a small small part in that resolution. >> host: here's the book. it's called "called to rise" by retired dallas police chief david brown. just out in the bookstores. >> guest: thank you so much, peter. appreciate it. take care. >> c-span, where history unfolded daily. in 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable-television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. >> lisa feldman barrett shirt and installation of her book "how emotions are made: the secret life of the brain." she is a university distinguished professor of psychology at northeastern

university with appointments at harvard medical school in massachusetts and general hospital in psychiatry and radiology. she received a national institutes of health directors pioneer award for her groundbreaking research on emotion in the brain. she is an elected member of the royal society of canada. here's a sampling of the phrase for her and her book. in a review, library journal says, she presents a new neuroscientific explanation of why people are more swayed by feelings than fax. she offers an intuitive theory echoes against out on the popular understanding but also that of traditional research. emotions don't arise, rather, we construct them on the fly. furthermore, emotions are neither universal nor located in specific brain regions.

they vary by culture and result from dynamic neuronal networks. "scientific american" calls the book remarkable for its freshness of its ideas and the "wall street journal" calls it fascinating. in another star review, booklist says quote that secretive selfie of the brain is brilliant. please help me welcome lisa feldman barrett. [applause] >> thanks very much. thank you so much. thank you for the lovely introduction. it's a very special me to be here to talk to you about the book this evening because this is actually our home bookstore. we live in newton and we've been coming to newtonville books actually since it was in newtonville. and then friends and family here as well, and i like to welcome the rest of you as well. what i'm going to do is read a couple of selections from the

book, and then we will open it up to questions. so i'm going to start with a passage that a road about a birthday party that i threw for my daughter when she was 12. we through the birthday party with the theme of gross foods. so i made pizza that was doctored to look as if it was green and moldy. it had like fuzzy cheese. i made vomit jell-o picky do want the recipe let me know. actually, i used peach jell-o and put in bits and pieces of chopped up pieces of vegetables. i served apple juice in medicine urine sample cups. [laughing] but the best part of this party was the game that we had after lunch. i took baby food, mashed carrots, mashed beef, things like that and i smeared it artfully on diapers to look like to come and the kids had to take

each diaper and hold up to the nose and take a good, deep with and identify the food bites. even though these kids knew that it was baby food, many of them had a full-bodied gag when they went to smell the diapers. this was exuberant, joyful discuss that with cultivated in these kids. and believe it or not this party action holds the key to understanding how emotions are major the signs of emotions is filled with an intuitive detail, very, very counterintuitive. each day we experience the delight of happiness, the dread of fear, the burn of anger. these days are some of us the burn a bank is a very common emotion. and we're surrounded by people are caught up in the throes of their own emotions. but these experiences, as compelling as they are, don't actually reveal what's going on

inside your brain and your body. and the reason for this is that the human brain is a master of deception. it creates experiences in direct actions with the magician skill, never revealing how it does so. and the whole time the brain is getting as a false sense of confidence that its products, our expenses, the ones with everyday, that these products review its inner workings. emotions seem distinct and feel built-in because that's really how we experience emotions. so we assume that joy and sadness and fear and anger and so on have separate causes inside of us because of the way that we experience emotion, as if it is happening to us. so when you have a brain like ours it's easy to come up with the wrong theory of emotion because effect largest a bunch of brains try to figure out how

brains work. so what i'd like to do now is give you i guess start at first principles. let's look around the room. when you look around the room you see me, bookshelves, each other. to us it seems as if the visual information from the world just enters the retina of your eyes and makes its way to your brain. so you see stuff all around you. but that is actually not what's happening, and i'm too divisive this i like to invite my lovely assistant up, and -- this is my husband. to show you an image. so who here sees a white square in the middle of this image? but there actually is no white square on that page.

so what is your brain doing to conjure an image of a square or no squir square exists? winfax vistas open space. well, this is something that we talk about in the book. what is happening, the book explains what is happening in your brain to create the perception of a square where there is none, and it also explains what this has to do with how the brain makes emotion. thank youthank you, my lovely a. your brain is basically, when it looks at the image, your brain is adding stuff from its vast array of prior experiences of other squares, of boxes, upper rooms with angles and so on, and it is constructing the square that you saw. neurons in your visual cortex at the back of your brain constructed that image for you. they were changing the firing, they were changing their own firing to create lines that were

not present so that you could see a shape that actually wasn't physically there. so you were in a manner of speaking hallucinating. not this scary kind of i better get to the hospital sort of hallucination, but the everyday my brain is built to work like this hallucination. your experience of the score revealed a couple of insights. first of all, your past experiences from direct encounters from photos, from movies and books and so on give meaning to your present sensations. additionally, the entire process of construction is invisible to you, the matter how hard you try you can't introspect and express yourself constructing that square. and as specially designed except unless the fact that construction is occurring in your brain. the process is so habitual that, in fact, it's very difficult for people to not see a square and just see blank space instead. this little magic trick of the

