Where Do Feelings Come From?

Hidden Brain

Hidden Brain Media

Arts, Science, Performing Arts, Social Sciences

4.6 • 40.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most of us feel that our emotions are reactions to those outside of us. Someone cuts us off in traffic, and we say that the other driver made us upset. A friend brings over food when we're sick, and we say the friend offered us comfort. But psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that our feelings are not, in fact, responses to the world — they're really predictions about the world. And she says we can exercise more control over those predictions than we realize.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
0:03.0	In Anthony Doors' wonderful novel, All the Light We Cannot See,
0:08.0	A radio host poses a question to an audience of children.
0:12.0	The brain is locked in total darkness, he says.
0:16.5	It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world
0:21.8	it constructs in the mind is full of light.
0:25.0	It brims with color and movement.
0:28.0	So how children does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light.
0:35.0	It's not just about light, of course. The world inside our heads is full of sound,
0:42.0	movement and sensation.
0:46.1	It is suffused with feelings and emotion.
0:50.0	Imagine for a moment that your brain was a person locked inside your head.
0:54.0	How does this person create a world so rich, so varied, and so beautiful,
0:59.0	when she is permanently trapped within the cage of your skull.
1:04.1	Most of us have a ready answer.
1:06.6	The brain has many messengers that bring it information.
1:10.4	Signal stream in from our eyes and ears and skin.
1:14.0	The brain takes in all these signals,
1:16.0	and like a film editor splicing together a movie,
1:20.0	assembles our perceptions of the world.
1:28.0	When in recent years, some scientists have come to believe that this is not what actually happens.
1:30.0	The light we see and the sounds we hear are not really comprised of signals from the outside world.
	...

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