An elaboration on episode 49's description of the brain as a prediction engine, focusing on a theory of what emotions are, how they're learned, and how emotional experiences are constructed. Emotions like anger and fear turn out to be not that different from concepts like money or bicycle, except that the brain attends more to internal sensations than to external perceptions.

If the predictive brain theory is true, the brain is stranger than we imagine; perhaps stranger than we can imagine.

Main sources

• Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017.
• Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017.
• Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, 2024.

Other sources

• "... Chemero’s approach in his book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (episode 43)..."
• "... Clark suggests something like this in his 1997 book, Being There, covered in the unnumbered episode just before episode 41..."
• "... Remember how, last episode, I distinctly remember driving seated on the left side of the car while in Ireland..."
• George A Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information,” 1956. ("... replicating an experiment from 1949...")

Credits

Picture of the University of Illinois Auditorium is from Vince Smith and is licensed CC BY 2.0. It was cropped.

Memories appear to be constructed by plugging together stored templates. Do concepts operate the same way?

Sources

• Suzi Travis, "False Memories are Exactly What You Need", 2024.
• Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017.

Credits

Image of street warning from Dublin, Ireland, via Flickr user tunnelblick. Licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

We see a creature near us, and we describe it as a dog. Why that and not "mammal" or "animal"? And if that dog's a Springer Spaniel, and we know it's a Springer Spaniel, why do we nevertheless call it a "dog"?

In an apparent digression, I discuss the idea in cognitive science of a "basic level of categorization" (or abstraction). While we construct hierarchies and taxonomies, we tend to operate at one specific level: one that's not too abstract and not too concrete.

Sources

• George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, 1987.
• Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, 2002.
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2024.

Credits

The image of the dog and cat is via https://fondosymas.blogspot.com. It is licensed as Reconocimiento-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 3.0 España.