How to Understand Emotions | Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

1. 0:00 – 3:01

   Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is the chief scientific officer of the Center of Law, Brain, and Behavior. Dr. Barrett is considered one of the top world experts in the study of emotions, and her laboratory has studied emotions using approaches both from the fields of psychology and neuroscience. Indeed, today you will learn about the neural circuits and the psychological underpinnings of what we call emotions. You will learn what emotions truly are and how to interpret different emotional states. You will also learn how emotions relate to things like motivation, consciousness, and affect. Affect is a term that refers to a more general state of brain and body that increases or decreases the probability that you will experience certain emotions. During today's discussion, Dr. Feldman Barrett also teaches us how to regulate our emotions effectively, as well as how to better interpret the emotional states of others. You will also learn about the powerful relationship that exists between our emotional states and the movement of our body. In fact, much of today's discussion is both practical and will be highly informative in terms of the mechanisms underlying emotions, and it is likely to also be surprising to you in a number of ways. It certainly was surprising to me. I've been a close follower of Dr. Feldman Barrett's work over many years now and have always found it to be tremendously informative. And when I say her work, I mean both her academic published papers as well as her public lectures that she's given and her two fabulous books on emotions and the brain. The first one entitled How Emotions are Made, and the second book, which includes information about emotions but extends beyond that, entitled Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. As you'll see from today's discussion, Dr. Feldman Barrett is not only extremely informed about the neuroscience and psychology of emotion, she's also fabulously good at teaching us that information in clear terms and in actionable ways. You'll also notice several times, she pushes back on my questions. In some cases, even telling me that my questions are ill-posed. And I have to tell you that I was absolutely delighted that she did that, because you'll see that every time she did that, it was with the clear purpose of putting more specificity on the question, and thereby, more specificity and clarity on the answer, which of course, she delivers. By the end of today's discussion, you will have both a broad and a deep understanding of what emotions are and their origins in our brain and body. You will also have many practical tools with which to better understand and navigate emotional states. And moreover, you'll have many practical tools in order to increase your levels of motivation and better understand your various states of consciousness.

2. 3:01 – 5:46

   Sponsors: Eight Sleep & Levels

   1. AHAndrew Huberman3:01

      Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep-tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment, and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature has to drop by one to three degrees, and in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by one to three degrees. With Eight Sleep, it's very easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. It's a mattress cover that allows you to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle, and end of your night, and in doing so, allow you to fall and stay deeply asleep throughout the night and wake up feeling extremely refreshed. I started sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover well over two years ago, and it has greatly improved the quality of my sleep. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $150 off their Pod 3 Cover. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and behaviors affect your health by giving you real-time feedback using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors impacting your immediate and long-term health is the way that your body manages its blood glucose, or sometimes referred to as blood sugar, levels. To maintain energy and focus throughout the day, you want to keep your blood glucose steady without big spikes or dips. Using Levels, you can monitor how different types of foods and different food combinations, as well as food timing and things like exercise, combine to impact your blood glucose levels. I started using Levels a little over a year ago, and it gave me a lot of insight into how specific foods were spiking my blood sugar and then leaving me feeling tired for several hours afterwards, as well as how the spacing of exercise and my meals was impacting my overall energy. And in doing so, it really allowed me to optimize how I eat, what I eat, when I exercise, and so on, such that my blood glucose levels and energy levels are stable throughout the day. If you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself, go to levels.link/huberman. Right now, Levels is offering an additional two free months of membership. Again, that's levels.link, L-I-N-K, /huberman to get two free months of membership. And now for my discussion with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett.

3. 5:46 – 10:42

   Core Components of Emotions

   1. AHAndrew Huberman5:46

      Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, welcome.

   2. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett5:49

      Oh, it's my pleasure to be here.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman5:51

      I've wanted to talk to you for a very long time. I'd like to talk about emotions.

   4. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett5:57

      Mm-hmm.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman5:58

      I think everyone has a sense, somehow, of what an emotion is....feeling happy, feeling sad, feeling excited, feeling, uh, curious, perhaps is even an emotion? I don't know, you'll tell us. What are the core components, what are the sort of macro nutrientsance of a- of an emotion? Uh, because I know there's a debate about whether or not we should be talking about emotions versus states, but what is an emotion? Uh, we all are familiar with what one feels like to us, but from a scientific perspective, how do you define an emotion?

   6. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett6:38

      Well, sci- this is a scientist's debate about this, um, nobody in the last 150 years has ever been able to agree on what an emotion is, um, and I think from my perspective, the interesting but tricky bit is that any time you want to talk about what the basic building blocks are of emotion, none of those basic building blocks are specific to emotion. So for example, there are a group of scientists who will tell you, "Well, an emotion is a coordinated response where you have a change in, um, some physical state, a change in the brain, a change in the physical state, um, which, um, leads you to make a particular facial expression." So you've got physiological changes in the body, changes in the brain, changes in the face or in motor movements, okay, but that describes basically every moment of your life. Um, your face is always moving in some way, if it wasn't, y- you would look like an avatar, basically. So we're, we're constantly engaged in, in movements and those movements have to be coordinated with the physiological changes in the body because whether we're, whether we're in a state that we would conventionally call emotion or not, because the physiology is supporting those, is supporting the, you know, the glucose and the oxygen and all the things that you need to make, uh, movements of your body, and of course, all these movements are being coordinated by your brain, so of course there's a coordinated set of, um, features, that doesn't really describe how emotions are distinct from any other experience that you have. But the, the claim was for a really long time that there would be diagnostic patterns, okay? So when something triggered fear, you would have an increase in heart rate, and you would have, um, a propensity to run away or to freeze, or, um, not just to fall asleep, although that is something animals do when they are faced with a predator, but that's not part of the Western stereotype for fear, so that wasn't what scientists were looking for. And, um, and also that you would make a, a particular facial expression which was presumed to be the universal expression of fear, where you widen your eyes and you gasp, like (gasps) . Um, that facial, set of facial movements in other cultures, like in Melanesian culture for example, is, um, is a symbol of threat, where you are threatening someone, you are threatening them with aggression, basically, is a war face. But in Western cultures, that's the, the face that Western scientists believed was the, you know, the, the distinctive, uh, part of that distinctive pattern for fear. And so, the way that scientists defined emotion for a long time was these kind of, um, states where you'd see this diagnostic ensemble of signals and that would mean that any time someone showed one of those signals, they may move their face in a particular way or their heart increased at a particular time, you'd be able to diagnose them as being in a state of fear, as opposed to a state of anger or sadness or whatever. The empirical evidence, um, just doesn't bear that out, and so it was kind of a mystery. The mystery is, how is it that you feel angry or sad or happy or, you know, g- full of gratitude or awe? How is it that you experience these moments but scientists can't find a single set of physical markers that correspond with each state distinctively, right? That, in, in a way that you could tell them apart. That's a, that was a really big puzzle for a really long time.

4. 10:42 – 19:33

   Facial Movement & Interpretation, Emotion

   1. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett10:42

   2. AHAndrew Huberman10:42

      I have to ask you about this perhaps myth, perhaps truth, about facial expressions and emotions, because as you were explaining the core components of emotions, I had to think back to the classic textbook images of the different faces associated with fear, with delight, with confusion, and on and on, we, we will get to that and your opinions on that, scientifically in- informed opinions of course, but there is a bit of a myth that the emotion system and the facial expression system run in both directions. For instance, y- people will say if you smile, it's harder to feel sad or anxious. I can't say that's been m- my experience, but I very well could be wrong. So we know that when people's emotional states change, their facial expressions often will change, right? If you see someone crying on the street, um, versus somebody smiling really big, you, we can make some assumptions about what might be going on inter- uh, internally for them. But, put simply, is it true that changing one's facial expression can direct shifts in the brain and body perhaps, that change our emotional states?

