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Speaker A: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett. Doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished pro... |
Speaker B: Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. |
Speaker A: I've wanted to talk to you for a very long time. I'd like to talk about emotions. I think everyone has a sense somehow of what an emotion is. Feeling happy, feeling sad, feeling excited, feeling curious, perhaps is even an emotion. I don't know. He'll tell us what are the core components? What are the sort o... |
Speaker B: Well, this is a scientist debate about this. Nobody in the last 150 years has ever been able to agree on what an emotion is. And I think from my perspective, the interesting but tricky bit is that anytime you want to talk about what the basic building blocks are of emotion, none of those basic building block... |
Speaker A: I have to ask you about this perhaps myth, perhaps truth about facial expressions and emotions, because as you were explaining, the core components of emotions. I had to think back to the classic textbook images of the different faces associated with fear, with delight, with confusion, and on and on. We will... |
Speaker B: If you'll permit me, what I would say is that your question is ill posed. So, first of all, it presumes that there's an emotion system and that there's a facial expression system. Now, clearly, there's a system for moving facial muscles, okay? But a movement is not the same as an expression. A movement is a ... |
Speaker A: That makes sense to me. I frankly never bought the idea that just smiling would make me feel happy, especially if my internal state was not one of happiness, like fighting the internal state. Also, in the early two thousands, I think it was, there was a lot of discussion about how positioning the body certai... |
Speaker B: Sure. |
Speaker A: I was taught in my psychology and neuroscience textbooks, because it was right there in front of me, that there were some core categories of facial expression that were universal across cultures, that conveyed something about the internal state of the person, that the downward lips in the corner and maybe ev... |
Speaker B: Yeah. So I'll just say that my journey here, my scientific journey, was not one of attempting to overturn a century's worth of. Are we allowed to swear? Bullshit. Basically, I mean, it's just. It's like. It's basically western stereotypes enshrined as scientific fact. And that sounds like a pretty harsh thin... |
Speaker A: But out of fear of losing their funding or something, you know, that's a. |
Speaker B: Whole other conversation about why certain scientists would not want to engage with people who disagree with them. That's an interesting conversation to have, but I don't think it's as simple, actually, as just they're careerist or they care about their money or funding or whatever. That would be an easy ans... |
Speaker A: And if I'm not mistaken, it includes verbs. Right, like anger as a set of verb actions in the brain and body. |
Speaker B: Yes. |
Speaker A: It's a process. It's not an event. |
Speaker B: Exactly. It's not a noun. It's a verb, and it's a process. But the point is that it's a highly variable grouping of instances. If you are talking about all instances of anger, all instances of anger that you have ever experienced or witnessed is a highly variable grouping of instances that vary. That doesn't... |
Speaker A: So if they saw an emoji of a smiley face, would they just assume it was a couple? They might think it's a face, because as we both know, there's some fairly hardwired brain circuitry for the two eyes and a line beneath it and something in the middle that's pseudo nose. That organization of just spatial featu... |
Speaker B: Interesting that you say that, because, yes, of course that's true, but it's not there at birth. What's there at birth is a preference for that configuration, right? So it's like, there's some. And we could talk about why that's there. It's actually very controversial. But what babies, what newborns orient t... |
Speaker A: A baby last night, and you see the baby. Friends of mine have an unbelievably cute baby with big cheeks, and you want. And there's this desire to see the baby smile, right? So you do the things that. And if the baby shows some sort of facial expression that makes it seem like it's a little bit of like, resis... |
Speaker B: Right. But I want you to notice, though, that. So first of all, I'm not saying that recognizing a face as a face is not hardwired. It is, but it's hardwired by. Not by genes alone. Right? And in fact, there's a really wonderful book called not by genes alone. Basically, there's cultural inheritance. We have ... |
Speaker A: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic greens. Athletic greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podca... |
Speaker B: Well, can I just mention one thing though, please? This is really serious stuff. Like sometimes people think, well, what's the big deal? This is such a big deal. Ill tell you why its a big deal. Because in our culture, people believe that they can read mental states of other people by their face, and they be... |
Speaker A: Well, I'm so glad that you're getting that message out there, and I'm very thankful that you highlighted the seriousness of these myths that have propagated. And that's a perfect segue into what I was already going to ask, which is, it's based on something that I think is in very much agreement with what you... |
Speaker B: So I'm going to give you a simple answer, and then I'm going to give you a more complicated answer. So the simple answer is, no, language is not sufficient, period. I think the way that you have, well, I should say one language is not sufficient. So English is not sufficient. And probably French on its own i... |
Speaker A: I'd love to know what some of those are. |
