WEBVTT - Ep86 "What are emotions?" 0:00:05.080 --> 0:00:09.000 What are emotions? Are they something that happened to you? 0:00:09.720 --> 0:00:13.840 Or are they bodily signals that we interpret? Does everyone 0:00:14.040 --> 0:00:18.040 show emotions in the same way? Are there particular markers 0:00:18.079 --> 0:00:21.680 of the face or body that always mean anger or 0:00:21.680 --> 0:00:24.360 sadness or joy? And what does this have to do 0:00:24.480 --> 0:00:29.040 with Charles Darwin or the truth about facial expressions or 0:00:29.080 --> 0:00:35.559 the movie Inside Out. Welcome to enter Cosmos with me 0:00:35.720 --> 0:00:39.240 David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford 0:00:39.280 --> 0:00:42.560 and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three 0:00:42.600 --> 0:00:46.520 pound universe to understand why and how our lives look 0:00:46.560 --> 0:01:12.399 the way they do. Today's episode is about emotions. Now, 0:01:12.440 --> 0:01:16.680 to set this up, let's think about emotion versus cognition. 0:01:17.360 --> 0:01:21.000 In the past half century, neuroscience has been buzzing with 0:01:21.120 --> 0:01:25.720 discoveries about cognition, like how we perceive information, how we 0:01:26.240 --> 0:01:28.880 decide that sort of thing, and this has all been 0:01:29.080 --> 0:01:33.240 enhanced by all the recent advances in artificial intelligence. So 0:01:33.319 --> 0:01:37.920 cognition is all about acquiring and using knowledge, recognizing patterns, 0:01:37.959 --> 0:01:43.920 storing and retrieving informations, creating mental representations, but real neural 0:01:44.000 --> 0:01:48.480 networks the ones living inside organisms. They operate in a 0:01:48.600 --> 0:01:55.000 very different context. Organisms are driven by needs and motives 0:01:55.080 --> 0:02:02.280 and pain and emotions. Without these driving all the cognitive 0:02:02.360 --> 0:02:05.840 processes like learning and representing and taking action. 0:02:06.120 --> 0:02:09.320 These would lack purpose or direction. 0:02:09.560 --> 0:02:13.239 In other words, if nothing matters to an organism, there's 0:02:13.280 --> 0:02:17.280 no reason for it to learn or do anything. This 0:02:17.400 --> 0:02:21.880 is why understanding the brain requires us to include emotion, 0:02:22.120 --> 0:02:26.360 not just cognition, and this consideration has given rise to 0:02:26.440 --> 0:02:30.240 a field that we call affective neuroscience, in other words, 0:02:30.320 --> 0:02:34.280 the neuroscience of emotions as a complement to the field 0:02:34.320 --> 0:02:36.360 of cognitive neuroscience. 0:02:36.639 --> 0:02:37.520 So what is. 0:02:37.480 --> 0:02:41.359 Different about these two fields, Well, at least traditionally, neuroscience 0:02:41.400 --> 0:02:47.839 thinks about cognition as representational and involving symbols and computation 0:02:48.520 --> 0:02:52.880 and degrees of accuracy in how well it reflects the world. 0:02:53.200 --> 0:02:57.959 But emotions they don't fit that model. Take something like fear, 0:02:58.040 --> 0:03:01.720 it's not exactly about rep presentation or symbols that it 0:03:01.760 --> 0:03:07.320 doesn't have accuracy, but instead it varies in intensity. If 0:03:07.320 --> 0:03:12.120 emotions are like forces that rise and fall, or they mix, 0:03:12.240 --> 0:03:15.320 or they remain pure, then cognition is maybe more like 0:03:15.360 --> 0:03:21.040 an encyclopedia, something structured and informational. Now These metaphors are imperfect, 0:03:21.120 --> 0:03:23.920 but I'm just using these to tee up the divide 0:03:23.960 --> 0:03:29.600 between cognition and emotion in conventional thinking. Now, why has 0:03:29.720 --> 0:03:34.119 cognition received all the attention in the laboratory. 