Sublime

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

Overall, we found that no brain region contained the fingerprint for any single emotion. Fingerprints are also absent if you consider multiple connected regions at once (a brain network), or stimulate individual neurons with electricity. The same results hold in experiments with other animals that allegedly have emotion circuits, such as monkeys an

I count myself among a growing number of scientists who believe that the construction of self identity is not much better than the Lo-fi representations of other people we hold in our heads.

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