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How Emotions Are Made
The brain uses concepts to make sense of data. Emotions like “fear,” “sadness,” and “disappointment” are concepts just like any other. Just as your brain interprets a pattern of light as a “window,” it might interpret a pattern of bodily sensations as “fear” or “disappointment.”
Tiago Forte • How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion
Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions.
Lisa Feldman Barrett • How Emotions Are Made
consciousness — that ultimate lens of being, which shapes our entire experience of life and makes blue appear blue and gives poems their air of wonder — is not a mental activity confined to the brain but a complex embodied phenomenon governed by the nervous-system activity we call feeling.