   3. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett12:06

      If you'll permit me, what I would say is that your question is ill-posed.So first of all, it presumes that there's an emotion system, and that there's a facial expression system. Now clearly, there's a system for moving facial muscles.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman12:24

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett12:25

      Okay? But a movement is not the same as an expression.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman12:30

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett12:30

      A movement is a movement. An expression is an interpretation of, of the meaning of a movement.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman12:37

      Mm-hmm.

   9. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett12:37

      Not all movements of the face are expressions. Um, and this is a, you know, a problem, it's a problem in science. Um, and it's often the case, uh, I think, in my experience, in the science of emotion but elsewhere too, that scientists, in their efforts to make their work, um, meaningful to people, will try to interpret their findings in, in ways that, uh, the average person would, um, find interesting, or, uh, the way that a physician would find interesting, or a teacher, or what have you, to be able to use this information.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman13:17

       Hmm.

   11. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett13:18

       But then they forget that they're actually making an interpretation, and they start to refer to their observations with the labels of interpretation. So facial movements are facial movements. People move their faces, and that, those movements have meaning, but they're not always to express an internal state. In fact, one might think that they're very rarely to, um, express an internal state. So I don't know that there's a facial expression system either. So that's, there's certainly, like I said, um, there, there's circuitry for moving a face, but, um, but what those movements mean, um, is highly variable. And so that would be my second point that where I would say when you see someone crying on the street, you are not looking only at their face. You might be aware, um, that you're focusing on their face. That might be the part of the entire sensory ensemble that you are focusing your attention on.

   12. AHAndrew Huberman14:19

       Hmm.

   13. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett14:19

       But your brain is taking in an entire ensemble of signals, as you know. It's taking in not just the, you know, movements of the face, the tears, or whatever. It's taking in all of the, the entire sensory array, the sounds, the smells, what's going on inside your own body. Your brain is being, um, bombarded with signals from, from all of those sources. And when it's making a meaning out of any signal, it's doing it in an ensemble of signals. So research shows that babies' cries aren't acoustically specific to when they're tired or hungry or, right? Um, the, you can, I can show you a video without context and show you someone crying, and, um, you might make a judgment. You might think, make the stereotypic judgment in the West, "Oh, that person is sad." And then we pan out, and really, you know, it's a little girl whose dad just came home from Iraq or something, right? So brains are always interpreting faces in context. They're making guesses. This is something that I've talked about quite a bit, that we don't read movements in people. We don't read emotions in facial expressions. We make inferences about the emotional meaning of facial movements, and we do it in an ensemble of other signals, the, the context, uh, as you, uh, if you will. And that's really what's, what's happening. So, um, do I think that, um, that there's feedback from the face to the brain? Sure. I mean, there's feedback from every muscle. But there's this constant conversation between the brain and the body. Um, the brain is sending motor commands. The body is, is, you know, has sensory surfaces which are sending signals back to the brain. So if the face is influencing the brain, it's doing so in a way that's not special. It, it's doing it in a way that works for all other parts of your body too.

   14. AHAndrew Huberman16:25

       Hmm.

   15. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett16:25

       And I guess what I would say, this is kind of a long-winded answer, but over time, your brain has learned that certain patterns of signal over time, um, recur. And so if you're smiling, if your brain is, you know, telling your, your facial muscles to move in a particular way that looks like smiling, um, it's happening in a larger ensemble of signals, and then the brain is predicting what's going to happen next, because it's learned over time what happens next. So probabilistically so, if you think about that as cause, then sure.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman17:07

       Mm-hmm.

   17. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett17:08

       But it's not a, it's not this simplistic kind of idea that an emotion is triggered, um, uh, it causes facial muscles to move in a particular way, and therefore, if you just pose your face in, in those, in that particular arrangement, it, that will somehow feed back to the emotion system and change that system. 'Cause there are no, there is no emotion system in your brain, and the, the causation just isn't that, it's not that simplistically mechanistic.

   18. AHAndrew Huberman17:44

       That makes sense to me. I, I, uh, frankly never bought the idea that just smiling would make me feel happy. Um, especially if my internal state was not one of happiness, like fighting the internal state. Also, um, in the early 2000s I think it was, there was a lot of discussion about how positioning the body in certain ways, you know, taking up more space would allow people to feel more powerful, and they, some of these studies, um, and, uh, argued that there were even hormonal shifts associated with, um, taking up more space that were associated with feelings of empowerment, and then when shrinking of one's self was in- associated with elevated cortisol states. And as I say all this, um, I, I want to be clear that, um, I do not take-...a simplistic view of the nervous system or-

   19. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett18:31

       Oh, of course.

   20. AHAndrew Huberman18:32

       ...the endocrine system, and I, I didn't, um, I don't think you, that you were implying that either. I just want to make sure that anyone listening or watching isn't thinking that, uh, for instance, that cortisol is bad. Cortisol is wonderful and essential, you just need to regulate it properly. Or that, um, the idea that the body and emotional states are l- are inextricably linked makes a ton of sense to me, but the idea that you could just, you know, grab onto one of the nodes in the emo- and now I have to be careful and not say "emotion" ... system, um, like position of the body, like being hunched over makes you depressed? No, that never made sense to me. Taking up more space makes you feel more, uh, powerful? That doesn't ... It, it can't be that way, and yet we were told for about a decade through, especially through popular press, that this stuff was true. Um, and so what I love about your work is that it includes a neuroanatomical, a psychological, a n- network perspective, that the, that there isn't one seat of emotions, and, and so on.

5. 19:33 – 31:03

   Facial Expressions & Emotion, Individualization

   1. AHAndrew Huberman19:33

      Um, so if we could go a little bit further into the facial expression piece for a moment?

   2. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett19:37

      Sure.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman19:38

      I was taught in my psychology and neuroscience textbooks, 'cause it was right there in front of me, that there were some core categories of facial expression that were universal across cultures that conveyed something about the internal state of the person, that the downward, you know, lips in the corner and some- and maybe even a furrowing of the brow was associated with negative valence states like sadness, perhaps even depression, that the opposite of upward turned corners of the mouth and widening of the eyes was delight and excitement. Some of that feels pretty true to my experience, but how do you and other serious scientists of emotions view that somewhat classic literature now?

   4. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett20:24

      Yeah, so I'll just say that my, um, my journey here, my scientific journey was not one of, um, attempting to overturn, um, a century's worth of ... Are we allowed to swear? Bullshit, basically.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman20:42

      Sure.

   6. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett20:42

      I mean, it's just, it's like, it's, it's stereotype ... It's basically Western stereotypes enshrined as scientific, uh, fact. And that sounds, uh, like a pretty harsh thing to say, but I think I pretty much stand by that at this point. Um, but for me, when I was, uh, a graduate student, when I was an undergraduate in, uh, in psychology and in physiology and in anthropology, you know, I also had read that Darwin said that there were these distinctive facial expressions that, um, were coordinated with specific emotional states, s- specific states of the nervous system. This was Darwin's view, and I assumed it was correct, um, until I started to try to use that information, um, in the lab, and everything fell apart, you know? So when you show someone in, uh, a laboratory, like a student or, um, somebody from the community, a face, a disembodied face where their eye- the person's eyes are widened in the face and they're gasping like a stereotypic fear expression, most of the time they don't know what it is. And so I would try to use these faces and, um, as stimuli in experiments and they weren't, they weren't working the way that they were supposed to work, and there ... We're really going all the way back to the beginning of psychology. There were always debates about whether or not this was actually accurate, and there's a really interesting story about how Darwin came to this idea, um, which I can tell you about, but it, it's not because he cared about emotion, and he was basically taking his own very Western views about emotion to make some claims about evolution actually. So, um, I have more to say about that and about why it's a problem to take anything that anybody said, even Darwin, from, you know, hun- 150 or so years ago or whatever it is, and treat it like it's a modern text. (laughs)

