Emotions Aren’t Real
Or, why everything you know about emotions is wrong
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Alright! On to this week’s essay.
What if everything you thought you knew about emotions was wrong? Emotions have long been considered automatic, reflexive responses triggered by external events. What if I told you they are not? What if I told you that they are nothing but concoctions of the brain? In this essay, we delve into the neuroscience behind the construction of emotions, uncovering some counterintuitive truths about our emotional experiences.
The key idea is from Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made. It’s about 2,000 words.
Q: Are emotions really distinct things inside us that control our actions and expressions, as depicted in the Pixar movie Inside Out?
The time-honoured story of emotion goes something like this: We all have built-in emotions. When something happens in the world — whether it’s a firecracker or a flirtatious glance — our emotions surface automatically, as if someone has flipped a switch.
We broadcast emotions on our faces by way of smiles, frowns, scowls, and other characteristic expressions that anyone can recognise (as long as they are paying attention). Our voices reveal our emotions through laughter, shouts, and cries. Our body posture reveal our innermost feelings with every gesture and slouch.
Emotions are thus thought to be a kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality. The primitive part of your brain wants you to tell your boss he’s an idiot, but your deliberative side knows that doing so would get you fired, so you restrain yourself.
This view of emotions has been around for millennia in various forms. Plato believed a version of it. So did Hippocrates, Aristotle, the Buddha, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.
Today, prominent thinkers such as Steven Pinker, Paul Ekman, and the Dalai Lama also offer up descriptions of emotions rooted in this view. It’s the same view that was presented in the beloved Pixar movie Inside Out.
This view is wrong.
Even after a century worth of experiments, scientific research has not been able to establish a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion.
When scientists attach electrodes to a person’s face and measure how facial muscles actually move during the experience of an emotion, what they find is tremendous variety, and no sign of uniformity.
They find the same variety — the same absence of uniformity — when they study the body and the brain. People can experience anger with or without a spike in blood pressure. They can also experience fear with or without an amygdala, the brain region historically tagged as the home of fear.
Emotions are not built-in, but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them.
Emotions emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment.
Emotions are real, but not in the objective sense that molecules or neurons are real. They are real in the same sense that money is real. It’s a product of human agreement.
On May 21, 2021, during the peak of the second wave of the pandemic, PM Modi came live to pay his tribute to the doctors, nurses, ward boys, and all health workers in India for their relentless hardwork to fight the war against the virus. Then he addressed the fact that despite our best efforts, we couldn’t save everyone.
“This virus has snatched away a lot of our loved ones from us. I pay my humble tribute to them...” He was uttering each word inbetween very long pauses. And as he said the two words, “humble tribute,” his voice was caught in his throat. His lips were trembling as he fought tears before finishing off his sentence, “…and express my condolences to their families.”
Seeing the most powerful man in India almost breakdown on screen got to a lot of people. It got to me and my family members who were watching it on TV. My stomach knotted into a ball. The emotion I felt was reflexively deployed, and a lot of people who were watching felt the same way (except for the trolls maybe).
Humanity has understood sadness and other emotions in this way for over two thousand years. But at the same time, if humanity has learnt anything from centuries of scientific discovery, it’s that things aren’t always what they appear to be.
When PM Modi’s voice caught in his throat, it did not actually trigger a brain circuit for sadness inside me, causing a distinctive set of bodily changes. Rather, I felt sadness in that moment because, having been raised in a certain culture, I learned long ago that “sadness” is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss.
Using bits and pieces of past experience, such as my knowledge of the adverse effect of the pandemic on many families, and my previous sadness about it, my brain rapidly predicted what my body should do to cope with such tragedy.
Its predictions caused my thumping heart, my flushed face, and the knots in my stomach. They made the resulting sensations meaningful as an instance of “sadness”.
Sadness doesn’t exist on its own. In this case, sadness didn’t explode on its own. In a manner, my brain “constructed” an experience of this emotion based on some external and internal cues.
In other words, my bodily movements and sensations were not a fingerprint for sadness. In a different situation, my stomach might remain unknotted, yet my brain could still transform the resulting sensation into sadness.
Not only that, but my original thumping heart, flushed face, knotted stomach, and tears could become meaningful as a different emotion, such as anger or fear, instead of sadness, if the context would have been different. For example, in a very different situation, like a wedding celebration, those same sensations could become joy or gratitude.
Look at this photo. This is Serena Williams screaming in pain because of a badly twisted ankle during a match. Except that it’s not. This is actually her breaking down after a defeat. Except that… it’s not.
This photograph actually shows Williams immediately after she beat her sister Venus in the 2008 U.S. Open tennis finals. When the context changes, the facial configuration takes on new meaning.
In conclusion, when we experience an emotion, our brain constructs it by integrating different types of information. For example, if we see a snake, our brain might take into account our past experiences with snakes, the context in which we see the snake, and physiological responses such as increased heart rate and sweating. These inputs are combined to construct the experience of fear or anxiety.
Now, let’s try to understand the neuroscience behind it.
The brain is essentially a guessing machine. It creates simulations based on its guesses of what’s happening in the world. One of the main jobs of the brain is to squeeze out the signal from all the noise and help us make sense of what’s happening around.
Just think about it. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. To quickly process all the data, your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis — a simulation — and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses.
In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise — selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.
If I ask you to imagine a bee, you would create something called a concept of a bee in your head. Your bee-related simulations are rooted in your mental concept of what a “Bee” is. This concept not only includes information about the bee itself (what it looks and sounds like, how you act on it, etc.), but also information contained in other concepts related to bees (“Meadow,” “Flower,” “Honey,” “Sting,” “Pain,” etc.).
