How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

By Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017)

I can't help feeling that this book is undersold by its title.  There is nothing much to suggest that this is a pretty radical overhaul of the theory of emotion, and indeed of all thought.  Of course, Karl Popper has been saying the same sorts of things since the 1950s in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" et al,  ie: about all products of the human mind being "theory laden", but that was coming at it from a philosophical point of view.  Feldman Barrett seems to be backing up what Popper said (without ever referencing him) with evidence from the lab.

Feldman's thesis is such a massive overturning of previous assumptions in popular science books that even though I am familiar with Popper and have had at least a tenuous grasp of his epistemology for about 20 years now,  and even though Feldman's theories seem to make sense, I was still rather pleased that Barrett kept labouring her points.  It was necessary so as to fix this radical overhaul firmly in the brain. 

Just to note, of course, that according to Popper and Barrett, one is doing this overhaul by a process of conjecture (Popper) or predictions (Barrett), and refutations (Popper) or corrections (Barrett).

However, the effect of Barrett's style was to make me feel like a very slow pupil being lectured by a slightly exasperated but nonetheless endlessly patient teacher, who only occasionally let her mask fall, though thankfully never directly at the pupil.  Instead the Barrett's exasperation seemed to get sublimated into over-sharing about her family life, to the point where one worried that her daughter might be none to happy about her mother's book.

I loved this book though.  It is daring, important, probably right in most regards and will require one to challenge almost every other book one reads on emotions ever again.

Important points to take from it:

Emotions (and indeed all other products of the human mind) are generated by the brain. They are not triggered. One makes predictions after a cascade of neuronal connections which are then selected for according to which appears to be the most appropriate/most used in a situation, and then tested against more predictions so as to be corrected through yet more of the same process of predication generation.

Also: emotions don't have a loci in the brain  and there is no fingerprint for an emotion.  Emotions as such are generated through cultural memes.  We have affect of course, but emotion is a cultural artefact...an emergent quality that only very broadly describes a vast range of different affects.

There are some practical suggestions towards the end of the book too, so this book could be classed as part self help.  Increased granularity when it comes to describing emotions seems to be useful, and the lesson from the arachnophobe seems instructive:  it was better to examine one's feelings exactly than to either try to override the bad feeling with positive thinking about the spider, or to try to distract oneself entirely from it. Increased granularity in interpreting emotion seemed to be the result, which seemed to have the dual effect of making the experience less overpowering as one broad emotion is not all-encompassing, and also more subject to other affect, in that one is having to think calmly whilst one is doing the assessment.

Re-interpreting affect is also a good idea at times.  Outside of the book, I do remember that newscaster who was afraid of heights being told to experience her zip-wire as one of excitement. Given that emotions are cultural constructs, and given that emotion doesn't have a loci or a set manifestation, this seems eminently rational, though I actually don't recall whether Barrett herself recommends this, though the third option in the spider test is somewhat akin to this.

Rating 9/10.