   7. AHAndrew Huberman22:57

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett22:57

      You know, he was writing at a particular time for a particular purpose, um, and that doesn't necessarily mean that whatever he wrote is true, um. But I'll just tell you what the evidence says, um, that there has been in psychology a debate, really vicious debate actually, for probably 50 years about the nature of facial expressions and whether they're universal and whether there's this one-to-one correspondence between a particular face and, like, a facial configuration and a particular emotional state, smiling and happiness, scowling and anger, wrinkling your nose and disgust. And so in 2016, I think, the Association for Psychological Science, um, tasked me and some other senior scientists, uh, with a- attempting to write a white paper, a consensus paper on what the literature actually shows. So what does the research actually show? If you read all the research, you know, can you find a pattern there? Does it actually reveal anything about whether or not facial expressions are universal, particularly for emotion? Um, and the way they do this, they have a journal for this purpose, for taking a widely held belief that is highly debated and bringing together a panel of experts who disagree with each other at the outset, and they have to work together to see if they can come to consensus over the data. And this is something that...You know, people have tried in the past, and it, th- I mean, they are really vicious. People have been vicious with each other over this question. So when we brought together a g- a group of people, so ma- several people refused to serve, senior scientists refused to serve on this panel, but-

   9. AHAndrew Huberman24:51

      Out of fear-

   10. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett24:52

       (laughs)

   11. AHAndrew Huberman24:52

       ... of, of losing their funding or something? Um...

   12. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett24:55

       Uh, you know, that's a whole other conversation-

   13. AHAndrew Huberman24:57

       Yeah, I'm sure.

   14. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett24:58

       ... about why sci- uh, certain scientists would not want to engage wi- uh, with, um, people who disagree with them. Um, that's an interesting conversation to have, but, um, I don't think it's as simple actually as just they, they're careerists or they, they care about, you know, their money or, or funding or whatever. Uh, that would be an easy answer, but I don't actually think that's what's going on, but that's another sort of... But anyway, so, uh, there were five of us who got together, um, all senior scientists, all from different fields. Some of us hadn't met each other before. We all knew of each other, of course, and we met over Zoom for two and a half years. This is pre-COVID 'cause people were all over the world, right? And we ag- we read over a thousand papers. So, so I was the only one in this group, of the five of us, who my starting hypothesis was that facial movements are meaningful, but they're not... There's no one-to-one correspondence between a particular facial configuration, like a scowl and anger. Not, not just that it would vary across cultures, but that it varies a- for you across situations. I mean, do you scowl every time you're angry? I don't scowl every time I'm angry. In fact, and I also scowl at times when I'm not angry. So, uh, uh, and there are scientific reasons to think that, that, like, that a, the collection of facial expressions that people make when they're angry or when they're sad or whatever would be highly variable. So, that was my starting position, and then the, there were varying... The four guys, so there was... I just refer to them as the guys 'cause it was me and four guys. And the guys, they all, uh, to some extent, thought that facial expressions were universal, but they had differing reasons and all, for, for, for hypothesizing that, and they also had different commitments, degrees of commitment to that par- position. But we, right off the bat, sort of agreed that we, it didn't matter who was right. That was just not relevant. The only thing that mattered was that we could come to the consensus over the data, and if we couldn't, we had to really pinpoint why. Like, so what would be the critical experiments that would have to be done in order for us to come to consensus over the data? And we also agreed that, um... We had all kinds of contingencies set up. So you know, you've got five senior people who are all running big labs, and they're investing, you know, upwards of three years working on a paper. So if we can't come to consensus, what are we gonna do? Are we gonna write one paper and sort of write about the process, or are we gonna write separate papers, or you know? But we, we had all these contingencies laid out, but the key here, I think, is that we agreed that we were not gonna be adversarial about it 'cause it didn't matter who was right, and in fact, if somebody had to admit they were wrong, and someone was gonna have to admit they were wrong, I mean, it turns out all of us were wrong about something, but it, we were gonna be, like, supportive of each other and, and really encourage each other, um, because, you know being wrong is, no one likes to be wrong, but for scientists to admit they're wrong is hard, and it's something that we should encourage each other to do, I think, more and, and more publicly. And I think the people who do that are really brave. And so that was my position, and they all agreed, and the long story short here is that two and a half years, a thousand papers later, we all very reasonably came to consensus that there was no evidence for facial expressions of emotion being universal, and that instead, what is, what there's clear evidence of is, um, that facial expressions, the way that people move their faces in, in, in moments of expression is highly variable, meaning sometimes in anger you scowl. Meta-analyses, so statistical summaries of many, many, many studies, even in the West, show that people scowl, uh, about 35% of the time when they're angry, which is more than chance, so it gets you a good publication in, you know, the Proceedings of the National Academy, but that means 65% of the time, people are moving their faces in other meaningful ways that's not scowling. So if you actually used a scowl, um, or even, you know, a scowl and blood pressure or, you know, just maybe not one signal but so- a couple signals, but you would be wrong more than half the time. You would miss more than half the cases, and even more importantly, I think... That, that's the reliability question. So there's low reliability for, um, the correspondence between a scowl and anger. It's above chance. So scowling is one expression of anger, but it's certainly not the dominant one, and there is no dominant one. It's just highly variable depending on the situation that you're in. So sometimes when I'm angry, I sit quietly and plot the demise of my enemy, you know? Sometimes I smile in anger. Sometimes I cry in anger. It really depends on the situation. Um, but more importantly, half of the scowls that people make are not related to anger. That means that the specificity is again higher than chance....but not that much higher than chance. So if you see someone scowling, the chances are that they might not be angry. They might be concentrating really hard or they might have gas. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why people make a scowl. Um, and we, we found this for every emotion category that had ever been

6. 31:03 – 36:53

   Emotion Categories, Culture & Child Development

   1. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett31:03

      studied, and I want you to notice what I just did there. I'm not, I'm no longer referring to an emotion as if it's an entity or a thing. So anger isn't one thing. It's a category of things, a grouping of things.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman31:15

      And if I'm not mistaken, it includes verbs, right? That, like anger as a set of verb actions in the, in the brain and body.

   3. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett31:23

      Yes, it-

   4. AHAndrew Huberman31:23

      Right? It's a process.

   5. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett31:24

      It's a process.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman31:24

      It's not an event.

   7. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett31:25

      Exactly. It's not a noun, it's a verb and it's a, and it's a process, but the point is that, um, it's, it's a highly variable grouping of instances. If you're, if you are talking about all instances of anger, all instances of anger that you have ever experienced or witnessed, um, is a highly variable grouping of instances that vary. Not they, that doesn't mean they're random, but what the body does in anger depends on what the physical movements will be in anger and that depends on the situation that you're in and what your goal is. And, um, and there are ways to talk about that in neuroscience terms, which are a little more precise, but the important thing to understand here, I think, is that we're only talking about Western cultures now. The minute that you go outside of the West to, uh, or even to the East, I mean, so, eh, you know, there are other cultures, you know, that have been studied, um, like, uh, China and cultures in China, in Japan, in Korea. They're, they all have access to knowledge about Western cultural practices and norms. So what happens when you go to, you know, to remote cultures which, um, have much less access? So they, it's not like they have no access because we, we live in a globalized world. So even hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, the Hadza, have access to Western practices and norms, but much less, much less.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman32:55

      Mm-hmm.

   9. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett32:55

      And we did do that and, um, and all bets are off there. I mean, th- most of the time, they don't even s- they don't even understand or experience facial movements as having anything to do with emotion. (laughs)

   10. AHAndrew Huberman33:09

       So if they saw an emoji of a smiley face, would they just assume it was a couple... Th- they might think it's a face. There, because as we both know, there's some fairly hardwired brain circuitry for the, the two eyes, a, and a, and a line beneath it and something in the middle, this pseudo-nose. That organization of, of just spatial features-

   11. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett33:29

       Yeah.

   12. AHAndrew Huberman33:29

       ...cues up face for both-

   13. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett33:31

       Well, that, but-

   14. AHAndrew Huberman33:31

       ...for most primates, including us.

