34 LISTENER MARCH 7 2020
probably is that, basically, you have a
metabolic illness, your body budget is out
of whack, you might be running a serious
deficit. You feel really crappy and fatigued,
and probably you have a lot of negative
things going on inside your brain and it
isn’t checking them against the world; it’s
just assuming that they’re right. That’s
depression. And there are lots of ways to
get to those states; there are lots of ways toget out of those states. I’m not trivialis-
ing depression. I think part of the reason
people have such a difficult time with
depression is because they don’t realise
the number of things in the day that actu-
ally impact their body budgets.To improve your emotional life, you suggest
old-fashioned remedies such as eight hours
of sleep a night, eating well, exercising,
managing social-media usage, yoga, reading
novels and spending time with friends.
Simple, yet hard in modern life, right?
It’s extremely hard. If I had to design an
environment that was deliberately going
to disrupt the human nervous system, it
would be the one that we live in. 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 ofGsocial media. Basically, a lot of modern life
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is taxing on our body budget and human
nervous system. If you don’t sufficiently
replenish them, you’re going to become
sick.Working on our emotional granularity can
help?
Emotional granularity is basically just
feeding your brain to provide it with
experiences so that you can make a wider
range of emotions out of the
sense data that come fromyour body and the
world. For example,
if you don’t know what schadenfreude is,
your brain can still make that emotion.
Because your brain can do what’s called
conceptual combination: take differentexperiences from the past and combine
them in novel ways. If you have a word
for it, it actually speeds your brain’s ability
to make that experience.
It’s like if you do public speaking and
the first time try to take anxiety andtransform it into determination, you have
to work really hard at it, the next time it’s
really hard, the third time maybe it’s a
little less hard. Eventually, your brain will
pretty automatically conjure up past expe-
riences of determination to make sense
of the present racing heart and sweating
palms. But you have to work at it like any
kind of skill.In your book you have an image of a woman
ostensibly screaming in terror – it’s actually
Serena Williams winning a tennis match.
It’s tricky to identify emotion from
people’s faces, isn’t it?
The idea that faces display emotion
or that we have “body language” are
metaphors that don’t work well in
the real world. Your attention may
be on someone’s face, but your brain
is taking in all sorts of information
about the surrounding situation: that
person’s body posture, what their
voice sounds like, what’s going on in
your own body, what just happened
a moment ago, what it expects to
happen a moment from now and so
on.
Also, [four senior authors and I] just
published a big paper reviewing more
than 1000 published papers show-
ing that people, for example, don’t
always scowl when they’re angry –
that happens only about 30% of the
time. People can cry in anger, smile in
anger, laugh in anger, widen their eyes
in anger. They can scowl when they’re
confused or curious or concentrating,
or when they have gas. The idea that
expressions are universal and that they’re
hard-coded into the brain is just not true.
Particularly in this political moment in
time, in issues of sexual consent and
the MeToo movement, it’s important to
understand that your brain is guessing
about what a body movement means.
And it can guess wrong – very easily.You write about criminal trials such as that
of the Boston Bomber. Given that memory
is constructed, eyewitness testimony is
flawed, facial expressions are guesses,
impartiality is an illusion and neuroscience is
misunderstood, you suggest educating jurists
about constructed emotions and even of
doing away with jury trials.
I don’t really see it as my job to claim
what the solution should be, but I do
see it as my job to raise questions about“People can cry in anger,
smile in anger, laugh inanger, widen their eyes
in anger. They can scowl
when they’re confused orcurious or concentrating,
or when they have gas.”Sorry I’ll read
that again:
Serena Williams’
apparent agony is
in reality ecstasy
at winning a point.