Speaker B: Oh, I should have brought them with me. I mean, there are some, like, there's a german word which I can't remember the name of the word, but it's like the experience of someone having a face that deserves a punch. |
Speaker A: I'm sure someone will tell us in the comments, someone who knows German or spend time there. Please put that word in the comments, but don't punch anyone. |
Speaker B: Another one that's my favorite is Ligut, which is a polynesian headhunting emotion word, and it means exuberant aggression in a group like soccer or headhunting, where you're basically, or I should say, also in the military. So when I was listening to NPR one day a couple of years ago, must have been more th... |
Speaker A: I had that experience yesterday evening. Squeeze. The kid was so cute. His cheeks are just, like, jumping at you. And. Yeah, and the parents are delightful people, too. And Dave was just facing out. Cause they have one of those outward facing baby things, and it's just sort of like. Yeah. |
Speaker B: And I think it's called gigol. |
Speaker A: Giggle. Oh, giggles is from the other episode that we did on babies, but, yeah. |
Speaker B: In a different way. Or there's one in Japan. I think there's a japanese word for the despair that you feel when you got a bad haircut. |
Speaker A: Really? |
Speaker B: Yeah. Cause it's. I mean, it really is a different kind of feeling than, you know. Cause you've gotta, like, wait for it to grow, you know, whatever. Anyways, the point being that words for us mark particular states, and they're not always the states that other people in other cultures care about. But there'... |
Speaker A: You, but feel free. What I love. Is that what you said before, when you said my question was ill posed in the answer that followed, it made it very clear why. And I learned something about how the not emotion system, but the things plural, that create emotions work. So feel free. I grew up in the same cultur... |
Speaker B: Well, no, but I think my point is that I'm trying to get at here is that when we ask questions, any of us. Me too. Anybody asks a question, there are certain assumptions that we're making in order to allow us to pose the question. And sometimes what I'm taking issue with is not the question itself, but it's ... |
Speaker A: A lot of that has to do with the scientific publication process. One of the most important statements I ever heard is from the late Ted Jones, one of the greatest neuroanatomists of probably the last 500 years, which was the following. He said, a drug is a substance that when injected into an animal or a per... |
Speaker B: And here's the. You know, there's so much in what you said that I just want to. It's very exciting to talk to you. So the first thing I'll say is that, you know, we often will identify we as in the, you know, people, but also scientists identify biological signals by what we believe them to mean psychologica... |
Speaker A: Important for our audience, but it's also important for me. Even though, yes, I know these facts, I believe it's always informative to go back to the fundamentals because we forget. Actually, I would say that someone once described, I'll call him the great cause. He's a great visual neuroscientist. Visual ne... |
Speaker B: For sure. |
Speaker A: The more expertise is associated with more focus on detail. So I love returning to the core basics. So I think it's wonderful. Please continue. |
Speaker B: So I think about the brain as being trapped in this box, and it's receiving signals continuously from the sensory surfaces of the body. But those signals are the outcomes of some set of changes, and the brain doesn't know what the changes are. It doesn't know the causes of those signals. It just knows the ou... |
Speaker A: It doesn't have access to all the information. No, it's just a guessing machine. |
Speaker B: It's a guessing machine. So, for example, you know, if you hear a loud bang, what is that loud bang? It could be a car door slamming. It could be thunder. It could be a car backfiring. It could be a gunshot. The brain doesn't know. It has to guess. And it's not making a guess like an intellectual guess. The ... |
Speaker A: Well, I feel like in the example of a loud noise, what I immediately thought of as you were describing that is that my system would become aware of it. I would become aware of it. But then it's a question of, is there another loud noise? How closely are those loud noises spaced? Is it getting louder or less ... |
Speaker B: And I think your analogy there is pointing out toothache. One is that really what the brain is attempting to do is to reduce uncertainty, because uncertainty is super expensive. Now, sometimes we deliberately cultivate uncertainty. We deliberately try to learn things that we don't know. We put ourselves in n... |
Speaker A: That's the label I would give it. It would be terrifying. |
Speaker B: Right. |
Speaker A: Because I couldn't plan anything or do anything because all possibilities are open, right? |
Speaker B: And it's just actually metabolically unsustainable. And there are some brains that are wired in a way that they don't predict very well. They don't create these categories very well. And so they're dealing with really unbelievable amounts of uncertainty. So that's one thing. That part of what's the goal here... |
Speaker A: There's this scene that comes to mind from that movie, I think it was saving Private Ryan, where the guys that are about to hit the ground on D Day are flinching with every crack of gunfire. Everything's a stimulus to move. And then some of the more seasoned soldiers are literally having bullets whizzing by ... |
Speaker B: Right, exactly. |
Speaker A: But if it were headed straight for them, they would quite, quite understand. |