   15. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett33:32

       Although, it's really interesting that you say that because yes, of course, that's true, but it's not there at birth. What's there at birth is a preference for that configuration, right? So it's, it's like there's some... And we could talk about why that's there. It's actually very controversial. But, um, but what babies, what newborns orient to, they orient to that or they orient to that configuration, but it doesn't have to be a face. And then very quickly, they start learning faces because they're exposed to fa- they're, I mean, really the first three months of life is almost like a massive continuous tutorial on what faces are because they're, you know, being fed and-

   16. AHAndrew Huberman34:09

       When everyone's in your face, uh, uh, so a-

   17. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett34:11

       Literally.

   18. AHAndrew Huberman34:12

       ...baby last night and you see the baby of s- friends of mine have a, uh, unbelievably cute baby with big cheeks and you want... And there's this desire to see the baby smile, right?

   19. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett34:20

       Correct.

   20. AHAndrew Huberman34:21

       So you do the things that-

   21. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett34:21

       Yeah.

   22. AHAndrew Huberman34:22

       ...and if the baby shows some sort of facial expression that makes it seem like it's a little bit, um, like resisting what you're doing, you, you stop doing it, you change up your strategy.

   23. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett34:30

       Yeah.

   24. AHAndrew Huberman34:30

       And then when baby cracks a smile, like now I'm going to assume that the baby may or may not have been happy inside, um, that little baby head, um, but when they do, there's a reciprocity. Then we smile.

   25. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett34:43

       Exactly. Exactly.

   26. AHAndrew Huberman34:43

       And so it's a, there's a template that, that's very robust.

   27. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett34:46

       Right. But I want you to notice though that... So first of all, I'm not saying that, um, that recognizing faces, a face as a face is not hardwired. It is, but it's hardwired by, not by genes alone, right? And in fact, there's a really wonderful book called Not by Genes Alone. Basically, there is cultural inheritance. We have the kind of nature that requires nurture. We have the kind of genes that require early learning. We have, we need wiring instructions from the world to get the rest of the information that we need to be competent, culturally competent in our, in our, in our lives. And that starts at birth. It probably starts before birth even. Um, but, um, in third trimester, there's some evidence of learning, fetal learning, even in the third trimester. So, um, the point is not that people aren't hardwired for viewing faces or recognizing faces, it's just where does that hardwiring come from? It's not by genes alone. Genes aren't the blueprint. The brain is expecting certain inputs from the world and it needs that because infant brains are wiring themselves to their world and part of that world is people making faces at them and smiling. And those people happen to also be the ones who are maintaining, who are maintaining that baby's nervous system. I mean, there is reward learning, right? Or reinforcement learning right off the bat because these are the people who keep you comfortable, they are the ones who feed you, they're the ones who help you get to sleep and so on and so forth, and so you're going to be very, very sensitive to changes in the contingencies of their behavior. Your brain, as a pattern learner, it's just going to learn those patterns. If we know that smiling i- m- more, you know, smiling is a cue for happiness, it's 'cause we've learned it. And that doesn't mean that that learning isn't hardwired, it just means that it, that information got into your brain by cultural inheritance, which is a part of evolutionary theory...... in the extended evolutionary synthesis, not in the original, you know, not in the original, uh, formulation that some people still kind of stick to.

7. 36:53 – 37:50

   Sponsor: AG1

   1. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett36:53

   2. AHAndrew Huberman36:53

      As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that's designed to meet all of your foundational nutrition needs. Now, of course, I try to get enough servings of vitamins and minerals through whole food sources that include vegetables and fruits every day, but oftentimes, I simply can't get enough servings. But with AG1, I'm sure to get enough vitamins and minerals and the probiotics that I need, and it also contains adaptogens to help buffer stress. Simply put, I always feel better when I take AG1. I have more focus and energy and I sleep better, and it also happens to taste great. For all these reasons, whenever I'm asked, "If you could take just one supplement, what would it be?" I answer, "AG1." If you'd like to try AG1, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman.

8. 37:50 – 41:07

   Legal System, ‘Universal’ Emotions & Caution

   1. AHAndrew Huberman37:50

      So it's far more nuanced, uh, than it was presented to me in those textbooks. And, and it sounds like it was outright wrong on many dimensions. Um-

   2. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett37:58

      Well, can I just mention one thing now?

   3. AHAndrew Huberman38:00

      Please.

   4. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett38:01

      This is really serious stuff. Like, sometimes people think, "Well, you know, what's the big deal?" This is such a big deal. I'll tell you why it's a big deal. Because in our culture, people believe that they can read mental states of other people by their face, and they believe it so much that it's enshrined in the legal system. And there are people who lose their lives because juries believe that they can read remorse or, or the lack of it. And in fact, there was just a case, um, you know, last year, I believe, where, um, you know, the Innocence Project, uh, got involved because there was a woman who was on death row, and what put her on death row was, um, a police officer's claim that he could read her emotions by her, the comportment of her face and her body. And, um, and, you know, uh, it was possible to get a stay of execution so that she could be retried and, you know. Um, so I'm not saying she was guilty or not guilty, I'm just saying what put her on death row was evidence that would not be admissible in a scientific, um, way now. Um, and there are, there are lots of cases where judgments are made that end up impacting people's lives in pretty serious ways. So this is a really serious thing, and it's, um, it's puzzling to me why it's so, it's got such traction, this idea that there are these universal, um, expressions that we can use to read each other, you know? Um, it's, it's just not true. I mean, the science just, it's so overwhelmingly... I feel like, you know, scientists, I don't like to use the T word, you know, the F word, fact, you know, it's a scary word. T word, truth? But I think in this case, I feel like I can s- I can really, at least with a little T, I can, I can use it. You probably have particular facial movements that you make on a regular basis that are tells for you. I know I do. You know, my husband can w- look at my actions and he can make really decent guesses about what's going on for me upstairs, right? But that's because he's known me for 30 years. Actually, 30 years today, I should just say.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman40:35

      Oh, congratulations.

   6. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett40:36

      That we met each other 30 years ago today. But he's, you know, brains are pattern learners. So I'm not saying that everything is random and like there's no, it's all noise. I'm saying that there just aren't these, you know, universal templates. They just, it's not like that, and we really have to stop assuming that, that, that there are.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman40:56

      Well, I'm so glad that you're getting that message out there, and I'm very thankful that you highlighted the seriousness of this, um, these myths that have propagated.

9. 41:07 – 48:18

   Language Descriptions, Differences & Emotion

   1. AHAndrew Huberman41:07

      And that's a perfect segue into what I was already going to ask, which is, um, it's based on something that I think is in very much agreement with what you're saying. A previous guest on this podcast, I think it was our first guest episode, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, colleague of mine at-

   2. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett41:22

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman41:22

      ... Stanford, incredible bioengineer, um, really, you know, 0.01% in his, you know, category of science, as well as a practicing, uh, psychiatrist, said something which really stuck with me over the years, which I once heard him say, "You know, we don't really know how other people feel at all. In fact, most of the time, we don't even know how we feel." And that prompted the question for me about how good or poor are we at gauging our own emotional states, and in particular, at labeling them, both to others and for ourselves? And, and so here's the, the direct question. Is language sufficient to capture this incredibly complex thing that we're calling emotions? So for instance, the other day, I was in New York with my sister, then she left, I went out for a bit. I was having a pretty good day, and then I returned to the place where I was staying and I was hit with this feeling of intense loneliness, and I don't know why. And then I had a bunch of ideas about how that related to growing up and da-da-da, but I was going to see friends the next day and I'm an adult and so I could use some top-down regulation and say, "Oh, you know, maybe I'm a little tired or I didn't..." 'Cause I hadn't slept as well the night before, but I've been pretty rested recently. And then I actually wrote in my journal, I th- I said, "You know, maybe most of feeling good is being pretty well-rested and not in any physical pain." That's a big part of feeling good is the absence of fatigue and the absence of physical pain.... and, and then I thought, "Wow, that's just so basic." That's like two building blocks. It's clearly insufficient. But then, I couldn't think of a word to adequately describe the emotion that came about an hour later when I was feeling a little bit better, but not completely better. So was I lonely? Not really, not anymore. Was I sad? Not really. But, you know, as I head- headed out into the city, I was thinking, "I don't really have a word for how I feel. I'm sort of okay, not great, not low." You know, and so I think that we have emotional labels, I certainly do, for peaks, you know, these peak emotional states. Super happy. I loved the time with my sister. We do this every year. This was a particularly good year for us, um, to do this and, and it went really well. We were texting back and forth how great it was. I certainly know what it feels like to be really down in the, in the pits. I've l- got language for that. But then there's this huge range in between. And so I guess the simple question is, should we even trust language as a way to understand how we're feeling? Or are there additional, if not better, signals that we should perhaps learn to elaborate, um, our understanding of emotions with?

