How Emotions Are Made: 6: How the Brain Makes Emotions

Here are my notes on Chapter 6 of the “How Emotions Are Made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett

• Categorization — selecting a winning instance that becomes your perception and guides your action.
• The brain transforms information efficiently. It creates concepts that identify similarities and differences
• Our senses find similarities in the service of efficiency
• We select the most similar concept based on what we perceive
• Preciseness leads to efficiency, biological payoff of higher emotional granularity. Example, if you have a word like the Korean’s do for happiness when seeing a friend, your brain is more efficient.
• A cascade is when your brain unpacks the summary of all the sensory input into a gigantic cascade of detailed predictions.
• You construct a large population of predictions with it’s own cascade.
• Remembered present — an instance of a concept is an anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and what your sensations mean.
• Control Network- An optimizer that helps your brain simultaneously regulate body budget, produce a stable perception and launch an action
• It helps you decide between what you’re sensing as an emotion or a non emotion concept. It decides between emotional concepts, it determines the correct goal of the current concept and the instance.
• Your brain has a mental model of the world as it will be in the next moment, developed by past experience.
• Your brain uses past experiences, organized as concepts to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning
• Making meaning goes beyond the information given.
• Emotions are meaning. They explain you interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings in relations to the situation. They prescribe action.