How Emotions Are Made

Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. 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,

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

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.

As it turns out, facial EMG presents a serious challenge to the classical view of emotion. In study after study, the muscle movements do not reliably indicate when someone is angry, sad, or fearful; they don’t form predictable fingerprints for each emotion. At best, facial EMG reveals that these movements distinguish pleasant versus unpleasant feel

What we have been calling a fingerprint might just be a stereotype.29

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

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

These findings undermine the idea that the amygdala contains the circuit for fear. They point instead to the idea that the brain must have multiple ways of creating fear, and therefore the emotion category “Fear” cannot be necessarily localized to a specific region. Scientists have studied other emotion categories in lesion patients besides fear, a

Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.