0:03:34.160 --> 0:03:35.400 Well, it's because we. 0:03:35.360 --> 0:03:41.240 Can build models or artificial neural networks to tackle cognitive 0:03:41.320 --> 0:03:45.240 tasks like chess and go and math problems. It's a 0:03:45.240 --> 0:03:50.880 lot harder to set up clear experiments with emotions, and 0:03:50.960 --> 0:03:54.240 so these have traditionally received a lot less attention in 0:03:54.280 --> 0:03:56.400 the research world. But the thing to note is that 0:03:56.440 --> 0:04:00.400 emotions are much more ancient and at least here to 0:04:00.880 --> 0:04:04.680 span the animal kingdom, while chess games do not, so 0:04:04.800 --> 0:04:10.160 emotions may be more fundamental in brain wiring. So how 0:04:10.200 --> 0:04:14.360 do emotions get studied? Let's start with Charles Darwin. In 0:04:14.440 --> 0:04:19.080 his book The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals. 0:04:18.480 --> 0:04:20.200 Which he published in eighteen seventy. 0:04:19.880 --> 0:04:25.360 Two, Darwin proposed that emotions are biological phenomenon. They're deeply 0:04:25.480 --> 0:04:28.719 rooted in our evolutionary history. So he argued that our 0:04:29.240 --> 0:04:33.480 facial expressions of joy or sadness, or anger or fear 0:04:33.920 --> 0:04:39.640 they evolved to communicate essential information to ourselves and others. 0:04:39.760 --> 0:04:42.880 So for example, it makes sense, he argued, for a 0:04:43.000 --> 0:04:47.320 person who is angry to stand tall and loom large 0:04:47.680 --> 0:04:49.640 and glare and tense their muscles. 0:04:50.200 --> 0:04:53.360 These actions prepare them for physical. 0:04:52.960 --> 0:04:56.039 Action, and these actions can also just serve as a 0:04:56.520 --> 0:05:00.440 visual threat of action. So Darwin proposed that he motions 0:05:00.560 --> 0:05:04.880 are survival tools passed down through the generations, like well 0:05:04.920 --> 0:05:05.760 oiled machinery. 0:05:05.800 --> 0:05:06.360 Although its a. 0:05:06.320 --> 0:05:11.160 Side note, he did mention that this appropriateness hypothesis can't 0:05:11.200 --> 0:05:13.360 be the whole story, since a lot of things didn't 0:05:13.360 --> 0:05:16.760 seem to fit, like a person who is sad moping 0:05:16.839 --> 0:05:20.720 around and recreating conversations in his head and feeling drained. 0:05:20.880 --> 0:05:23.440 But we'll come back to this. So the general thing 0:05:23.440 --> 0:05:28.359 that Darwin emphasized is that certain emotions prepare our body 0:05:28.400 --> 0:05:31.159 to do the next thing, and he suggested this was 0:05:31.600 --> 0:05:35.520 universal across the animal kingdom. He said, look, expressions are 0:05:35.640 --> 0:05:40.400 essentially the same across mammalian species, and things can even 0:05:40.400 --> 0:05:44.720 look a little similar between mammals and reptiles and birds, 0:05:45.040 --> 0:05:49.279 like when the animal is afraid or angry or showing 0:05:49.400 --> 0:05:55.080 parental love. So Darwin said, the core emotional operations relevant 0:05:55.080 --> 0:06:01.280 to behavior are evolutionarily highly conserved, so fast forward to 0:06:01.360 --> 0:06:05.320 the twentieth century, and this research gained momentum with researchers 0:06:05.360 --> 0:06:08.320 like Paul Ekman. Ekman went around the world and he 0:06:08.680 --> 0:06:18.800 concluded that he could identify six basic emotions. There was happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, 0:06:19.040 --> 0:06:23.440 and surprise. And these six emotions, he argued, are universal 0:06:23.480 --> 0:06:26.840 whether you are in New York or New Guinea. A 0:06:27.000 --> 0:06:30.640 smile means joy, and if you have a furrowed brow, 0:06:30.720 --> 0:06:34.159 that means worry and so on. And this model of 0:06:34.360 --> 0:06:38.400 basic emotions that are universal, we see this framework everywhere 0:06:38.440 --> 0:06:42.600 around us. You've probably seen the Pixar movie Inside Out, 0:06:42.720 --> 0:06:45.920 which brought emotions to life. You had the characters of 0:06:46.160 --> 0:06:50.839 joy and sadness and anger and fear and disgust, and 0:06:50.920 --> 0:06:55.080 each one was personified as a little being running the 0:06:55.080 --> 0:06:57.800 control panel of a young girl's mind. And it was 0:06:57.839 --> 0:07:01.080 a great movie and it captured the publicma because it 0:07:01.160 --> 0:07:05.800 felt sort of true. Right, these emotions seem like individual 0:07:06.200 --> 0:07:09.680 entities living inside us. They're always there, They're waiting to 0:07:09.760 --> 0:07:12.640 surface and take charge of the control panel. But what 0:07:12.720 --> 0:07:15.360 if I told you that everything you just heard about 0:07:15.440 --> 0:07:18.840 Darwin and Eckman and Inside Out is not really the 0:07:18.880 --> 0:07:24.320 full story about emotions. What if emotions aren't actually universal? 