All this information is integrated with your “Bee” concept which guides how you simulate the bee in this particular context.
Your concepts are a primary tool for your brain to guess the meaning of incoming sensory input. For example, there are concepts that give meaning to changes in sound pressure so that you hear them as words or music instead of random noise.
Let me illustrate this further.
In Indian classical music, there are two main scales or ragas — the Carnatic and Hindustani — each with its own unique set of notes and intervals. The Carnatic scale has 16 notes, while the Hindustani scale has 7 notes with a total of 22 microtones (known as shrutis), that can be used to create a vast array of melodies.
This system of tuning is known as just intonation, which means that the intervals between the notes are based on natural mathematical ratios, rather than equal division of an octave as in Western music.
Carnatic music often features more complex rhythmic patterns and intricate melodic ornamentations when compared to Hindustani music, which can take some getting used to for someone accustomed only to Hindustani music.
The similar can be said for someone who has only been exposed to Western music, and vice versa. A brain that’s been wired by listening to one type of music doesn’t have a concept of other types.
Every moment that you are alive, your brain uses concepts to simulate the outside world. Without concepts, you are experientially blind — you’d see random images that don’t make any sense.
With concepts, your brain simulates so invisibly and automatically that vision, hearing, and your other senses seem like reflexes. But… they aren’t reflexes; they are constructions.
Now consider this: what if your brain uses this same process to make meaning of the sensations from inside your body — the commotion arising from your heartbeat, breathing, and other internal movements?
From your brain’s perspective, your body is just another source of sensory input. Sensations from your heart and lungs, your metabolism, your changing temperature, and so on have no objective psychological meaning.
However, once concepts enter the picture, those sensations may take on additional meaning. If you feel an ache in your stomach while sitting at the dinner table, you might experience it as hunger. If flu season is just around the corner, you might experience that same ache as nausea. If you are a judge in a courtroom, you might experience the ache as a gut feeling that the defendant cannot be trusted.
In a given moment, in a given context, your brain uses concepts to give meaning to internal sensations as well as to external sensations from the world, all simultaneously. From an aching stomach, your brain can construct an instance of hunger, nausea, or mistrust depending upon the context. This instance is nothing but an emotion.
In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organised as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.
If a swarm of buzzing bees is squeezing underneath your front door while your heart is pounding in your chest, your brain’s prior knowledge of stinging insects gives meaning to the sensations from your body and to the sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations from the world, simulating the swarm, the door, and an instance of fear.
The exact same bodily sensations in another context, like watching a fascinating film about the hidden lives of bees, might construct an instance of excitement. Or if you see a picture of a smiling cartoon bee in a children’s book, reminding you of a beloved niece whom you took to a Disney movie, you could mentally construct the bee, the niece, and an instance of pleasant nostalgia.
Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input. Instead, you are an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs plausible meaning and prescribes necessary action.
If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave in order deal with them.
It is with concepts that your brain makes meaning of sensations; and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.
In conclusion, our emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed. They are made. By us. We don’t recognise emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions, on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems.
Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.
Today I Learned
The brain learns its model of the world by observing how its inputs change over time.
There isn’t another way to learn. Unlike with a computer, we cannot upload a file into our brain. The only way for a brain to learn anything is via changes in its inputs. If the inputs to the brain were static, nothing could be learned.
Take a simple object such as a computer mouse. To learn what a mouse feels like, you have to run your fingers over it. To learn what a mouse looks like, you have to look at it from different angles and fixate your eyes on different locations. To learn what a mouse does, you have to press down on its buttons, slide off the battery cover, or move it across a mouse pad to see, feel, and hear what happens.
The term for this is sensory-motor learning. In other words, the brain learns a model of the world by observing how our sensory inputs change as we move.
We can learn a song without moving because, unlike the order in which we can move from room to room in a house, the order of notes in a song is fixed. But most of the world isn’t like that. Most of the time we have to move to discover the structure of objects, places, and actions.
With sensory-motor learning, unlike a melody, the order of sensations is not fixed. What I see when I enter a room depends on which direction I turn my head. What my finger feels when holding a coffee cup depends on whether I move my finger up or down or sideways.
With each movement, the neocortex predicts what the next sensation will be. Move my finger up on the coffee cup and I expect to feel the lip, move my finger sideways and I expect to feel the handle. If I turn my head left when entering my kitchen, I expect to see my refrigerator, and if I turn my head right, I expect to see the shelf. If I move my eyes to the left front burner, I expect to see the broken igniter that I need to fix.
If any input doesn’t match the brain’s prediction — perhaps someone fixed the igniter unbeknownst to me — then my attention is drawn to the area of misprediction. This alerts the neocortex that its model of that part of the world needs to be updated.
Timeless Insight
When something that previously didn’t work suddenly does, it doesn’t necessarily mean the people who tried it first were wrong. It usually means other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical.
Marc Andreessen explained how this has worked in tech: “All of the ideas that people had in the 1990s were basically all correct. They were just early.” The infrastructure necessary to make most tech businesses work didn’t exist in the 1990s. But it does exist today. So almost every business plan that was mocked for being a ridiculous idea that failed is now, 20 years later, a viable industry.
Pets.com was mocked, but Chewy is now a $30 billion business. Webvan failed, but Instacart and UberEats are now thriving. eToys was a joke, but now look at Amazon. Some of the biggest businesses of the last 10 years are all in industries that were the starkest examples of stupidity 20 years ago.
What I’m Reading
What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
Tiny Thought
Curiosity invalidates the ambiguous need to have patience.
Before You Go…
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Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
PS: All typos are intentional and I take no responsibility whatsoever! 😬