   4. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett44:01

      So I'm going to give you an, a simple answer and then I'm going to give you a more complicated answer.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman44:07

      Great.

   6. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett44:07

      So the simple answer is no, language is not sufficient, period.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman44:12

      Great.

   8. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett44:12

      I think the way that you have ... Well, I should say one language is not sufficient. So English is not sufficient, and probably French on its own is not sufficient, and probably Swahili on its own is not sufficient. Although it's very interesting that the, the states that we mark with words in each culture, some of them overlap, but a lot of them don't. And it's very, very useful to have labels of emotion concepts from other cultures that, that capture configurations, uh, uh, or a state that we, we don't really mark ... We don't mark those and, and sort of distinctively pull them out, uh, as, as different from other states.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman44:57

      I'd love to know what some of those are.

   10. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett44:59

       Oh, there are, there are, um ... I should have brought them with me. I mean, there, there are some, like there's one, there's a German word which I can't remember the name of the word, but it's like, um, the experience of someone having a face that deserves a punch.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman45:13

       (laughs) I'm sure someone will tell us in the comments.

   12. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett45:15

       Yeah. You know-

   13. AHAndrew Huberman45:15

       Someone, someone who knows German or spent time there, please put that word in-

   14. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett45:19

       Yeah.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman45:19

       ... in the comments. But don't-

   16. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett45:20

       Or-

   17. AHAndrew Huberman45:20

       ... don't punch anybody.

   18. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett45:21

       Another one that's my favorite is, um, um, ligut, which is, um, it's a Polynesian, um, head hunting, um, uh, emotion word, and it means, um, exuberant aggression in a group.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman45:38

       Hmm.

   20. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett45:39

       Like soccer, or head- or head hunting. (laughs)

   21. AHAndrew Huberman45:43

       (laughs)

   22. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett45:43

       Right? Where you're basically ... Um, or I should say also, um, in the military. So when I was listening to NPR one day a couple of years ago, must have been more than that 'cause it's in my book so it was probably more than seven years ago, I was listening to these guys talk, these former, um, um, military, uh, personnel talk about being, um, deployed in a war where they're with their buddies and they're, they're basically hunting the enemy, and they feel exuberant. Like they're, you know ... And, and they're, it's not that they're happy, but they're ... It's pleasant and it's very intense, very high arousal, v- you know? And in the moment, it, it seemed right and then they come back, um, you know, and they ask themselves like ... They come back and so they're now, you know, their deployment's ended now they're back home and they're like, "Am I a psychopath? Like I enjoy killing people. What is this about?" And I was thinking, "No, no, you just experienced ligut." And if you had a word for it, you would understand that it's a groupy feeling where you're all in it together and it's really intense and, you know, they were experiencing the, um, the intensity of, of, um, having their life on the line and, and being responsible for their, for their brothers, you know, and sisters in, in, in their troop, or, you know. So, um, the, the, what they would realize is it's a perfectly, it's perfectly within the range of normal human variation. It's just that in English we don't have a word for it really. But there are words that are concepts in other languages, right? Or then the (laughs) other one that I like is called "giggle" which is where when you see a baby who's really cute and you just want to like oh-

   23. AHAndrew Huberman47:30

       I had that experience yesterday evening.

   24. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett47:32

       You just wanna, you know, and it's just squeeze.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman47:32

       Oh, my God.

   26. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett47:32

       So hard.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman47:33

       That kid was so cute, his little cheeks were just like jumping at you and-

   28. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett47:36

       Yeah, you just want to go, "Oh, I wanna bite you."

   29. AHAndrew Huberman47:37

       ... and, and the parents are delightful people too.

   30. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett47:39

       Yeah, yeah.
10. 48:18 – 53:40

    Questions & Assumptions; Language, Emotions & Nervous System

    1. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett48:18

       But I, there's a w- But even again, the phrasing of your question, I just wanna come back to, and I'm not trying to pick at you, but-

    2. AHAndrew Huberman48:25

       Feel free.

    3. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett48:25

       No, no, but it-

    4. AHAndrew Huberman48:25

       What I love is that what, what you said before when you said my f- question was ill posed, in your, in the answer that followed, it made it very clear why, and I learned something about how the-

    5. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett48:37

       And-

    6. AHAndrew Huberman48:37

       ... the, the not emotion system but the things, plural, that, that create emotions work. So, uh, feel free. I, I, I grew up in the same culture that you did.

    7. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett48:47

       (laughs)

    8. AHAndrew Huberman48:47

       I'm not Canadian by birth, but, but in the academic culture.

    9. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett48:50

       Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman48:50

        You know, I mean, the, the stuff that we take online, by the way folks, is nothing compared to the kind of hazing that I experienced growing up in, uh, in academic culture as it was-... done then. I don't know if it's still that way now. So, uh, feel free.

    11. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett49:04

        Yeah, I think we sh-

    12. AHAndrew Huberman49:05

        I'm tougher than I look.

    13. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett49:06

        Well, no, but I think my point is, that I'm trying to get at here is that when we ask questions, any of us, me too, a- anybody asks a question, there are certain assumptions that we're making in order to allow us to pose the question.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman49:18

        Mm-hmm.

    15. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett49:18

        And sometimes what I'm taking issue with is not the question itself, but it's the assumptions behind the question, right? And this is a very classic thing in philosophy of science, which I know I just said the P word, philosophy, which scientists, you know, usually they roll their eyes back in their head and they fall over when you talk about that. But, I think it's really important. So, you know, can language... Is language sufficient to label or to- to- to gauge emotional states? Kind of sounds like, and this is the assumption that people make, that there's a state in here called an emotion, and now I have to label it, and I have to identify it. That is not how it works. Like, that is not what your brain is doing, at all. And in order to explain what I think is happening and what I... My best available guess, you know, like based on what I understand, it's like not even remotely... That- that is just not a meaningful question at all. Um, I do think words are important. I just don't think that they have to be insufficient by virtue of what the brain is actually doing. And the way that I come at this is just really different from a- a lot of my colleagues. So, really, for 100 years at least... I hate when people say things like that, like, "For 100 years." But it really is.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman50:35

        Mm-hmm.

    17. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett50:35

        Like, for 100 years at least, what psychologists and neuroscientists do, have... Or did and are still doing is they start with a folk experience, a folk category, a common sense experience. I feel angry. Uh, I'm making a decision. I'm having a memory. I'm remembering something. They start with their experience, and then they go looking for the physical basis of that experience in the brain-

    18. AHAndrew Huberman50:58

        Mm-hmm.

    19. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett50:59

        ... or in, you know, in the body. I think that's really problematic, because not everybody in the world actually uses those categories or has those experiences.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman51:09

        Well, a lot of that has to do with the scientific publication process.

    21. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett51:12

        For sure.

    22. AHAndrew Huberman51:12

        U- one of the most important statements I ever heard is from the late Ted Jones, one of th- the greatest neuroanatomists of probably the last 500 years (laughs) , um, which was the following. He said, "A drug is a substance that when injected into an animal or a person produces a scientific paper."