0:07:24.360 --> 0:07:28.600 What if they're not hardwired programs that move us like 0:07:28.600 --> 0:07:34.480 a marionette, but instead something we create and interpret. So 0:07:34.600 --> 0:07:38.320 the story of the neuroscience of emotions really started taking 0:07:38.320 --> 0:07:41.920 a turn with the work of one neuroscientist, Lisa Feldman Barrett. 0:07:41.960 --> 0:07:45.320 She's a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and she 0:07:45.360 --> 0:07:49.840 wrote a book called How Emotions Are Made. Over the years, 0:07:49.960 --> 0:07:52.880 Barrett's work has really challenged everything we thought we knew 0:07:52.880 --> 0:07:58.280 about emotions. In her view, emotions aren't universal biological reflexes. 0:07:58.320 --> 0:08:04.840 They are constructed experiences, shaped by our brains, by our past, 0:08:04.960 --> 0:08:07.600 and by our culture. So I called up Lisa to 0:08:07.680 --> 0:08:10.000 join us here today, and as we're about to see 0:08:10.320 --> 0:08:13.840 her research flips the script. It suggests that your brain 0:08:13.920 --> 0:08:18.400 doesn't feel emotions as much as it predicts them. So 0:08:18.480 --> 0:08:22.360 that wave of joy or that stab of anger, it's 0:08:22.440 --> 0:08:27.640 not a reaction, it's your brain interpreting the signals of 0:08:27.680 --> 0:08:31.760 your body in the context of your situation and your 0:08:31.880 --> 0:08:39.760 life experience. So Lisa, first I want to ask you 0:08:39.800 --> 0:08:43.160 what the classical view is of emotions, and then we're 0:08:43.160 --> 0:08:46.520 going to transition into how you see it and what 0:08:46.559 --> 0:08:48.720 your research has revealed. 0:08:48.800 --> 0:08:50.720 So let's start with the classical view. 0:08:50.760 --> 0:08:53.520 What is any student can learn in their psychology or 0:08:53.559 --> 0:08:55.600 neuroscience textbook about emotions. 0:08:56.160 --> 0:08:58.520 Right, So you open up an intro textbook, or you 0:08:58.520 --> 0:09:03.040 could even open up a Harvard Business Review or often 0:09:03.120 --> 0:09:05.959 even read the newspaper, and what you see is a 0:09:06.080 --> 0:09:14.520 view that humans are born with six somewhere between six 0:09:14.600 --> 0:09:19.160 and some I don't know, twelve fifteen circuits, one for 0:09:19.280 --> 0:09:22.800 each type of emotion, Anger said, fear discussed. You know, 0:09:22.880 --> 0:09:26.520 the different scientists disagree on how many there are, but 0:09:26.800 --> 0:09:30.200 the ideas that you have these inborn emotions, something happens 0:09:30.240 --> 0:09:33.920 in the world triggers one of them, and you make 0:09:35.280 --> 0:09:40.360 a universal facial expression to express the state. Your body 0:09:41.200 --> 0:09:45.680 changes to express the physical state that is characteristic of 0:09:45.720 --> 0:09:50.640 that emotion, and you are likely to perform a specific behavior. So, 0:09:50.720 --> 0:09:56.439 for example, if your fear circuit is triggered, you'll make 0:09:56.480 --> 0:09:59.440 a wide eyed, gasping face, which is supposed to be 0:09:59.600 --> 0:10:02.600 universe soul. Everybody around the world is supposed to make 0:10:02.640 --> 0:10:06.000 that face when they're afraid, and recognize that as an 0:10:06.000 --> 0:10:09.080 expression of fear. Your heart rate is supposed to race, 0:10:09.600 --> 0:10:14.120 and you're supposed to be likely to flee or freeze 0:10:14.280 --> 0:10:17.480 or make some kind of characteristic movement. 