Michelle: That scowl on your boss's face? It might not be anger. That smile from a stranger? It might not be happiness. For centuries, we've believed emotions are universal. Today, we're exploring the explosive idea that they're not read, they're made—by you. Mark: A pretty bold claim to start with. It feels like saying the sky isn't blue. We all know what an angry face looks like, right? It’s baked into our DNA. Michelle: That’s what we’ve always been told. But today we’re diving into a book that systematically dismantles that entire idea. It’s How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Mark: And we should be clear, she is a total heavyweight in neuroscience and psychology. A University Distinguished Professor with appointments at Harvard Medical School. Her work is considered a genuine scientific revolution, not just some pop-psychology theory. It’s been widely acclaimed, but it's also a bit of a lightning rod in the scientific community because it challenges everything. Michelle: Exactly. And what’s fascinating is that this whole breakthrough started from failure. In graduate school, her own experiments kept failing to prove the very classical ideas about emotion she was taught. That repeated failure forced her to ask a bigger question: what if the entire foundation is wrong? Mark: I love that. A discovery born from the data refusing to cooperate. So, let's start there. What is this "classical view" that she says we've all gotten so wrong?

Michelle: The classical view is the one we all intuitively know. It says that emotions are like little programs hardwired in our brain from birth. There are a handful of basic emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise—and each one has a distinct, biological "fingerprint." Mark: A fingerprint? What do you mean by that? Michelle: A unique and consistent pattern. The idea is that every time you feel anger, your brain fires in a specific anger circuit, your body produces a specific anger response—like increased heart rate and blood pressure—and your face contorts into a specific, universal "anger" expression. It should be the same for you, for me, for someone in a remote village in Namibia. Mark: Right, that sounds completely plausible. It’s the basis for all those TV shows where the expert profiler reads a micro-expression on someone's face and knows they're lying. Michelle: You’ve hit on a perfect example of how this idea has permeated our culture. And it has real-world consequences. Take the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, the TSA. After 9/11, they spent nearly a billion dollars on a program called SPOT—Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques. Mark: Oh, I've seen them. The agents who walk around the airport looking for suspicious behavior. Michelle: Precisely. They were trained, based on this classical view, to spot terrorists by identifying universal facial and bodily cues for deception or stress. The assumption was that a terrorist's inner state would leak out through their body language in a readable, predictable way. Mark: And let me guess, it didn't work? Michelle: It was a spectacular failure. After years of operation and costing taxpayers $900 million, the program was found to have no scientific basis and was no better at detecting terrorists than random chance. Not a single terrorist was caught through the program. It was based on a faulty premise about how emotions work. Mark: Wow. A billion-dollar mistake based on a scientific myth. But hold on, what about those famous studies that seem to prove it? I remember learning about a psychologist who went to Papua New Guinea in the 1960s, showed photos of facial expressions to a remote tribe, and they recognized them. I think it was Paul Ekman. Michelle: You're right, that study is legendary. It’s the cornerstone of the classical view. But Barrett points out a huge flaw in the methodology. It was called the basic emotion method. The Fore people in Papua New Guinea weren't just shown a scowling face and asked, "What is this person feeling?" Mark: What happened then? Michelle: They were given a multiple-choice test. They were shown the face and given a short list of emotion words, like "anger," "sadness," or "fear," and asked to pick the best match. Barrett argues this is less a test of recognition and more a lesson in emotion concepts. You're essentially coaching them. When later studies removed the list of words and just asked people to freely label the faces, the accuracy rates plummeted. Mark: So it's like giving someone a picture of a beagle and asking, "Is this a cat, a beagle, or a lizard?" You're basically giving them the answer. Michelle: That’s a perfect analogy. The experiment wasn't discovering a universal ability; it was creating one through its own design. For decades, scientists searched for these definitive fingerprints for each emotion in the brain and the body. They conducted hundreds of studies, meta-analyses covering tens of thousands of people. And they consistently came up empty. There is no single brain region for anger. Your heart can race when you're angry, but also when you're excited, or scared, or just running up the stairs. Variation, not uniformity, is the norm. Mark: Okay, my mind is a little blown. If emotions aren't these pre-packaged, built-in programs, then where on earth do they come from? Are they just... illusions?