    23. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett51:31

        (laughs) That is wonderful.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman51:32

        And in many ways... Yeah.

    25. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett51:34

        (laughs)

    26. AHAndrew Huberman51:34

        Yeah. It kind of catches... It catches you square in the face and you go, "Oh, right."

    27. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett51:38

        Yeah.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman51:39

        I mean, basically, every drug disrupts, if taken an hour or two before sleep, changes the amount of REM sleep-

    29. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett51:46

        Yeah.

    30. AHAndrew Huberman51:46

        ... that you get. And so, so I could imagine that almost any perturbation of the language system, the body, the facial m- m- movement system could give you a "effect" that you could write a paper about.
11. 53:40 – 1:02:51

    Brain, Uncertainty & Categories

    1. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett53:40

       I would say, I don't start with the categories that derive from English and my own experience. Um, I start with the nervous system. I try to learn what is the best available evidence for how that nervous system evolved, how it developed, how it's structured, right? Anatomy, to me, is very important. Some of my best hypotheses come from just learning the anatomy and realizing, "Oh, well. There's a connection there that's direct." That mean- that should mean something, you know? I mean, um, I could give you lots of examples of, um, uh, where we've had... We've made discoveries solely because we noticed an ana- a set of anatomical connections and were really curious about what they might be involved with. But if you start with that premise, then you think about the brain in a r- I think about the brain in a really different way, right? So, I don't think about the brain as a stimulus-driven organ. Um, I think about it more like this, that, that the brain is... Um, first of all, the brain is not running a model or, or making inferences about the world. All the brain knows is, are signals from the sensory surfaces of its body. So your brain is modeling your retina, and it's modeling your cochlea, and it's modeling the sensory surfaces of the skin....and sure, signals, you know, are, you know, hit those surfaces, and those surfaces transduce those signals and send them up to the brain. But the brain only knows the body, and anything it knows about the world, it knows about the world through the body, through the sensory surfaces of the body. So, that's the first, for me, really big important point. The second important point is that I think about the brain as being trapped in a dark silent box called your skull.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman55:40

       Mm-hmm.

    3. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett55:40

       You know? And it's so weird saying these things to you. You're so much, you know, you're like, you're, you're this really esteemed, like (laughs) neuroscientist, and here I am explaining to you-

    4. AHAndrew Huberman55:51

       No, but-

    5. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett55:51

       ...how I think the brain works. It's just very, you know, but anyway-

    6. AHAndrew Huberman55:54

       Well, it's important for our audience, but it's also important for me, even though, yes, I, I know, I know these facts. But it's, I, I believe, it's always, uh, informative to go back to the fundamentals.

    7. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett56:06

       Sure, so-

    8. AHAndrew Huberman56:06

       Because we forget. You know, actually I would say that, that, uh, someone once described, um, the, I'll call him The Great 'cause he's a great visual neuroscientist, uh, visual neuroscientist, Tony Movshon, who, uh, founded the Department of, of Neuroscience at NYU, once said, "You know, a real intellectual is somebody that can appreciate and work with a topic at multiple levels of granularity."

    9. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett56:25

       Right, for sure, for sure, for sure.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman56:26

        Right? It's not about the... And oftentimes, it, the, the more expertise is associated with more focus on detail.

    11. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett56:31

        Right.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman56:31

        So, I love returning to the core basics.

    13. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett56:33

        Okay, so-

    14. AHAndrew Huberman56:33

        So, I, I think it's wonderful.

    15. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett56:34

        Okay, okay.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman56:35

        Please, please continue.

    17. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett56:36

        So, so I think about the brain as being trapped in this box, and, um, it's receiving signals continuously from the sensory surfaces of the body, but those signals are the outcomes of some set of changes, and the brain doesn't know what the changes are. It doesn't know the causes of those signals. It just knows the outcomes. It knows the signals. That's what it's receiving. And so, it has to guess at what the causes of those signals are in order to stay alive. Um, and so, that's, in philosophy, called an inverse problem. So, the brain just has a massive continuous inverse problem that it has to deal with all the time.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman57:14

        Like, it can't ha- it doesn't have access to all the information.

    19. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett57:17

        No.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman57:17

        It's just a guessing machine.

    21. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett57:18

        It's a guessing machine. So, for example, um, you know, if you hear a loud bang, what is that loud bang? Could be a car door slamming. It could be thunder. It could be a car backfiring. It could be a gunshot. The brain doesn't know. It has to guess, and it's not making a guess, like, uh, intellectual guess. The guess is a motor plan. It's a plan-

    22. AHAndrew Huberman57:46

        Mm-hmm.

    23. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett57:47

        ...for changing the internal state of the body in order to support motor, skeletal motor movements. Do I need to run? Do I need to shut the window? Do I need to get an umbrella? Do I, you know?

    24. AHAndrew Huberman57:59

        Mm-hmm.

    25. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett58:00

        Do I need to hold my breath because a car has backfired? You know, what do I need to do? So, where does that plan come from? Well, it comes from past experience, the experience that's been wired into the brain, um, what the bra- I think that the evidence suggests that what the brain is doing is basically reinstating bits and pieces of past experience, so remembering, although we don't experience ourselves as remembering. But basically, it's reimplementing ensembles of signals from the past that are similar to the present in some way. Now, a bunch of things which are similar to each other, in psychology, is a category. So, what the brain is doing is it's creating a ca- it's constructing a category, and in fact, we think about the brain as a continuous category constructor. It's constructing a category of possible futures, possible outcomes, possible motor plans, and how does it know which is the right one? 'Cause it's not just picking one. There's going to be some sample that it's re- it's reimplementing, but how does it know which one, which is the right one? 'Cause there can only be one.

    26. AHAndrew Huberman59:22

        Well, I feel like in the example of a loud noise, what I immediately thought of as you were describing that is that my system would become aware of it, I would become aware of it, but then it's a question of, is there another loud noise? How closely are those loud noises spaced? Is it getting louder or less loud? And then, uh, and so a bunch of categories, it, it, it's like a bookshelf with an infinite number of books, but then with the second loud noise, now it's just, you know, one, uh, wing of the library. And then with the, the next thing that happens in the context, it starts narrowing, and then pretty soon you get presented with the book that says, "You know, the roof is about to cave in."

    27. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett59:57

        For sure, and, and I think your, your po- your, your analogy there is pointing out two things. One is that, um, really, why, why the, what the brain is attempting to do is to reduce uncertainty-

    28. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:09

        Mm-hmm.

    29. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:00:10

        ...because uncertainty is super expensive. Now, sometimes we, like, deliberately, you know, cultivate uncertainty, right? Like, we do not, you know, we deliberately try to learn things we don't, you know, that we don't know. We, we, you know, put ourselves in novel situations, you know, we seek novelty, and because it's fun and interesting and whatever, sure. But imagine every single waking moment of your life was like that, where you didn't know, you couldn't narrow things down from the library, to the wing, to the bookshelf, to the, you know, the, to the, the particular shelf on that bookshelf, to the fu-

    30. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:47

        It'd be terrifying.
12. 1:02:51 – 1:03:57

    Sponsor: InsideTracker

    1. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:02:51

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:51

       I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you meet your health goals. I'm a big believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test. However, with a lot of blood tests out there, you get information back about blood lipids, about hormones, and so on, but you don't know what to do with that information. With InsideTracker, they have a personalized platform that makes it very easy to understand your data, that is, to understand what those lipids, what those hormone levels, et cetera mean, and behavioral supplement nutrition and other protocols to adjust those numbers to bring them into the ranges that are ideal for your immediate and long-term health. InsideTracker's Ultimate Plan now includes measures of both ApoB and of insulin, which are key indicators of cardiovascular health and energy regulation. If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can visit insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of InsideTracker's plans. Again, that's insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off.

