2020-03-07 New Zealand Listener

MARCH 7 2020 LISTENER 33

going on in the body. So, the person

continues to feel pain. Well, is that pain

real? Yes, it’s real, it’s happening in your

brain. But you can learn to change the

activity of your brain to give it a different

meaning and construct a different feeling,

a completely different emotion.

Stress, pain, anxiety – your book suggests that

all these are constructed in some sense by

your brain.

When I say that something is constructed

by your brain, I don’t mean it’s imagi-

nary. Everything you experience from

when you’re born to when you die is

constructed in your brain by neurons.

Your brain is doing this predictively. It

doesn’t wait around to receive sensory

inputs and then ask itself, gee, what are

these similar to? It predicts what’s going to

happen next by changing the firing of its

own neurons. It starts to construct what

you’re going to see and hear, to anticipate

what bodily sensations you’re going to

feel, and what the cause of them is. It

makes these neural guesses, then it waits

for information to come from the world

and the body. And that information either

confirms the brain’s guesses or it changes

them.

And depression, too?

What happens when your body budget

is really running a deficit? What are

the two most expensive things from a

metabolic standpoint a brain can do?

Move your body and learn something

new. Those are also two major symptoms

of depression: fatigue and what’s called

context insensitivity, meaning your brain

is making all these predictions, but it’s

not checking them against the world.

It’s just going with its own beliefs. So, if

you are depressed, what happened to you

GE

TT

Y (^) I
M
AG
ES
“We’re social animals;
we influence each
other’s nervous systems.
What’s really hard on a
human nervous system
is ambiguous social
feedback where someone
might be evaluating
you badly. That’s like
all of social media.”