Everything you Know About Emotions is Wrong

One of the most interesting books I have read in the past few years was Journey of the Mind by Ogi Ogas. This book gave a very simplified explanation of the work of Stephen Grossberg. Grossberg’s work, admittedly, is really dense, and he cites his own research quite a bit. However, the concepts he puts forward are amazing, especially because much of his early work inspired other engineers and scientists to create the kinds of neural networks and learning systems that created generative AI— the software that is changing our world.

The reason I am enjoying the book How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett is that her work to a large degree supports some of the key concepts put forward by Grossberg and Ogas. Namely, our brains operate differently than we think.

You have no doubt heard that the amygdala (that little walnut-sized part of your brain buried deep inside your “lizard brain” at the top of the spinal column) is responsible for “fear.”

Feldman’s meticulous research has revealed that this just isn’t so. In particular, I love her work because she has undertaken the daunting task of trying to reverse almost a hundred years of scientific misconception. And if there’s one thing science, academia, and most humans love to do is latch onto an idea and hold it for dear life.

Adam Grant pointed this out beautifully in his book Think Again. Instead of actually rethinking or reconsidering flawed ideas, nearly all humans have a playbook we run instead. In various orders, in various ways, we run through three “personas” in rapid succession. We will take on the role of:

• Preacher— extolling the virtues of our threatened belief.
• Prosecutor— pointing out the flaws of the new belief.
• Politician— we will pander to other believers and try to rally their support against the new idea.

It appears to be part of the human condition of achievement and leadership, that when you climb to the pinnacle of any area that holds influence over others, you want to establish a “realm” and defend it. Not all realms are political or physical. Some are ideological. And according to Dave McRaney, these are non-trivial. We find safety in groups. In his book How Minds Change, he could not find a single instance of a high-profile “change of mind,” where someone who was a card-carrying member of a controversial community changed their mind then left the group. In fact, the opposite happened. They had to leave the group first. And only after they felt safe and supported were they able to reconsider the beliefs, thoughts, and opinions they held for so long.

We love disruption in industry, but not so much in ideas, beliefs, and knowledge. We crave certainty. We want to know. So for me, the most impressive part of Feldman Barrett’s work is the uphill battle she is facing trying to reveal the misconceptions we have held for decades, and in some cases millennia, about what emotions are, how they are formed, and how we perceive them.

That is no small task. And what’s the punchline? The amygdala is not responsible for fear. It is a part of a very complex system that is responsible for generating all of our emotions. The idea that there are parts of the brain dedicated to certain emotions is, what I would call an “organistic” view of the brain, that certain “circuits” are dedicated to do certain things, like the organs of the body are organized to perform certain clearly identifiable functions such as lungs for breathing, stomach for digestion, heart for circulating the blood. But the brain is different. To say some dedicated part of the brain is responsible for creating emotion is like saying some part of the silicon on the computer chip inside your phone is responsible for running your texting application, and only that part. That’s all it does. Clearly, the central processing unit (CPU) in your phone runs ALL the software on your phone, every app, in addition to running an operating system that is always active.

The human brain is not so different. I love Feldman Barrett’s analogy that the brain is like a sports team. The roster is bigger than the number of players on the field, and depending upon the situation in the game, different players may be on the field, some go in, some leave, a few stay most of the time, but when the game was over we say “the team won.” Well, who actually did the winning? Nearly everyone contributed to the win, some more than others, but on a different day it could change yet again. The brain works like this, with different systems contributing in different amounts, often to produce the same or similar outcomes.

Her big finding is that emotions are constructed much like thoughts or memories. How we experience emotions, as to thoughts might be another thing, but there is no one “fear circuit” in the brain centered on the amygdala or elsewhere. The amygdala plays a part in lots of emotions, and seems to have more to do with novelty and cue detection than only fear processing.