aches. It’s a very nonspecific uncomfortable feeling until moments before your appendix burst, and that’s when you feel a very specific pain or jab right over the spot where your appendix is.
That ache, that general ache, is not very informative. It doesn’t tell you what’s wrong. It only tells you that something is wrong. It doesn’t tell you what to do about it. We are not wired to experience the whole symphony of sensations that are arising from our internal body. Instead, what evolution has fashioned us with is, are these simple affects of feeling. You feel good, you feel not so good, you feel worked up, you feel calm, you feel comfortable, you feel uncomfortable. It’s a general barometer of how your body budget is doing, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what to do next to make yourself feel better or how to maintain the good feeling that you have. And there isn’t a single cause of those feelings. The feelings are like a summary in the sense of the general state of your body budget. Your brain has to make meaning out of them. If you’re feeling crappy, what do you do about that? Do you do sleep? Do you get a hug? Do you drink something? Do you distract yourself? What do you do? And the answer is, you don’t know because it’s not very specific.
Your brain has to be able to make very specific predictions about what sense data mean in order to act on them, to know what to do next. When your brain draws on past experience of emotion (that you’ve learned), either because someone’s labeled them for you as emotions, or because you’ve read something, or you’ve watched television, or somebody told you something. When your brain uses past experiences of emotion as predictions to make sense of sense data (in your body, which you experienced the affect in relation to what’s going on around), that is when you say that your brain is constructing an emotion. This is how an ache in your chest can be longing for someone, or it can be anxiety, or it can be a feeling of needing to breathe more deeply and needing to rest. The ache in your stomach can be hunger, it can be anxiety, it can be excitement, it can be an indication, it can be a hunch that somebody is guilty of a crime.
The fact is that it’s not that the aches are different, so your brain has to make a guess, a prediction about what the cause is. It’s what scientists and philosophers call a reverse inference problem. You know the effect, you know the outcome, you have an ache, but you don’t know what caused it, so you have to make a guess. We all usually use the situation that we’re in to make a guess. If your stomach is aching and it happens to be around dinnertime, you’re likely going to guess that you’re hungry. And if your stomach is aching and you’re waiting for your test results from a doctor’s office. Or, you’ve been on social media too long, and you’re waiting for someone to respond to you, and they haven’t responded to you, your brain is going to construct anxiety. Or if you’re in a courtroom and you’re listening to a defendant, and your stomach starts to ache, you’re likely going to construct a feeling that that person is guilty of something.
Most of the time, that’s not what happens automatically under the hood. Your brain is just using the surrounding context as a cue to generate predictions from past experience to make sense of your body. Affect is always with you. Sometimes your brain conjures affects or feelings into emotions, but they’re not equivalent things. You can be in a very strong affect or feeling that your brain doesn’t build into emotions. Your brain might fit it into something else, some other experience.
5b) What are important considerations defining both through the use of a four-quadrant model/approach?
The original research that I did as a graduate student and as an assistant professor was developing out of that quadrant approach. If you go back into the research literature, you’ll see that I am currently responsible for introducing and developing that approach along with Jim Russell. And you can trace that model all the way back to Wilhelm Max Wundt in 1897.
The quadrant model uses valence and arousal, and these are affective features. This is a description of what I would call aspects of space or feeling space. It’s not a definition of emotion in any way. For example, people typically define in Western cultures anger as a higher arousal of negative emotion. But anger is a population of instances, as I said earlier. Sometimes you feel anger and it is unpleasant, but sometimes you feel pleasant. Sometimes anger feels good. Anger can give high arousal, but sometimes anger is low arousal. The same is true for sadness. Sometimes sadness is actually pleasant, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes fear is pleasant. People don’t pay to go on roller coasters, go to haunted houses, and go to horror movies because fear is unpleasant—sometimes fear is pleasant.
Sometimes fear is high arousal; sometimes fear is low arousal. Sometimes sadness is low arousal, but sometimes it’s high arousal. The point is it is useful to use a dimensional model to describe your affect to feeling, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate what emotion is most congruent—the best fit—with a situation that you’re in. The placement of emotion categories in four-quadrant space, that two-dimensional space, those are the stereotypes of emotion, but they’re not the actual populations of instances because those are much more variable on a situation by situation basis.