13. 1:03:57 – 1:14:45

    Brain & Summaries; Emotions as “Multimodal Summaries”

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:57

       There's this scene that comes to mind from that movie, I think it was Saving Private Ryan, where, like, the, the, um, the guys that are about to hit the ground on D-Day are flinching with every crack of gunfire. Like, they're just... Everything's a stimulus to move and-

    2. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:04:15

       Right.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:15

       ... to... And, and then some of the more seasoned soldiers are literally ge- having bullets whizzing by their head, and people are dropping dead all around them, and they're moving forward steely-eyed and stable and upright. And in part, we look at that and, and say, "Okay, they're courageous, they're seasoned, maybe they're desensitized in certain ways," but actually, it fits much better with the idea, based on what you're saying, it fits much better with the idea that, um, they have intimate knowledge, both conscious and unconscious knowledge, that something right next to them is a threat, but not a threat worth responding to.

    4. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:04:56

       Right. Exactly.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:56

       But if it were headed straight for them-

    6. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:04:58

       Yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:58

       ... they would-

    8. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:04:59

       So-

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:59

       ... qui- quite understandably duck.

    10. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:05:00

        What I would say is, is that it's, um, it's not, uh... You know, I keep referring to things as signals, and really I'm just, I'm- Y- That's, like, my generic word for a quantity of energy of some sort, you know? But your brain, my brain, every brain is constantly making signal-noise distin- you know, like, distinctions. "Do I need to care about this? Do I- Do I not need to care about this?" Right? And we have ways of learning, and we also have ways of cuing each other. So, um, you know, humans use eye gaze to cue each other about what is signal and what is noise, right? So if you and I were sitting- We're ha- Let's say we were at a coffee shop and we were in a part of town that I'd never been to before and we were sitting having coffee and, you know, a loud siren went by. If you turned and looked, I would probably turn and look because you just cued me that that was something I need to care about. If you ignored it, I would probably ignore it because you just cued me that I didn't need to worry about it, I didn't need to care, and we're constantly doing that with each other, and we also do it with little babies and with kids and that's how we teach children. "This is signal. This is noise. This, you need to worry about. This, you can ignore." And so yeah, your, your description is perfect. So what does this have to do- any of this have to do with emotion? In order to answer that part of the question, I, I, I want to say... So okay, you've got these signals. The brain is like- has these electrical signals going on. We'll just ignore the hormonal signals for the moment 'cause that's compli- You know, one is complicated. So it's got all these electrical signals going on. It's- When it's remembering something, it's just basically reinstating a pattern of signals. And it's got these signals coming in, um, from the sensory surfaces. Okay, so what's- so what is the brain doing? It's a signal processor, so what is it... I don't mean a computer, I mean a signal processor in the engineering sense. So what's it- What is it doing? Without getting into all the dynamics of prediction and, you know, whatever, what the brain is doing is it's, um, it's assembling a set of features. It's- Some of the features that it's assembling are very close in detail to the sensory surfaces of the body. So in primary visual cortex, there's a retinotopic map....the details there are very, very low level, like a line, an edge, you know? Same thing in primary auditory cortex, right? It's tonotopic, so there are tones. But it's very, very, very low level details, and we might... There are many, many, many, many of these little features, so we would say there, there's a, it's a high dimensional array, lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of features. And then, and let's just talk about one structure, just the cerebral cortex. Let's not worry about just... But what I'm about to say is basically true of really the rest of the brain as well. If you take the cortex off the surface, uh, the cortical sheet off the, that wavy, you know, (laughs) cortical sheet, you take it off the rest of the brain, the subcortical parts, and you stretch it out like a napkin, you can see there's a compression gradient there in the architecture of the neurons. So at the primary sensory areas, there are these tiny little pyramidal neurons that are representing these li- these very low level features, and they feed into bigger neurons, which feed into bigger neurons, which feed into more, bigger neurons. So what's happening is you've got this very detailed array being compressed in its dimensionality until you get to the middle of the brain, at the front, where there are many fewer neurons, but they're bigger and they have many more connections. So it's a dimensionality reduction that's happening.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:38

        So just to make sure I understand, um, correctly and that the audience understands, the physical world obviously is, um, transformed by our sensory apparati, the retina, the cochlea, the, the sensing neurons in our skin.

    12. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:08:54

        Yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:54

        Um, it's physical things, mechanical pressure, light-

    14. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:08:57

        Yeah, yeah.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:57

        ...photon, sound waves. Okay. Tho- that's translated into neural code, which is chemical and electrical.

    16. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:09:03

        Yeah.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:04

        And, and those sensory inputs are, are fairly vast and that use c- high dimension- high dimensionality, so lots of different orientations of lines, lot... Even, you know, even though it originates with just three, uh, cone photopigments, lots of opportunity for encoding different shades of color, contrasts, okay, and all of that. And so you have lots of little neurons to represent all the possibilities of the physical world that are occurring.

    18. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:09:29

        Mm-hmm.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:30

        But as that information is passed further up, (laughs) along, s- excuse me, I have to be careful with hi- the use of hierarchies 'cause that's controversial nowadays.

    20. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:09:38

        Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:38

        Not for political reasons, but-

    22. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:09:40

        Mm-hmm.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:40

        ...for accuracy reasons.

    24. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:09:42

        Mm-hmm.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:42

        Um, as that information is passed along, there's more, um, convergence-

    26. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:09:48

        Mm-hmm.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:48

        ...onto s- a smaller number of larger neurons.

    28. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:09:51

        Mm-hmm.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:52

        So these are neurons that have access to a lot of information, but in coarser form.

    30. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:09:55

        Right, so they are low... You know, it's like, like compressing an MP3, like how an MP3 compresses information, for example. So the cortex is representing features, so... And I, represent, I'm just using that in a generic way-
14. 1:14:45 – 1:19:40

    Emotional Granularity, Library Analogy

    1. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:14:45

       okay, so but, but before you used the word granularity, and so I'm going to use that word too. In fact, I've u- I've coined that phrase emotional granularity. Um, just as an aside, you know, I, I coined that phrase almost 30 years ago and now people study it like it's a phenomenon, which is cool in a sense, but also I kind of want to keep reminding them, like, that's a word that refers to a process. (laughs) It's not a thing.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:12

       Mm-hmm.

    3. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:15:12

       It's a process, and the, but the process is, so when the, the brain is a category constructor, how fine-grained are the categories? How precise are the categories, right? Like, if you're using, if your feature of equivalence that your brain is using is threat, you're in really big trouble, 'cause there are, like, a gazillion different sensory motor patterns that could go with threat. So your category is going to be massive. So how does the brain figure out which of those massive number of options is the one to use in this i- in, in this instance? If, on the other hand, you don't just want to use sensory motor patterns as the features of equivalence, or the features that you're using to say this instance right now is similar to these past instances, if I had to search, like, right now, what is similar to right now? It would be me sitting across the table from somebody who has a beard and is, um, dressed in black, and you know, there, there are a lot of details there that probably don't matter, right? So you, you'd be searching for a specific match from the past. That's not very efficient either. So you need something in the middle, and let me, that is to say, you need to have ca- your brain has to be able to make categories that are more fine-grained, but not super fine-grained, but they have to be more fine-grained than just threat.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:40

       Yeah, you want to keep the, in the library analogy that I made earlier, you want to keep the rest of the library accessible at some level.

    5. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:16:46

       Yeah.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:47

       So you're not just staring at that one book.

    7. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:16:49

       But if you use the category bad, this feels bad, then your brain is basically, um, going to be partially constructing an entire wing full of books, like, an entire wing full of options. If you use the word angry, um, then maybe it's a bookcase. It's constructing a bookcase full of options and a category that's the size of a bookcase. And if you were using the word frustrated, then maybe it's a shelf. The brain can learn to construct categories at different scales of gen- generalizability. So if I'm in an instance and, um, my brain is making a guess, is it drawing from past instances that were associated with the word anger, uh, were associated with the word fear? Maybe it's some combination. It's, the words are just features. They're just sounds. There are also all sorts of other features, like what was my heart doing? What, what, what kind of motor actions did I make? What did I see next? So the point being that I'm trying to bring here is that it's not like your brain creates an emotional state and then labels it. What your brain is doing is creating a category of possible futures, of what's going to ha- what it's going to do next, and that state is largely determined by the, what the brain is remembering.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:21

       Mm-hmm.

