How Emotions Are Made

The Secret Life of the Brain

By: Lisa Feldman Barrett

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

“Fascinating... A thought-provoking journey into emotion science.” - Wall Street Journal

“A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented.” - Scientific American

“A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin.” - Daniel Gilbert, best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness

The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture. A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution.

“Mind-blowing.” - Elle

“Chock-full of startling, science-backed findings... An entertaining and engaging read.” - Forbes

©2017 by Lisa Feldman Barrett. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Emotions are not things!!!!!!

Most new pop science books irritate me since they give me nothing I didn't already know. This book is definitely an exception to that rule. I started liking this book from the very beginning, because I have previously read in over 20 books the experiment where they show photos of actors posed with an emotional expression of some kind and showed it to various people from different cultures and then claiming that each group shown the pictures knew what emotion was being invoked by the actor posing in the picture. I always suspected there was something wrong with the results which claimed that there is a universal set of emotions based on unique emotional 'fingerprints'. This author demolishes that finding, and I really hope I never see anyone else site that experiment again without at least first mentioning this author's analysis.

There is a classical view of emotions. It's been wrongly floating around since Plato hypothesized that we were like the charioteer (reason) being led by the horse being pulled apart by our passion and our appetites. Similarly Freud gave us a super ego, ego, or id, and Kahneman has his 'S1' and 'S2' (quick thinking vs thoughtful mind). The author not only tears down the classical emotional models of the mind, but she builds one up in its place that seems to make sense.

The author calls it the constructive emotional model. What she's saying is that emotions are not things. They are instances of previous experiences. They do have essences or fingerprints. Darwin knocked it out of the park with his "Origins of Species", but his book "Expression of Emotions in Man in Animals" brought back essentialism (the author will say). That is a belief that there are real categories in the world and they exist beyond the concepts within our own mind. Our emotions are always of a particular instance and never from the general because they are always about something particular.

The author's theory takes the best from the Social, Neurological and Psychological constructive theories from the past. In the past, the social theory would have agreed with Beauvoir that girls are not born girls but made into girls, neurological would have said that there are basically unique areas in the brain for different emotions or patters of neurons, and the Psychological would have been William James' reaction to the bear that we would meet in the woods. The author does not accept any of those premises but does construct her constructive emotional model from those three areas. She builds her system from holism, emergent properties, and multiple different neuron formations leading to various emotional states.

The author really focuses on our body budget as to how we construct our emotional makeup. Also, she speaks about how our mind is constantly predicting, and when we create our 'now' we are also predicting it since we don't always understand everything and we are constantly making our best guess about our world and our current emotional states. We are statisticians from an early age (she'll say) and we often must take all of our previous best guesses of the world (an average) and interpolate (or even extrapolate) what we think we know and use that as our guide even though we know there is an error because we're forcing averages on to a particular. Since she's a scientist in the field she will provide some experiments and data to back up her beliefs.

A lot of the book I didn't like in particular the last third. That's just me. She did a little bit of self help type book and that always bores me, but basically her advice was along the lines of do more exercise and eat broccoli (okay, she doesn't say 'broccoli' but she does say eat healthier). She mentioned Spinoza and that he falls in to the classical school of emotional theory and he does, but within his book "Ethics" he too gave advice for living a healthy emotional live and I think he did a better job then this book did.

Though, I don't recommend skipping the last third. She did a really good job on speculating on the nature of autism. She theorized that the autistic person under predicts their body budget needs since they are not always attuned to the local environment correctly and therefore are often out of sync with what is really going around in their local environment. It seemed reasonable to me. I just never seem to come across any good books on autism, and her section seemed to be better than most that I have seen.

There is a real Phenomenological bent to her theory (think Husserl, some Heidegger, the Existentialist and in particular Gadamer in his book "Truth and Method", a book that no one reads today, but I would rate it as one of my all time favorites). Gadamer did say all "understanding is interpretation, being that can be understood is language". The author makes the point that if we don't have the word for the emotion we can't fully understand the emotion. Not everyone has a rich vocabulary to understand all of their perceived emotional states, and so therefore might not always be fully aware of their emotional state (she'll say). In addition, Gadamer ends his book by emphasizing that it's not the pieces that matter, and it's not the whole it's how they fit together. Similarly, the author is saying that's how we experience our emotions.

