Review: How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am fascinated by the advances in neuroscience and what it tells us about our brains, behaviours and who we are. It is even more interesting to combine that with the wisdom of mindfulness theory & practice. This is a book with a lot of very interesting material which we do not often come across, and is intellectually very stimulating.

In what Lisa describes as the most prevalent classical view, we think we are all very similar in how we display our emotions. If shown a picture, based on the person’s expression, we believe we can recognise the emotion he/she is going through. This has in fact led to a number of technology companies making investments in this area, juries basing judgements on how defendants conduct themselves etc. Lisa forcefully argues, and very successfully, that there are no specific standards for emotion & variation is the norm. There is no specific common brain pathway for emotions and attempts to decipher emotions such as anger from body measurements & brain scans have shown no patterns and have failed. She goes on to discuss that the concept of the 'truine brain' where parts of our human brain were inherited from other species and govern rudimentary survival behaviours has been largely discredited by neuroscience.

Our brain is constantly anticipating and preparing our body for what is to come (balancing the body budget) and dealing with prediction errors (deviation between the expected & actual). Right since our birth, our brain is building concepts for us based on what we are told and what we experience. Our emotions have roots in these concepts, and are hence very individualised. Similarities are more explained by the fact that we go through many similar experiences in similar environments, and hence build adjacent concepts. This makes perfect sense and also explains the growing inability of people to change their world views in later stages in life.

The parallels with mindfulness theory can provide great insights. Lisa does discuss eastern philosophy (largely around Buddhist thought) and the alignment with the latest of what neuroscience is telling us.


There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj


In quite a few cases though she just skims the surface and the treatment lacks depth. The impact of words & language is written about in great detail and yet misses some obvious negative implications. When concepts are fortified, egos grow bigger, resistance to change becomes greater and de-sensitization develops, largely robbing us of the newness of the experience.


“Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

“The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.”
― Krishnamurti


The implications of all this knowledge for the law is important and there is a fairly detailed discussion on that (eg: there is almost no basis for segregating ‘crimes of passion’ vs ‘conscious crimes’). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky was another fascinating book based on neuroscience and there are quite a few common themes (such as the impact of past experiences, implications for law etc). This book is also as interesting but is far more speculative & less organized in parts. The chapter on animal emotions is in fact very poorly written, makes lots of assumptions and comes across as rambling. While the broad contours of the book are very logical, a number of the similarities across species cannot be explained by only the theories in this book, which considerably downplays the impact of genes.

If this subject interests you, I would also urge you to read ‘Behave’ and The Ape that Understood the Universe.


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