    9. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:18:22

       And how it's drawing from that huge population, that huge library of options, which books is it sampling?

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:31

        I love this so much because it explains so much that, frankly, uh, has been perplexing to me and also somewhat troubling to me. Like, for instance, I, um, we hear about emotional intelligence, you know, and, and sometimes I wonder whether or not, um, true emotional intelligence would be what you just des- described, the understanding of how this process works so that you can work with it, and I definitely want to talk about how one can work with this knowledge, because I think it's incredibly powerful in its, um, explanatory power, but also, um, its actionable power. Um, the other thing is that it's clear to me, just based on my experience today of hearing these words from other cultures that relate to different emotional states, that the system, unlike a lot of systems in the brain, I like to think is fairly plastic.

    11. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:19:17

        Yeah.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:19:17

        Like, the moment that you know that there are...... additional dimensions to sadness, anger, et cetera. There's something comforting about that. What's really unsettling is the idea that we have such broad bins that we are, we would define, you know, a near infinite number of situations as just fear. That would suck. That's not a good existence. And yet,

15. 1:19:40 – 1:29:04

    Brain & Compression, Planning

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:19:40

       I have to ask whether or not you think that as a species, not as a culture, but in our entire species, whether or not we are taking the exact opposite approach, that we're sort of moving into the emoji-ization. Is that a word? I'll make it a word, and people can assault me in the comments. Um, the emoji-ization of this very rich and complex system-

    2. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:20:02

       Yes.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:20:02

       ... we're starting to get into this mode of, like, "I'm gonna post an angry face and therefore, like, this is a bad... I'm angry at you. This is a bad interaction. We're gonna... It's, it's um, comba- potentially combative." Or, and you know, maybe, um, Twitter X or Instagram or other social media sites are kind of the e- the epitome of this, where you reduce this high dimensional space and you, you keep the, the sensory stimulation very high. It's movie after movie after movie and color and sound and people doing crazy parkour stuff and bears eating giraffes or whatever it is. (laughs) It's probably not bears eating giraffes, but l- you know what I mean. And you can see stuff that's sexual and violent and political and emotional and sweet, and then the cats are kissing the monkey and you're like... Or the monkey's kissing the cat, and so it's high dimensionality in terms of sensory space. But then what do we call it? We're like, "Oh, this is an emoji." You assign an emoji. You're hearting something. You're giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down. So I almost feel like we- we're (laughs) trying to, uh, we- we're regressing to a state where we're kind of like an infant trying to figure out, like, what the hell is going on and we're saying, "You know what? You get, like, six categories of response." When in reality, um, we should probably be expanding the number of different responses that we can have in order to accurately match the way that our nervous system actually works.

    4. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:21:18

       Yes, exactly. There are many different things we could talk about with respect to the summary that you just gave, which I in- I think is completely accurate. So what I would say is that if you look through even just the last, I don't know, 100 or so years, like the 19th, you know, 19th, 20th centuries maybe, you can see that the complexity of the... of people's responses expands and contracts, right? So for example, this is something that I've written really speculatively about, um, but one of the things that I f- found really interesting, um, is that, you know, authoritarianism, authoritarian thinking is the reduction of complexity to some things that are really, really simple. Like, you're getting rid of all the complexity to, you know, basically these very, very coarse, low dimensional judgments-

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:22:18

       Mm-hmm.

    6. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:22:18

       ... and things become black and white. Um, it's the avoidance of complexity, um, so that there can be simple single answers to things, and it happens in human culture at times and then, then there's an expansion of complexity at times too. So what predicts that? Like, what is it in the human nervous system or our collective human nervous... You know, like, we're, we're just a bunch of brains attached to bodies interacting with other brains (laughs) and bodies, right? So, like, what is it that causes these, um, ripples of... And, and I have some thoughts about that that are really, really, really speculative. Um, but I think the other thing that's, that's really important is that we've talked about... So we'll go back to our, our cortical sheet that we've... And by the way, this is just one compression gradient in the brain. There are others too, right? Um, there are at least four others that I can think of. Um, so this is just one. But all compression gradients work the same way, which is that... Now we've talked about going from the low level details, um, compressing to these multimodal summaries, these really, like, simple, um, features that are... Right? But that compression is what engineers would call lossy, meaning you lose the information. You lose the information. So when you go from lines and edges to a face, those neurons, they just know the face. They don't have... They lose. What they've thrown away, the details they've thrown away, those details are gone for those neurons that are representing a face.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:24:00

       They don't have access to them.

    8. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:24:01

       They don't have access to it. And we know... So we said, well, the brain is making a guess. It's making a guess about what these... what this big, very, very high dimensional, you know, soup of signals in the world and in the body, like, what do they mean, right? When the brain makes a guess, it starts with the compressed low dimensional signals. It starts with the features like anger or, like, threat, or it starts with these summaries and then it has to infer or guess. At every synapse, there's a guess that's being made about what the details are at the next level, because what's happening is the guess is basically the brain going from these really general things to these very specific sensory motor patterns. It happens along the cortical sheet. It happens also down the neuraxis, down the neur- you know, t- from the cortex to the midbrain to the brain stem to the spinal cord. You have to go from a representation of, you know, run to the actual physical movements of muscle spindles and, you know, angles of joints and things like that. So what you're doing is you're going in the other direction. You're adding detail, you're particularizing, and the brain is guessing. It's guessing-...well, if it's using anger as the general feature, well, which i- which instance of anger is it and what are the specifics that are g- going to happen? And, um-

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:25:36

       And what are the w- and, and forgive me, but w- and what are the adaptive steps that w- I might take or not take? Because, um, t- I'm quoting a lot today, so forgive me, but in the words of the great Sherrington, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, "The final common pathway is movement."

    10. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:25:53

        Is movement. And that's-

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:25:54

        And, and movement is nuanced, right?

    12. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:25:56

        Yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:25:56

        Humans, I, I suppose, have among the greatest variety of different speeds and types of movement. I think about parkour, gymnastics. Think about then what like a, a, a cheetah can do. Cheetahs are impressive. A gymnast is truly impressive in terms of the range of movements and speeds, et cetera. In any event, the ultimate choice that the nervous system has to make is whether or not to move, which direction, how fast or stay still-

    14. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:26:21

        Yeah.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:21

        ...move forward, move back. And, and I'm just, I'll just add 'cause I, I'm hoping that you'll expand on this. Um, it's been said before that ultimately, the nervous system is trying to make decisions about yum, yuck, or meh. Like, like am I going to move towards something? Am I going to move away from it? Or am I just going to stay put? And-

    16. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:26:40

        Well, that's only, that's only at the, the, the, that, that's a very, the, I would say that those are very low dimensional features.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:45

        Mm-hmm.

    18. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:26:45

        So those are those compressed features, but that's not the only thing the brain has to decide. That's just a misnomer.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:51

        Mm-hmm. Well, g- the, I can get out of this little pickle that I just put myself in by saying that I didn't say that.

    20. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:26:56

        No, I know you didn't.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:56

        And now I won't quote who did 'cause he's a very famous neuroscientist.

    22. LBDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett1:26:59

        No, no.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:59

        But he tried to reduce it all. He's at Caltech. It, um, uh, he's not somebody who studies emotion. He studies the visual system. But he said that, you know, that, that there's a, that the, the neural circuits, maybe it's 'cause he studies mice, are, are essentially binned into, um, yum, yuck, and meh outputs. And, and I've, I've always liked it on the one hand 'cause threes work and it's simple, but rarely is-

Episode duration: 2:39:03