What if Everything You Knew About Emotion was Wrong?

Over the past week, I have been reading the book, How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. And when I say, “read,” I mean “listen to.” However, the reality is that I do a bit of both. I listen, then pause and go to the Kindle version of the book and highlight or mark key concepts.

While listening to Dr. Barrett’s book, I was struck by the amazing similarity between her work and that of Stephen Grossberg. You probably have never heard of Stephen Grossberg because he works tirelessly in a very obscure niche between psychology, neuroscience, and physics.

Grossberg’s goal was to understand how the observed behavior of neurons (neuroscience) can explain the observed behaviors of humans (the discipline of psychology). Very few psychologists are trained in neuroscience, and very few neuroscientists are trained in psychology. Neither of those groups is trained in physics.

What does physics have to do with the brain? One of Isaac Newton’s great contributions (similar to Einstein’s) was not only a theory of how physical reality is structured but the mathematics to model it. We have amazing equations like Force = Mass * Velocity^2. I used to tell my baseball players that a lighter bat moving faster can hit with more force than a heavy bat moving slowly.

This, it turns out, is counterintuitive. Early baseball players played with very large, heavy bats. They believed a big thing (the big bat) hitting a little thing (the ball) would produce the best results. However, controversial home run king Barry Bonds swung the lightest bat he was allowed to swing. Modern professional players focus on swing speed and exit velocity. Newton’s laws of physics shape how they play. Early players’ intuitions were wrong. And this, sadly, turns out to be a case for many of our “intuitive” senses about reality.

A great model can unlock better understanding of the way the world works. Of course, there are limits. Newton’s classic mechanics gave way to quantum mechanics, which challenges our understanding of a great many things.

Einstein’s great discovery of relativity is known by its equation, e = mc^2 . But you typically do not see equations like that in medicine, neuroscience, or psychology. The most common type of mathematics used in the “people” sciences is Bayesian statistics, a formal set of disciplines designed to help scientists make sense of data gathered from experiments. This means most psychologists and neuroscientists tend to form a hypothesis and test it for validity. Physicists build models which have valid predictive capabilities.

Grossberg is perhaps the only person working in the “soft science” fields I know of building such models. He wanted to understand how a group of neurons, wired together, can produce many of the psychological effects researchers gather from their studies.

In essence, using cross-disciplinary skills, he is trying to connect the dots. How do bundles of neurons collected into a three-pound (1.5-kilogram) ball make a human mind?

Grossberg is not well known to most people; however, he was the first to educate other scientists and engineers on his discoveries about how neural networks work. Because he also focused on creating mathematical models to explain how these networks work, engineers could build software simulations of his networks. Thus, Grossberg seeded a generation of work which has led, more or less in a straight line, to our modern artificial intelligence systems, the “large language models” or LLMs behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others.

But Grossberg was not trying to build artificial intelligence; he was trying to understand human intelligence.

I have been reading his textbook for the last year a little at a time, and it is dense. What’s more, Grossberg suffers from a lot of self-reference. He mostly refers to his own papers, and he is very rarely cited in other people’s papers. This has the unfortunate side effect of making him look like a bit of a crank, or at the very least an oddball.

Sadly, even science seems to be subject to the laws of human prestige. If we can’t know for certain the truth (because every claim is hard to verify), we resort to good old-fashioned popularity contests. If enough people not only build on your work but say they build on your work and give you credit for doing so, then you must be right.

From my point of view, since Grossberg toils away in the gaps between disciplines, effectively belonging to multiple camps, he belongs to no camps. However, recently, the work of Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett on understanding human emotion seems to me at least to lend tremendous credence to Grossberg’s work. While she never directly cites him or mentions him, her work is consistent with Grossberg’s assertions and other recent neuroscience discoveries that the brain does not work the way we believe it does.

Just as the early baseball players managed to play the game despite the mistaken belief that a heavier bat was more effective than a lighter one, many scientists and clinicians have been able to work with people using incorrect understandings of the human brain’s wiring.

The first major myth of the brain, one that is near and dear to any determinist’s heart, is the idea that the brain is a stimulus and response engine. B.F. Skinner built his entire career around this idea, that the brain is stimulated and responds. End of story.

Only… the evidence - for quite a while has been mounting that this is not actually how the brain works. It is not fast enough to be only a stimulus and response engine. So it does something even more incredible.

The human brain is a proactive prediction engine. Now, that won’t mean very much to you at this point in time, but the difference is profoundly important. And it is this understanding that is of particular interest to me, because I think it directly relates to why kids are having so much trouble with video games, especially free games designed to “hook” the user.