0:10:17.679 --> 0:10:20.160 So that's a bit of a caricature, but not that much. 0:10:20.320 --> 0:10:23.400 That's that is actually the view that a lot of 0:10:23.440 --> 0:10:25.640 people still hold. 0:10:25.880 --> 0:10:29.840 Actually, And when you started graduate school, I assume you 0:10:30.160 --> 0:10:32.480 felt that was the right model as well. That's what 0:10:32.520 --> 0:10:35.800 you were taught, and so you started doing some research 0:10:35.920 --> 0:10:37.000 and what happened there? 0:10:37.440 --> 0:10:40.400 Yeah, So I wasn't even doing research on emotion, David. 0:10:40.640 --> 0:10:44.560 I started graduate school doing research on something else. But 0:10:44.640 --> 0:10:48.120 I had to measure emotion, and I was measuring emotion 0:10:48.880 --> 0:10:51.160 the way a lot of psychologists do, which is to 0:10:51.200 --> 0:10:54.840 ask people, how are you feeling? And what I did 0:10:55.000 --> 0:10:59.959 was I, instead of, you know, analyzing what people say, 0:11:00.240 --> 0:11:03.959 I looked at the statistical structure of what they said. 0:11:04.360 --> 0:11:06.600 So instead of just averaging the ratings and saying, oh, 0:11:06.640 --> 0:11:11.480 this person is, you know, reporting sadness or fear, I 0:11:11.520 --> 0:11:13.480 looked at the whole pattern of their reports. And I 0:11:13.520 --> 0:11:18.560 found people on average don't distinguish between feelings of sadness 0:11:18.559 --> 0:11:21.440 and fear and discuss. They basically group like all the 0:11:21.480 --> 0:11:27.400 negative emotion words together to report I feel terrible and 0:11:27.559 --> 0:11:30.400 all the positive words to I feel great, So I 0:11:30.400 --> 0:11:34.280 feel good, I feel bad, I feel comfortable, I feel uncomfortable. 0:11:34.679 --> 0:11:37.120 That's generally, on average, what it looked like. 0:11:37.160 --> 0:11:40.600 And I thought, well, everybody knows there are universal expressions 0:11:40.640 --> 0:11:45.479 for emotion, and everybody knows that there are these physical patterns, 0:11:45.720 --> 0:11:49.880 you know, for different emotion categories, and eventually, you know, 0:11:49.920 --> 0:11:52.600 everyone knows there are different circuits in the brain. So 0:11:52.679 --> 0:11:56.280 I should be able to objectively measure somebody's emotional state 0:11:56.880 --> 0:11:59.400 and then I can compare that to their reports. Because 0:11:59.440 --> 0:12:01.160 it turned out but when I looked a little closer, 0:12:01.200 --> 0:12:04.080 I could see that actually, on average, it looks like 0:12:04.080 --> 0:12:06.920 people aren't distinguishing, but some people distinguish pretty well, and 0:12:06.960 --> 0:12:10.480 other people, you know, use anger said and fearful to 0:12:10.600 --> 0:12:13.000 mean are synonyms. So I thought, well, I can just 0:12:13.040 --> 0:12:16.360 figure out like who's reporting accurately and who isn't. And 0:12:17.240 --> 0:12:20.360 I thought, you know, not being an expert in emotion 0:12:21.160 --> 0:12:25.160 and also having the exuberance and unrealistic expectations of a 0:12:25.160 --> 0:12:28.640 graduate student, I thought, oh, this will just take me 0:12:28.679 --> 0:12:30.280 a couple of months, Like, I'll figure it out and 0:12:30.320 --> 0:12:32.880 then I'll be able to objectively, you know, measure emotion 0:12:33.000 --> 0:12:34.280 I'll move on and it'll be great. 0:12:35.160 --> 0:12:37.720 And that is not what happened. 0:12:38.520 --> 0:12:39.400 So what did you find. 0:12:40.120 --> 0:12:45.320 I've went to the literature because like probably you and 0:12:45.640 --> 0:12:49.440 almost everybody I know, we were all taught that each 0:12:49.520 --> 0:12:53.720 emotion category that is anger, is a category of instances. 0:12:53.800 --> 0:12:57.120 So we were taught that there are certain categories that 0:12:57.200 --> 0:13:02.520 are universal and should have objective markers. So I started 0:13:02.520 --> 0:13:07.360 with the face because everyone knows that Charles Darwin. I 0:13:07.360 --> 0:13:09.720 mean when I say everyone, I mean you know, scientists 0:13:09.800 --> 0:13:13.680 know Charles Darwin wrote a book called The Expression of 0:13:13.679 --> 0:13:17.360 the Emotions in Man and Animals, and he claimed that 0:13:17.440 --> 0:13:20.559 there were these universal expressions. And so I went to 0:13:20.640 --> 0:13:22.720 the literature and I started to read, and what I 0:13:22.800 --> 0:13:26.600 discovered was that if you just read the introduction of 0:13:26.720 --> 0:13:30.280 papers and you read the discussion section of the papers, 0:13:30.960 --> 0:13:34.880 there are lots of claims about universal expressions. 