How Emotions Are Made

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

And consider this fun fact: the historical record implies that ancient Greeks and Romans did not smile spontaneously when they were happy. The word “smile” doesn’t even exist in Latin or Ancient Greek. Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages, and broad, toothy-mouthed smiles (with crinkling at the eyes, named the Duchenne smile by Ekman) became

Simple pleasant and unpleasant feelings come from an ongoing process inside you called interoception. Interoception is your brain’s representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system. Think about what’s happening within your body right this second. Your insides are in motion. Y

Your river of feelings might feel like it’s flowing over you, but actually you’re the river’s source.

Every moment that you are alive, your brain uses concepts to simulate the outside world. Without concepts, you are experientially blind, as you were with the blobby bee. With concepts, your brain simulates so invisibly and automatically that vision, hearing, and your other senses seem like reflexes rather than constructions.

For the bulk of human history, the most learned members of our species have wildly underestimated the human brain’s capabilities. This is understandable, since your brain occupies only about 2 percent of your body mass, and it looks like a blob of gray gelatin. Ancient Egyptians deemed it a useless organ and tugged it out of dead pharaohs through t

Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions.

In the long run, scientists who still subscribe to the basic emotion method are very likely helping to create the universality that they believe they are discovering.

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