I really enjoyed this book. The author has a theory that goes against common wisdom, and builds a system that can explain a better way to understand our emotional world. I don't always agree with everything she says, but I always like to see the world differently and am open to new ways of thinking about old problems.

Eye-opening

As a practicing psychiatrist, I found this book incredibly thought-provoking. It wonderfully turned on its head many of my previous "thoughts" about how "feelings" work. I have always been more of an advocate of good questions than good answers, & Feldman does a wonderful job of asking good questions and following through with adequate scientific inquiry to lend credence to her perspectives. This proved to be such an excellent listen, that I have since purchased the hard cover & am equally enjoying that exploration of the book's ideas. Unquestionably five stars!

I cannot recommend this book

Although this book does have some important points to make concerning emotions, it did not meet my expectations. My expectations were based on the title and on an interview of the author. This book is basically an essay, arguing that emotions are made. It does not answer "how" emotions are made, with any satisfaction, or in any depth. It spends a lot of time arguing against a concept it calls "essentialism". Too much time is spent on battling this strawman.
Less, would be more: If all the important ideas were distilled out of this book, it would be one tenth its current length. With assistance from philosophers, science fiction aficionados, and AI engineers, the speculative topics could be expressed more clearly as being speculative, and a theory of "how" emotions are made could be built.
The challenge of explaining how emotions are made may be every bit as challenging as explaining how quantum mechanics gives us General Relativity and classical physics.

Helped Me Out A Lot

I was genuinely impressed by this book. I was listening to a podcast where they talked about this particular work very heavily and I thought i might look into it just because it was interesting. I've always been an extremely emotional person, to the point where it makes my life much more difficult. I've been going through a particularly hard period and listening to this has helped me get through. Overall it was easy to understand, the narrator's voice was soothing, and the subject was intriguing. I tell all of my friends about it and still want to delve deeper into the science of emotions. I feel more in control over myself after listening and can see myself changing how I think. A lot of the topics talked about can also be brought back to mindfulness which is something that interests me as well. If I had the choice I would have read this book physically just because some of her sentence structures are more complex and it would have been need to have been able to easily read over small portions. I would recommend also trying to listen to this one in large chunks because I felt as though when I came back to it after a period of time I was in a completely different headspace than when I was in it. Looking forward to looking into emotions more, definitely glad I stumbled upon this.

Old News, Poorly Told

What disappointed you about How Emotions Are Made?

1. All of this information was presented as old news when I went to Medical School 30 years ago, yet Dr. Barrett makes it sound as if she is the genius who discovered that emotions are complex and personal.
2. She actually makes a point of refuting non-scientists like Plato and the Dalai Lama, while totally misrepresenting their views.
3. Often she cites findings which provide little or no support for her thesis.
4. She valiantly aims to overturn a simplistic view of emotions as simple neurologic circuits with predictable outputs that no psychologist, neurologist, or professor of my acquaintance would ever subscribe to. If only psychology were that easy!
5. "Colleagues" were so outraged by her theses that one threatened to punch her? She need new and sober colleagues who actually read. And a lawyer.

What do you think your next listen will be?

Not relevant to this.

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

The narrator was fine.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Yes. The material is true and useful. In fact here is all the good stuff in one place:

"Emotions are the individual's output of the complex interaction between neurophysiology, personality, personal history, culture, and context. Context includes physical, internal, and social elements, among others.
Emotions don't happen to us, we make them, and we have at least some choice as to how we go about it."

The author is to be congratulated for unhorsing straw men and putting her finger on the blindingly obvious.

Any additional comments?

If you can get past the above deficiencies, the basic information is actually of great value.

Neuroscience Lite

A little bit lighter on neuroscience than I was expecting, but overall a compelling account of how emotions are constructed.

A must read for anyone interested in emotions

A systematic, scientific explanation of emotions. clearly written and understandable by anyone. If you thought that you do not have the ability to modify your emotions, read this book. If you want to understand what emotions are, read this book. Or, if you have a general interest in how the human brain works, read this book.

Not science.