0:13:35.559 --> 0:13:36.839 But if you actually look at. 0:13:36.840 --> 0:13:40.319 The results and you read you sort of dig into 0:13:40.360 --> 0:13:45.760 the results, you don't see anything which looks like universal expressions. 0:13:45.920 --> 0:13:48.840 Actually what you see is real variations. I'll give an 0:13:48.840 --> 0:13:51.679 example of a recent meta analysis. So this is a 0:13:51.720 --> 0:13:56.280 statistical summary of you know, hundreds of studies. Right, people 0:13:56.360 --> 0:14:01.800 on average scowl when they're angry. Scowling is the supposed 0:14:02.160 --> 0:14:07.440 universal expression of anger. People scowl when they're angry about 0:14:07.640 --> 0:14:12.079 thirty five percent of the time, so that's more than chance, 0:14:12.840 --> 0:14:15.760 and therefore it will get you a good publication if 0:14:15.840 --> 0:14:19.440 you report that finding. But that means sixty five percent 0:14:19.480 --> 0:14:22.480 of the time people are doing something else that is 0:14:22.520 --> 0:14:28.080 meaningful with their face when they're angry, and other research 0:14:28.120 --> 0:14:30.600 suggests that about half the time when people scowl, they're 0:14:30.600 --> 0:14:34.760 not angry. They're feeling something else, and oftentimes it's not 0:14:34.800 --> 0:14:35.320 an emotion. 0:14:35.920 --> 0:14:37.320 And if you combine that with. 0:14:37.360 --> 0:14:43.160 Evidence from people who live in remote cultures who have 0:14:43.400 --> 0:14:49.280 less access to Western values and norms for emotion, what 0:14:49.360 --> 0:14:52.960 you see is that there's nothing that looks like universality 0:14:53.040 --> 0:14:56.120 for anger or for any category that's ever been studied. 0:14:56.480 --> 0:15:01.440 So scowling and anger is certainly one set of facial 0:15:01.480 --> 0:15:05.680 movements that people make in the West when they're angry, 0:15:06.240 --> 0:15:09.359 but it doesn't come anywhere close to having the reliability 0:15:09.400 --> 0:15:12.680 or specificity that we would need to see for a 0:15:12.800 --> 0:15:16.280 universal expression. And I'll just say that in my lab, 0:15:16.400 --> 0:15:21.760 we were very fortunate to be able to visit Tanzania 0:15:21.800 --> 0:15:26.720 and work with members of the Hudsa hunter gatherer culture. 0:15:27.240 --> 0:15:32.800 And we basically took six emotion categories that don't exist 0:15:32.800 --> 0:15:37.200 in English. They don't exist in Hadzane either. They have 0:15:37.400 --> 0:15:40.840 never been claimed to be universal, and then we just 0:15:40.960 --> 0:15:43.800 made up expressions for them, like literally, we sat around 0:15:43.800 --> 0:15:47.680 a table just made up expressions for them. We pretested 0:15:47.720 --> 0:15:51.800 them with American subjects. To make sure that American subjects 0:15:51.800 --> 0:15:56.240 thought these were reasonable expressions of these emotions, we had 0:15:56.240 --> 0:15:58.280 to tell them what the emotion was, you know, like 0:15:58.760 --> 0:16:01.880 there were one emotion category it was gigle, which is 0:16:02.080 --> 0:16:05.880 the desire to squeeze a baby's cheeks, you know, like 0:16:05.920 --> 0:16:08.240 when you see a really cute baby and you just like, 0:16:08.360 --> 0:16:11.560 So there was and then we plopped it into the 0:16:11.560 --> 0:16:16.720 method that everybody uses when they do these cross cultural studies, 0:16:16.760 --> 0:16:21.160 and the method produced evidence that five of the six 0:16:21.200 --> 0:16:25.560 of these categories were universal. So what I'm saying here 0:16:25.680 --> 0:16:30.520 is that there's a method that scientists are using that 0:16:30.600 --> 0:16:36.920 basically is teaching people what the right answers are. But 0:16:37.000 --> 0:16:40.480 the basic answer here is that for every claim of 