How Emotions Are Made

They are real in the same sense that money is real—that is, hardly an illusion, but a product of human

kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality. The primitive part of your brain wants you to tell your boss he’s an idiot, but your deliberative side knows that doing so would get you fired, so you restrain yourself. This kind of internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilization. It he

Emotions are thus thought to be a

Brain circuitry operates by the many-to-one principle of degeneracy: instances of a single emotion category, such as fear, are handled by different brain patterns at different times and in different people. Conversely, the same neurons can participate in creating different mental states (one-to-many).

A single core system can play a role in thinking, remembering, decision-making, seeing, hearing, and experiencing and perceiving diverse emotions. A core system is “one to many”: a single brain area or network contributes to many different mental states. The classical view of emotion, in contrast, considers particular brain areas to have dedicated

It means that on different occasions, in different contexts, in different studies, within the same individual and across different individuals, the same emotion category involves different bodily responses. Variation, not uniformity, is the norm.

Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.

standard way of thinking in biology called population thinking, which was proposed by Darwin. A category, such as a species of animal, is a population of unique members who vary from one another, with no fingerprint at their core. The category can be described at the group level only in abstract, statistical terms.

If you grow up in poverty, a situation that leads to chronic body-budget imbalance and an overactive immune system, these body-budgeting problems are reduced if you have a supportive person in your life. In contrast, when you lose a close, loving relationship and feel physically ill about it, part of the reason is that your loved one is no longer h