32 LISTENER MARCH 7 2020
T
he classical view of how
emotions work is straight-
forward: we’re born with a
set of circuits in our brain,
one for anger, one for sad-
ness, one for fear and so on.
When we see a threat, our
fear circuit triggers, we make
a scared face, our heart speeds up and
we run away. Right? Completely wrong,
says Lisa Feldman Barrett. The professor
of psychology at Northeastern University
in Boston and Harvard Medical School
psychiatry lecturer talks about how view-
ing emotions as constructed by our brain
may help us better deal with anxiety and
depression, how the modern world seems
set up to disrupt the human nervous
system, and why for the sake of justice
we need to jettison the idea of universal
emotional expressions.The subtitle of your book How Emotions Are
Made is “The Secret Life of the Brain”. Can you
explain constructed emotions?
There’s not a lot of evidence for the classi-
cal view of emotions. The actual evidence
suggests something more complex.
Imagine your brain is running a budget
for your body, budgeting glucose and salt
and water and all of the nutrients your
body needs to stay alive and well. Your
brain is receiving sensory inputs from the
body and from the world – sights and
sounds and so on – that are the effects of
some set of causes. If you have an acheEMOTIONAL
RESCUE
Think you can read people’s expressions like a book?
Forget it, says psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett,
author of How Emotions Are Made, ahead of an
appearance at the NZ Festival of the Arts. by MARK BROATCH
NZ FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS
“If I had to design an
environment that was
deliberately going todisrupt the human
nervous system, it wouldbe the one that we live in.”
it can reconstitute in its neurons. Your
brain is basically asking itself, “Well, the
last time I was in this kind of situation,
what caused these sensations?” That’s why
your heart racing or your hands sweating
can be determination or it can be fear. An
ache in your gut can be anxiety, or it can
be longing for someone that you miss or
a gut feeling that someone is guilty of a
crime. You certainly can take control of
that process when you need to, but most
of the time it’s happening without your
awareness.If we can change our perceptions of
emotions, such as feeling excitement
in place of anxiety in public speaking,
how real are they?
If your heart is racing, that’s real. If you are
experiencing anxiety, that’s real. The ques-
tion is, could you take that racing heart
and transform it, by giving it a different
meaning, into a different experience that
would also be real? You can. It’s not that
you have anxiety lurking somewhere
in your brain and body and you’re just
deceiving yourself by turning it into
determination.
It’s like chronic pain. In chronic pain,
the brain believes that there’s tissue
damage in the body. Probably there was
at one point, and the body was send-
ing sense data back to the brain to tell
it, “Hey, there’s damage here.” The brain
learns that, but as the body healed, it
didn’t change its beliefs about what wasLisa Feldman
Barrett:
Wellington-
bound.in your gut or you experience a flash
of light or a change in air pressure, the
brain doesn’t have access to the causes;
it has access only to the effects. So it has
to guess at the causes. The only thing it
has available is the past experiences that