0:16:40.520 --> 0:16:45.560 a universal marker or signature for emotion, if you just 0:16:45.640 --> 0:16:48.400 look closely and you start to poke a little bit 0:16:48.560 --> 0:16:51.520 at the research. You know, it's like a house of cards, 0:16:51.560 --> 0:16:53.720 it sort of falls apart, and instead what you see 0:16:54.120 --> 0:16:59.320 is that variation is the norm, meaning you, David, probably 0:16:59.360 --> 0:17:03.359 do many things when you're anger. You probably sometimes feel unpleasant, 0:17:03.360 --> 0:17:06.320 and sometimes you probably might even feel pleasant. You know, 0:17:06.400 --> 0:17:10.040 your body probably does many things in anger. It's not random. 0:17:10.119 --> 0:17:13.720 It's structured by the situation, and that leads us to 0:17:13.720 --> 0:17:16.479 ask a whole set of different questions about emotion. 0:17:30.800 --> 0:17:33.760 So when we think about an emotion like anger, it's 0:17:33.800 --> 0:17:35.639 not that there's one thing going on. It's not as 0:17:35.680 --> 0:17:39.640 though I have an anger circuit. So instead, there are 0:17:40.000 --> 0:17:42.960 lots of ways that I might express that based on 0:17:43.160 --> 0:17:46.440 the context that I'm in. Can you give an example 0:17:46.480 --> 0:17:47.720 of that? Sure? 0:17:47.840 --> 0:17:49.240 Have you ever laughed in anger? 0:17:49.800 --> 0:17:52.360 I don't remember if I've ever laughed at anger. It's 0:17:52.560 --> 0:17:55.720 possibly what would be a situation where someone might do that. 0:17:56.320 --> 0:17:56.920 I think. 0:17:58.280 --> 0:18:02.880 People laugh in anger when they're insulted in some way, 0:18:03.040 --> 0:18:08.679 and they cry in anger. I've certainly cried in anger. 0:18:09.160 --> 0:18:14.359 People sit stoically in plot the demise of their enemy. 0:18:14.440 --> 0:18:18.199 In anger, they make no expression whatsoever. I mean, you know, 0:18:18.280 --> 0:18:20.280 I'm sure you've been in a faculty meeting where you've 0:18:20.280 --> 0:18:23.880 done that. I certainly have had my moments. I think 0:18:23.880 --> 0:18:26.040 if you look to the literature, what you see is 0:18:26.080 --> 0:18:28.640 that people do all kinds of things in anger. Heart 0:18:28.680 --> 0:18:30.879 rate can go up, it can go down, blood pressure 0:18:30.920 --> 0:18:33.800 can go up, it can go down, it can stay 0:18:33.800 --> 0:18:36.679 the same. There's not a single pattern. And when it 0:18:36.680 --> 0:18:39.760 comes to the brain, there is no single circuit for 0:18:40.240 --> 0:18:42.639 anger or sadness or fear. It's not even like there 0:18:42.640 --> 0:18:46.000 are multiple circuits. What you see in the brain is 0:18:46.000 --> 0:18:50.800 that there are ingredients or components that work together. So 0:18:51.480 --> 0:18:55.720 anger is a whole brain state. It's not a single circuit. 0:18:55.840 --> 0:18:59.320 In fact, any research that claims to have identified a 0:18:59.480 --> 0:19:04.679 distinct circuit for an emotion is usually equating an emotion 0:19:04.800 --> 0:19:08.359 with a specific action. So when you read research that 0:19:08.440 --> 0:19:11.760 talks about the fear circuit, they mean the circuit in 0:19:11.880 --> 0:19:17.400 animals when the animal freezes. Really careful research shows, for example, 0:19:17.480 --> 0:19:20.440 if you place a rat in a testing box and 0:19:20.840 --> 0:19:25.679 you expose the rat to us tone and then a 0:19:25.680 --> 0:19:29.880 foot shock, eventually the rat will come to freeze when 0:19:29.920 --> 0:19:33.119 it hears the tone. This is what scientists refer to 0:19:33.160 --> 0:19:38.240 as learned fear, so they're equating a freezing behavior to fear, 0:19:38.680 --> 0:19:41.520 and then they look for the circuit for that freezing behavior, 0:19:41.680 --> 0:19:44.240 and then they call it the circuit for fear. The 0:19:44.320 --> 0:19:48.320 really interesting thing is that recent research, for example, will 0:19:48.800 --> 0:19:51.919 train a rat in the way that we just discussed, 0:19:52.600 --> 0:19:58.440 mark the neurons that increase their firing, and then reactivate 0:19:58.480 --> 0:20:04.440 