The author sets up straw men arguments, and then, having attacked the straw man, makes overly broad claims. For example, she cites a study where her lab tested people who had brain lesions that limited their memory, and when the memory disabled group sorted photographs of actors showing facial emotions into fewer piles than normal people, she makes a claim based on their inability to sort that emotions are socially constructed. It's laughable. If it was a physical book I wouldn't keep it.

Book needed a better editor

Is there anything you would change about this book?

This book is very academic, citing study after study, personal anecdote after anecdote. For a more general audience, it needed a firm editor to insist on summarizing or limiting this repetitive information. And while it includes content supporting the social construction theory of emotion, current research literature in the areas of how consciousness is developed and the implications of neuroscience in attachment, consciousness, and emotion receives a cursory glance.

Any additional comments?

The third section was by far the best part of the book.

4 of 5 final chapters are a waste of time

This book should be cut from 13 chapters to 9 by removing chapters 9 through 12. The author makes a strong case for her scientific understanding for how human motions are made. After doing the job the title promises she wanders through chapters 9 through 12 which detract from her message. My other issue is that she presents her concepts as revolutionary while they are not.

The narrator also reads the appendices which are not interesting.

Putting up with - for the sake of good science.

If this book wasn’t for you, who do you think might enjoy it more?

If, like me, you are curious about the world, life and how humans behave, this book has very good science in it. Nothing wrong with the science. If you are a bit OCD about your children - this book is right up your street. If like me, other people's children is mildly interesting, but mostly soaked in ambivalence, then this book is a drag to listen to. Because, the author does not half go on and on and on about her daughter. I felt stuck in a lift with one of those parents that simply don't get that others don't care much about every move and evolving trick of their off-spring. Once it started to work my nerves, I simply could not stick to it for long - had to plow through it in small bits. Putting up with - to get to the otherwise excellent, science.

Would you ever listen to anything by Lisa Feldman Barrett again?

No - unless she changes her publishing editor. I get the feeling that the publisher made her add in a lot of personal accedes to "warm the audience". Sure that left to her own, the author would have stuck to the core message and got there in 1/4 of the time.... and I would not have felt so urged to switch it off, time-and-again. Note the editor: Readers are not morons, give us some credit and stop sugar coating technical stuff, not all things need to be 'mommyfied'

What three words best describe Cassandra Campbell’s performance?

Clear voice, slightly monotone - not bad.

You didn’t love this book--but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Good science, bad anecdotes. Its maybe cultural, but anecdotes are a giant put off to me. Stick to the facts, talk through actual case studies, leave the family and other emotive bollocks at home.

Any additional comments?

Love to hear a much reduced, abridged version.

Interesting

Really interesting theory, presentation jarred a bit but worth it, stuck it out til end. Found a clearer explanation of the theory in article by same author in journal 'social cognitive and affective neuroscience', 2017, 1 - 23 (open access and without pop terms like 'body budgeting'!)

a must read for anyone who is neurodivergent

If you have ADHD or autism, I highly recommend this book - it helped me understand my ADHD and myself in a way that other books have not been able to

Ideal for newbies

A great introduction to the subject for someone like me, with a keen interest but no previous background.

Revolutionary research made accessible

This book makes a revolutionary research accessible. This book also has a noticable self-help value through practical suggestions about better way to organize life and raise children, as well as building a framework within which to think about your body needs and capabilities.

A life changing read

I would argue that this book (and Behave, by Prof Robert Sapolsky) are two books that should be as important reading in the 21st century as the Bible has historically been considered in previous centuries.

Suspiciously unscientific

I am not sure whether this topic of thought deserves a laborious 14 hour audiobook. It feels like the author has found a relatively insignificant theory and pushes it to its extremes. It also feels to me like she is generally ignoring people's interpretation or understanding (semantics) of emotions.

I would like to see more reviews from leaders on the topic.

Unlistenable

Tedious in the extreme the narration is boring, the analysis detailed, too detailed! the conclusions sparse and delivered in hours as each experiment is detailed in tedious mind numbing detail... simply dreadful

A mind expanding look at the brain

A powerful antidote to naive essentialism and necessary reading/listening for anyone who’s work or life involves other people. So... everyone really.

Thank you

Thank you for giving me a great perspective. it changes how I perceive life