Michelle: They are absolutely real. But they aren't revealed, they are constructed. This is the core of Barrett's theory of constructed emotion. Your brain isn't passively reacting to the world; it's actively building your experience of reality, including your emotions. Mark: The brain as a construction site. I like that. What are the building materials? Michelle: Barrett identifies three core ingredients. The first is interoception. Mark: That sounds like a word from a sci-fi movie. What is it? Michelle: It’s your brain’s sense of what’s going on inside your own body. It’s constantly monitoring the storm of signals from your heart, lungs, gut, immune system, everything. These signals create simple, general feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness, calmness or agitation. Barrett calls this your "affect." It’s the raw material of feeling. Mark: So it’s like the background music of your life? Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s tense. Michelle: Exactly. And your brain’s job is to make sense of that background music. This brings us to a fantastic story from the book. When Barrett was in graduate school, she went on a date with someone she wasn't particularly interested in. But during the date, her stomach fluttered, her face felt flushed. She thought, "Wow, I must be really attracted to this person!" and agreed to a second date. Mark: And? Was it love at first sight? Michelle: The next morning she woke up with a raging flu. Her brain had misinterpreted the physical symptoms of an oncoming illness—the interoceptive signals—as feelings of romantic attraction. The sensations were real, but their meaning was constructed based on the context: being on a date. Mark: That is incredible. So the same physical feeling can become two completely different emotions depending on the situation. A fluttering stomach on a date is 'attraction,' but a fluttering stomach before a presentation is 'anxiety.' Michelle: You've got it. The physical sensation itself has no inherent emotional meaning. It’s just raw data. This leads to the second ingredient: concepts. Your brain uses your lifetime of past experiences, organized as concepts, to give meaning to that raw data. Mark: How does that work? Michelle: Barrett uses a brilliant visual example. She shows these ambiguous black and white splotches. At first, you see nothing, just a meaningless mess. Your brain is experiencing what she calls "experiential blindness." Mark: Right, it's just noise. Michelle: Then, she shows you a full photograph that reveals what's hidden in the splotches—it's a bee on a flower. When you look back at the splotches, you can't unsee the bee. Your brain has now acquired the concept, and it uses that concept to construct the image from the same noisy data. Mark: Wow. So my brain is constantly doing that with my feelings? It takes the noisy data from my body—my interoception—and uses my concepts of 'joy' or 'sadness' or 'anger' to turn it into a recognizable emotion? Michelle: Precisely. And this all happens through the third ingredient: prediction. Your brain is not a reactive organ that waits for information to come in. It’s a predictive organ. It's constantly running simulations, making guesses about what's about to happen next based on your past experiences. It's like a predictive text feature for reality. Mark: I like that. It’s trying to autocomplete the world. Michelle: It is! And it's doing the same for your body. Your brain predicts what your body will need to deal with the upcoming situation and prepares it. That's what an emotion is: it's your brain’s prediction of what your bodily sensations mean in relation to what's going on around you. You aren't a passive receiver of emotions; you are an active constructor. Mark: This is a huge shift. If we're making our emotions, that feels like it gives us a lot more power... but also a lot more responsibility.

Michelle: It does both. And this is where the theory becomes incredibly practical. If we construct our emotions using concepts, then one of the most powerful things we can do is refine and expand our emotional concepts. Barrett calls this developing emotional granularity. Mark: Emotional granularity. Like going from a low-resolution picture of your feelings to a high-definition one? Michelle: Perfect analogy. It's the difference between saying "I feel bad" and being able to distinguish whether you feel disappointed, frustrated, resentful, or despairing. People with higher emotional granularity are better at managing their lives. Studies show they go to the doctor less, use medication less, and are less likely to react aggressively when provoked. Mark: Why? What's the mechanism there? Michelle: Because a more precise concept allows your brain to make a more precise prediction and prescribe a more tailored action. If you just "feel bad," what do you do? Eat a pint of ice cream? Yell at someone? But if you can identify that you feel "disappointed," your brain can prescribe a more specific solution, like talking to a friend or re-evaluating your expectations. Mark: So, how do we get more of this granularity? Do we just need to study a thesaurus? Michelle: That’s actually not a bad start! Barrett says one of the best ways is to learn new emotion words. Travel, read fiction from other cultures, watch foreign films. You can learn concepts that don't exist in your own language, like the German word Schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from someone else's misfortune. Having that word allows you to construct that specific experience more easily. Mark: And I assume the foundation for all of this is keeping your body's internal state in good shape? Michelle: Absolutely. Barrett talks a lot about managing your "body budget." That means the basics: eating healthy food, getting enough sleep, and exercising. When your body budget is out of whack, your affect—that background feeling—is more likely to be negative, and your brain is more likely to construct negative emotions from ambiguous signals. Mark: This has massive implications for things like the legal system. The whole 'heat of passion' defense seems to be based on the classical view—that an emotion like rage 'took over' and made someone lose control. Michelle: It is. And the book argues that's a flawed way of looking at it. From a construction standpoint, an emotion isn't an alien force that hijacks you. It's a creation of your own brain. This doesn't mean you're always to blame, because your concepts are shaped by your culture and upbringing. But it does shift the focus. The law should be less concerned with whether an emotion was present, and more concerned with the degree of intentionality and the responsibility we have to cultivate concepts that lead to constructive, not destructive, actions. Mark: It's a complete reframing of responsibility. It’s not just about controlling your actions in the moment, but about curating the conceptual system your brain uses to build your reality in the first place.

Michelle: Exactly. It's a profound shift in how we view human nature. We aren't just animals with a rational brain layered on top, constantly fighting our primal urges. We are, from the ground up, architects of our own experience. Mark: So the big takeaway isn't that emotions aren't real. They are very real. But they're real in the way that money is real—a product of human agreement and social construction, not like a rock or a tree. Michelle: That's a key quote from the book, and it's so powerful. Emotions are a form of social reality. And that means we're not at the mercy of some ancient, animalistic brain circuits that we can't control. We are the architects. The responsibility is huge, but the freedom that comes with that understanding is even greater. Mark: It really does feel like being handed a new set of tools. You have more control than you think. Michelle: And you can start using those tools immediately. You can work on your body budget. You can learn new emotion concepts. You can practice recategorizing your feelings in the moment. When your heart is pounding before a big meeting, you can ask, "Is this anxiety, or is my body simply preparing me to be awesome?" Mark: It makes you wonder, the next time you feel a strong emotion, what are you going to ask yourself? 'What is this feeling?' or 'What is my brain making right now?' Michelle: That's the question at the heart of it all. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Does this change how you think about your own emotions? Let us know in the comments on our platform. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.