those neurons opt genetically with light, and then they look 0:20:04.640 --> 0:20:08.080 throughout the entire brain, Well, what else is being so 0:20:08.200 --> 0:20:10.840 not just looking at the you know, the circuit, like 0:20:10.920 --> 0:20:14.119 let's say the little subcortical circuit that they might be 0:20:14.119 --> 0:20:15.840 interested in, but they look at through the whole brain 0:20:15.880 --> 0:20:17.680 and what you see is that there's actually a whole 0:20:17.720 --> 0:20:22.640 brain ensemble of neurons which are increasing their firing. Two 0:20:22.720 --> 0:20:26.080 interesting things to me in this body of work. Oftentimes 0:20:26.080 --> 0:20:29.680 scientists think the fear circuit is in neurons in this 0:20:29.800 --> 0:20:33.359 little area called the amygdala, which is deep inside the 0:20:33.400 --> 0:20:39.399 temper lobe of a vertebrate brain. If you reactivate the 0:20:39.440 --> 0:20:42.439 neurons in the amygdala and you bring up this whole 0:20:42.800 --> 0:20:46.400 brain wide ensemble of neurons, but you interfere with the 0:20:46.440 --> 0:20:50.520 firing of the other neurons, including in the cerebral cortex, 0:20:50.600 --> 0:20:55.719 you don't get freezing behavior. So it's the whole ensemble 0:20:55.880 --> 0:20:59.720 that's producing that behavior, not just the neurons in the 0:21:00.520 --> 0:21:03.320 But even more so, what's interesting is that if you 0:21:03.720 --> 0:21:07.480 put the animal in a different box, one that doesn't 0:21:07.560 --> 0:21:11.280 look very much like the box in which it learned 0:21:11.280 --> 0:21:14.920 to freeze, those neurons that you've activated are part of 0:21:14.960 --> 0:21:21.880 a different ensemble, and no freezing behavior happens. So you've 0:21:21.920 --> 0:21:25.400 got this situation where the neurons in question are clearly 0:21:25.440 --> 0:21:28.159 doing something, but whatever they're doing, they're working in a 0:21:28.280 --> 0:21:33.080 larger group, So their psychological meaning is related or relational 0:21:33.200 --> 0:21:38.160 or dependent on that group. And it's very context sensitive, 0:21:38.960 --> 0:21:44.080 and it's just explaining freezing behavior. It's not explaining all 0:21:44.080 --> 0:21:47.399 the other things that animals do in fear. This is 0:21:47.480 --> 0:21:50.600 just one thing they do in a particular kind of context. 0:21:50.960 --> 0:21:53.000 So when you look in a movie like Inside Out 0:21:53.400 --> 0:21:55.879 and you've got these different emotions and they hit a 0:21:55.920 --> 0:21:59.840 button and cause some behavior, what your research has shown 0:21:59.840 --> 0:22:02.280 for a few decades now is that it doesn't seem 0:22:02.320 --> 0:22:06.399 to be the right explanation for emotion. Why do you 0:22:06.400 --> 0:22:10.080 think that view is so popular? And more importantly, what 0:22:10.240 --> 0:22:12.840 is your theory about constructed emotions? 0:22:12.880 --> 0:22:13.840 Explain that to us. 0:22:14.240 --> 0:22:16.359 Yeah, well, first, can I just say about Inside Out. 0:22:16.560 --> 0:22:18.760 I have to say I've seen both movies and I 0:22:19.240 --> 0:22:22.200 love them. I think they're totally fun. They have really 0:22:22.240 --> 0:22:27.600 really clever metaphors that I love, and I think in 0:22:27.640 --> 0:22:30.000 the second movie, I particularly loved on Wei. 0:22:30.600 --> 0:22:31.880 I just love that character. 0:22:32.240 --> 0:22:35.760 But what I'll say is that I also really like 0:22:36.280 --> 0:22:39.679 Roadrunner and Wiley Coyote cartoons, but I don't think that 0:22:39.720 --> 0:22:42.399 I can learn physics from it. So the idea that 0:22:42.440 --> 0:22:46.200 you could learn neuroscience, the neuroscience of emotion from a cartoon, 0:22:46.920 --> 0:22:51.280 and particularly from Pixar that can put emotions into cockroaches 0:22:51.400 --> 0:22:55.560 and cars, and you know, they're so clever, right. I 0:22:55.600 --> 0:22:58.639 think there's nothing wrong with what Pixar did. It's it, 0:22:58.800 --> 0:23:01.960 but the marketing is is pretty problematic. 