Speaker B: What I would say is that it's not. I keep referring to things as signals, and really, that's my generic word for a quantity of energy of some sort. Your brain, my brain, every brain is constantly making signal noise distinct, you know, like distinctions. Do I need to care about this? Do I, do I not need to c... |
Speaker A: So just to make sure I understand correctly and that the audience understands, the physical world obviously is transformed by our sensory apparati, the retina, the cochlea, the sensing neurons in our skin. It's physical things, mechanical pressure, light, photons, sound waves, okay? That's translated into ne... |
Speaker B: Right. So they're low. You know, it's like compressing an MP3, like how an MP3 compresses information, for example. So the cortex is representing features. So. And I represent. I'm just using that in a generic way because that's also controversial about exactly how is the brain. Okay, but. Yeah, but it works... |
Speaker A: I love that. I hope everyone hears that because I've been in this field of neuroscience a long time. As you move along the neuraxis from the sensory epithelium, now it sounds very, very nomenclature ish, but from the surface of the skin, inward, you're getting summaries. Yeah, you send more and more summarie... |
Speaker B: So, but at each of those points correspond to some mental feature, like a line or an edge or a circle or a square or a face or. Right, but now, then you. When you. When you're in the midline, at the front, what are those features? Well, those features are things like, they are multimodal summaries, meaning t... |
Speaker A: This, to me, again, feels so, so important for people to understand, because as I'm hearing this and this word summaries is just ringing in my mind. It's so important because one of the core components of my experience of my emotions, because that's all I can really say for sure. My subjective interpretation... |
Speaker B: Pretty broad bins. And so that's where I was, exactly where I was going. So what about the word anger? Where is that represented, like, well, that's one of these multimodal abstractions. In fact, anger is just a couple of phonemes. It's a couple of sounds. But those sounds, the sound of anger, corresponds ov... |
Speaker A: And it seems to me are highly constrained by developmental and cultural experience, because just today I learned that there's a word in Japan for the feeling that one has of having gotten a haircut they don't like. There's a word in Germany that pertains to the feeling of wanting to punch someone specificall... |
Speaker B: Well, really, it's more like you like. To you, it feels like they're asking to be punched in the face. |
Speaker A: So you added yet more dimensionality to it. So upon learning just those things just today, there is additional dimensionality brought in, such that if I were to ever want to punch somebody in the face simply because of the look on their face, that I wouldn't necessarily label that as anger alone. It now has ... |
Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so, but before you use the word granularity, and so I'm going to use that word, too. In fact, I've coined that phrase emotional granularity. Just as an aside. You know, I coined that phrase almost 30 years ago, and now people study it like it's a phenomenon, which is cool in a s... |
Speaker A: You want to keep in the library analogy that I made earlier, you want to keep the rest of the library accessible at some level, so you're not just staring at that one book, but. |
Speaker B: If you use the category bad, this feels bad, then your brain is basically going to be partially constructing an entire wing full of books, like an entire wing full of options. If you use the word angry, then maybe it's a bookcase. It's constructing a bookcase full of options and a category that's the size of... |
Speaker A: I love this so much because it explains so much that, frankly, has been perplexing to me and also somewhat troubling to me. For instance, we hear about emotional intelligence, and sometimes I wonder whether or not true emotional intelligence would be what you just described the understanding of how this proc... |
Speaker B: Yes, exactly. There are many different things we could talk about with respect to the summary that you just gave, which I think is completely accurate. So what I would say is that if you look through even just the last, I don't know, 100 or so years, like the 19th, you know, 19th, 20th centuries, maybe, you ... |
Speaker A: Face, they don't have access to that. |
Speaker B: They don't have access to it. So we said, well, the brain is making a guess. It's making a guess about what? This big, very, very high dimensional soup of signals in the world and in the body. What do they mean when the brain makes a guess, it starts with the compressed low dimensional signals. It starts wit... |
Speaker A: And forgive me, but. And what are the adaptive steps that I might take or not take? Because I'm quoting a lot today. So forgive me, but in the words of the great Sherrington, Nobel Prize winning physiologist, the final common pathway is movement is movement, and movement is nuanced. Right. Humans, I suppose,... |
Speaker B: Well, that's only at the. That's a very. I would say that those are very low dimensional features. Those are those compressed features. But that's not the only thing the brain has to decide. That's just a misnomer. |
Speaker A: Well, I can get out of this little pickle that I just put myself in by saying that. I didn't say that. Now, I won't quote who did, because he's a very famous neuroscientist, but he tried to reduce it all. He's at Caltech. He's not somebody who studies emotion. He studies the visual system. But he said that, ... |
Speaker B: So we would, in studying humans, we would say, well, that's affect, affect, that's mood. Or it's just like, should I move towards it? Is it pleasant? Should I move away from it? Is it unpleasant? Or is it irrelevant? And basically, I don't care. Okay, think about when you're feeling horrible. You just feel. ... |
