How Emotions Are Made

A constructionist approach to emotion has a couple of core ideas. One idea is that an emotion category such as anger or disgust does not have a fingerprint. One instance of anger need not look or feel like another, nor will it be caused by the same neurons. Variation is the norm. Your range of angers is not necessarily the same as mine, although if

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.

facial movements have so much variation within an emotion category like “Fear,” you might wonder why we find it so natural to believe that a wide-eyed face is the universal fear expression. The answer is that it’s a stereotype, a symbol that fits a well-known theme for “Fear” within our culture. Preschools teach these stereotypes to children: “Peop

As it turns out, people spend at least half their waking hours simulating rather than paying attention to the world around them, and this pure simulation strongly drives their feelings.33

Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.

This is one of the most surprising things I learned as I began to study neuroscience: a mental event, such as fear, is not created by only one set of neurons. Instead, combinations of different neurons can create instances of fear. Neuroscientists call this principle degeneracy. Degeneracy means “many to one”: many combinations of neurons can produ

“No man ever steps in the same river twice,”

An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.

Consider what this means: events in the world, such as a snake slithering at your feet, merely tune your predictions, roughly the way that your breathing is tuned by exercise. Right now, as you read these words and understand what they mean, each word barely perturbs your massive intrinsic activity, like a small stone skipping on a rolling ocean wa