0:23:02.000 --> 0:23:04.080 And I also want to point out that you just 0:23:04.160 --> 0:23:05.439 watch any single one. 0:23:05.280 --> 0:23:10.400 Of those characters, anger or embarrassment, any of them, and they. 0:23:10.280 --> 0:23:10.920 Show a rate. 0:23:11.040 --> 0:23:14.480 They have a range of emotions, they display a range 0:23:14.480 --> 0:23:17.680 of expressions. If they only ever did their one thing, 0:23:17.800 --> 0:23:20.560 it would be a really boring movie. 0:23:20.840 --> 0:23:25.159 Yeah, so tell us about your theory of constructed emotion 0:23:25.560 --> 0:23:28.000 and what the right way is to think. 0:23:27.840 --> 0:23:30.160 About this, Well, I don't know if it's the right way, 0:23:30.200 --> 0:23:33.199 but it's certainly a different way, and I think a 0:23:33.240 --> 0:23:36.399 way that's more justified by the available evidence. And so 0:23:37.080 --> 0:23:39.520 I'll say that for a long time I didn't have 0:23:39.560 --> 0:23:44.320 a theory. I just was trying to learn. You know, 0:23:44.359 --> 0:23:47.480 we're faced with a paradox, really, and that is that 0:23:48.320 --> 0:23:53.520 there's no single biological marker or pattern of biological markers 0:23:54.119 --> 0:23:59.120 that like, no biomarkers for any category of emotion. Yet 0:23:59.520 --> 0:24:05.080 when I I'm angry, I feel angry, and I don't 0:24:05.119 --> 0:24:09.399 feel sad or happy or you know, I have an 0:24:09.440 --> 0:24:14.120 immediate reaction and I don't think about why I'm having 0:24:14.200 --> 0:24:15.560 it or which one I'm having. 0:24:15.920 --> 0:24:18.040 And pretty much. 0:24:17.840 --> 0:24:21.560 People, you know, that's their experience. They feel like emotions 0:24:21.640 --> 0:24:26.040 happen to them. It feels like something's being triggered. So 0:24:26.600 --> 0:24:31.240 you've got the subjective experiences of certainty. 0:24:31.960 --> 0:24:33.320 And then on the other hand. 0:24:33.359 --> 0:24:36.040 You've got this biological question of like, well, they're no 0:24:36.160 --> 0:24:42.399 markers anywhere. Plus what you have is tremendous variation across cultures, 0:24:42.640 --> 0:24:45.520 just even in the categories that exist. So not all 0:24:45.520 --> 0:24:48.480 the categories that we think of as basic in English 0:24:48.560 --> 0:24:51.960 actually exist in other languages, and there are many other 0:24:52.040 --> 0:24:55.160 categories that are basic for other languages that don't exist 0:24:55.160 --> 0:24:57.679 in our language. So how do you account for all 0:24:57.720 --> 0:25:01.200 of this in one theory? This this was a puzzle 0:25:01.280 --> 0:25:03.480 to me for a really long time. So what I 0:25:03.480 --> 0:25:07.000 did is I started to study brain evolution. So how 0:25:07.000 --> 0:25:10.320 did brains evolve and how are they structured? And how 0:25:10.320 --> 0:25:13.560 do they work? So instead of doing what most scientists 0:25:13.600 --> 0:25:16.919 do is they say, okay, well, I'm I'm really interested 0:25:16.960 --> 0:25:19.040 in anger, fear, sadness, so I'm going to go looking 0:25:19.080 --> 0:25:21.520 for the physical basis of those emotions in the brain 0:25:21.600 --> 0:25:24.240 or in the body. I started with the brain and 0:25:24.320 --> 0:25:27.040 body and said, okay, well, to the best of our knowledge, 0:25:27.040 --> 0:25:29.400 how did a brain like ours evolve, How does it work, 0:25:29.480 --> 0:25:32.960 how is it structured, what's its anatomy? And then how 0:25:33.040 --> 0:25:35.480 is it, you know, communicating with the body. And then, 0:25:36.160 --> 0:25:39.880 given that we have that kind of biology, how could 0:25:39.960 --> 0:25:43.800 it be creating the instances or the events that we 0:25:43.880 --> 0:25:47.479 experience as emotion. And I came up with a really 0:25:47.600 --> 0:25:51.680 different set of hypotheses that required a really different way 0:25:51.720 --> 0:25:55.560 of doing science. And it's a little more complicated. Then 0:25:55.720 --> 0:25:57.399 you've got a circuit in your brain that you were 0:25:57.440 --> 0:25:59.960 born with the triggers and then produces a you know, 0:26:00.359 --> 0:26:05.680