Speaker A: You don't know what you don't know. |
Speaker B: Because you don't have a plan of action. And that's ultimately, that is what those compressed, like summary features, those very low course features, they have to be decompressed into details, otherwise you don't know what to do. So ultimately, what the brain is doing is it's sampling from the past based on ... |
Speaker A: It's not pizza. |
Speaker B: That's not real pizza. That's not real pizza, right? So you could then ask me, was it, but you're from Chicago, is that deep dish pizza? And then I would say, no, no, I'm actually from Toronto, which is just like New York. And so, no, it was thin crust pizza, which is really the only kind of pizza there is j... |
Speaker A: And we are constrained by what we know and what we can say and the extent of our vocabulary. |
Speaker B: And I'll just say that little babies, three months old, they don't speak yet, and they don't understand language, but they can use words to learn abstract categories. So abstract just means that the word refers to many different patterns of sensory motor features. So the word is or the category, the things t... |
Speaker A: By the way, folks, just listening. Lisa just gave three examples, first with a pen, then a coffee mug, and then her very own watch. Three very distinct objects, but all of which make, that are told. The baby is told, make a bling sound, and they will bin those three visually distinct objects, functionally di... |
Speaker B: One single bin because they are sharing a function which is to beep. |
Speaker A: I think this is so important. And if I may, I want to ask whether or not we can take this incredible understanding of emotions, because that's really what we're talking about. |
Speaker B: Well, we're really talking about how the brain, my version of how the brain works and how emotions emerge out of this system, basically. |
Speaker A: And absolutely, you described it far better than I could, and anchor that to this concept of movement. The movement is the final common path, with the understanding that the movement system, and forgive me, but that we have systems in the brain and body that allow us to move. That's for sure, systems, plural... |
Speaker B: Well, I mean, so if we just look at how things are happening. Here's what the anatomy tells us, that when the brain makes a guess, that guess starts as a motor plan, starts as a visceral motor plan and a skeletal motor plan. |
Speaker A: So heart rate changes, breathing changes, blood pressure changes, and potentially skeletal muscle movement. |
Speaker B: Right? And literal copies, literal copies, efferent copies of those signals are sent to, they propagate to the sensory areas, telling the brain telling those neurons, this is the last time we made this in this context, when this other stuff just happened. Like this temporal context. Right? And we made these ... |
Speaker A: So, yeah, I think of this as the image that pops in my mind, and we should explain to people what efferent copy is. In neuroscience and neuroanatomy, the connection to a structure is called an afferent with an a, and the connections out from a structure are called the efferent. But the way I was thinking, it... |
Speaker B: It's just basically the point here is that in our experience, your brain conjures an experience, okay? And that experience is that you feel something first. You see something, you feel something, you act. That's not what's happening. What's happening is your brain is preparing the action first, and the feeli... |
Speaker A: That's true. Yeah, I subscribe to that. It's fairly adaptive in most circumstances, controlled hallucination, but it has its limitations. What we were talking about, if I could be somewhat of a summary neuron, you can tell me if my summary is too coarse, is first of all, the neural systems and the brain, let... |
Speaker B: I was actually trained as a clinician. |
Speaker A: Oh, there you go. I'm wrong again. |
Speaker B: No, no, no. But I mean, I haven't practiced in, like, really gazillions of years. |
Speaker A: Okay, well, you're more than qualified to answer the question I'm about to ask, which is, to me, there is a great conflict of information in the psychology, psychiatry, and let's just call it wellness and mental health space, which is when we are feeling lousy, like not good, let's put valence on it. Just lo... |
Speaker B: So I would say I'm going to answer your question, and then I want to also pick at the word. I want to pick at an assumption, because it's come up actually a couple of times, and there's something super important in your descriptions that I just want to pull out for the listeners because I think it's really i... |
Speaker A: Your body and hit a pillow. I mean, there's scream therapy. Bite the pillow, scream the pillow, tear the pillow. You can pay $5,000 for a week of doing this, and they'll tell you you're going to feel better at the end. |
Speaker B: So the answer there is, it's the wrong question. Like, flexibility is important for everything, always, right? So, first of all, you don't have emotions in your body. Your body doesn't keep the score, you know. |
Speaker A: Yeah, great book title because it's super catchy. But with all due respect to, I think, the important work of Vanderkohl, I think it oversimplified and led people to believe that their back pain was trauma and that all trauma is somaticized. And it's not. |
Speaker B: No, it's not. But I would go further and say, like, first of all, your body does keep the score. Your brain keeps the score. Your body is the scorecard. That's super important. And he has done really important work, but his explanations for why things work is scientifically incorrect. It just is, because we ... |
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