Your brain must figure out the meaning of those flashes and vibrations, and its main clues are your past experiences, which it constructs as simulations within its vast network of neural connections.

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.

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

Other scientists also have demonstrated, as Camras and Oster did, that you take tremendous information from the surrounding context. They graft photographs of faces and bodies that don’t belong together, like an angry scowling face attached to a body that’s holding a dirty diaper, and their test subjects nearly always identify the emotion appropria

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

In short, we find that your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and

The human face is laced with forty-two small muscles on each side. The facial movements that we see each other make every day—winks and blinks, smirks and grimaces, raised and wrinkled brows—occur when combinations of facial muscles contract and relax, causing connective tissue and skin to move. Even when your face seems completely still to the nak

Your experience with figure 2-1 reveals a couple of insights. Your past experiences—from direct encounters, from photos, from movies and books—give meaning to your present sensations. Additionally, the entire process of construction is invisible to you. No matter how hard you try, you cannot observe yourself or experience yourself constructing the