brain is called simulation. it means that your brain was changing the firing of its own neurons in the absence of incoming sensory information. there was no come there were no lines either the cause you to see a square. certain parts of your brain for changing the firing of other neurons in other parts of your brain, which led you to see a square. simulations can be visual as we just saw but they also involve other senses. so for example, have you ever heard a song playing in your head that you just can't get rid of? has that ever happened to anyone? so that kind of audio hallucinations also a sort of simulation. now i want to do some simulation with you. will do an example right now. i get the last time someone handed you a red, juicy apple. you reached out for it. you took a bite.

you experienced the tart flavor, and during those moments neurons in your brain, and essential parts of the brain, in the motor parts of your brain were firing. motor neurons fired to perdition movements. sensory neurons fired so that you could process the sensations in the apple, its red color. maybe it had a blush of green, and may have felt very smooth against your hand. when you get into it you could taste the tangy taste with a hint of sweetness. other neurons in your brain caused your mouth to water to release enzymes and begin digestion. release cortisol to prepare your body to metabolize sugars in the apple, and maybe even major stomach turn a little bit. but now here's the really cool thing. just now when i said the word apple, your brain responded to a

certain extent as if the apple was actually present. your brain combined bits and pieces of knowledge of previous apples that you've seen and tasted and change the firing of neurons in your centur sensory r region to conduct the mental image of an apple. your brain simulated nonexistent apple using sensory and motor neurons. so who here right now can imagine in the minds i and apple, like a macintosh apple, of the kind that you eat? and who here can hear the cries of the apple when you buy into it? and what about the taste of the apple, sort of tart, maybe with some sweetness? some people want to give this example actually start come they can feel themselves starting to salivate. right now your brain is changing

the firing of its own sensory neurons so that you have the image of an apple, the case of an apple, the sound of an apple and so on. this kind of simulation, even though we're doing it very deliberately right now as an example, is actually a cursory quickly and very automatically in your brain. it's kind of business as usual for how your brain works. in my book "how emotions are made" i explain how the square and apple are no different from what you are doing right now. you may think you're listening to me speak, reacting to my words, but in fact, your brain is creating simulations that are predicting every single word that comes out of my -- mouth. [laughing] ..

just like the scientists make competing hypothesis and like a scientist, your brain is using knowledge, past experience to estimate how confident you can be that each prediction is true. your brain then test these predictions by comparing them to incoming sensory input from the world, much like a scientist compares hypothesis against the data in an

experiment and if your brain is predicting well, then input from the world confirms your predictions. when you are simply simulating the apple, if an apple and showed it to you and it was exactly as you had stimulated it, as you had predicted it, then no new information from this apple would enter very far into your brain. because your neurons are already firing in a way that captured the visual information from the apple. you already were prepared to see it essentially. sometimes though, there's prediction error in your brain, like a scientist has options. it can be a responsible scientist and change its predictions to respond to the data. so let's say the apple was slightly more green than what you had simulated, what you had predicted. your brain would then change its, it would learn the error and change its representation of the apple so you would see the apple differently. this is, we have a fancy name

for this in the science of psychology and neuroscience. we call it learning. this is what you do when you learn. your brain is taking in information that has not had before so we can use it to predict and get better in the future.your brain can also be an unscrupulous scientist and enjoy ignore the information altogether like we saw with the square. or like the quintessential scientists, your brain and run armchair experience to imagine a world of pure simulation without any sensory input or any prediction error at all, just as you did when you imagine the apple or when you are hearing the sound of the song you can't get out of your head. and how emotions are made explain more about how simulations give meaning to sensations that allow you to experience the world and act in the world. the examples that i used here

so far are the object and events in the outside world like apples and squares. but the really important and wonderful thing is that this same process happens about the sensations inside your own body. this is a key insight to understanding howemotions are made . so, i am on page. there we go.from your brain's perspective, your body is just another source of sensory inputs that it has to make meaningful. sensations from your heart pounding, from your lungs expanding, from metabolism, from changing temperatures are ambiguous. these early physical sensations inside your body no objectives psychological meaning.

if you feel and eight in your stomach while you are sitting at the dinner table, you might experience that as hunger. if flu season is just around the corner, the same eight might be the experience of nausea. if you are a judge in a courtroom, you might experience the eight as a gut feeling that the defendant can't be trusted. in a given moment in a given context, your brain uses your past experience to give meaning to the internal sensations from your body as well as external sensations from the world. this is all happening continuously and simultaneously throughout your entire life. so from an aching stomach, your brain instructs an instance of hunger or nausea or mistrust. now consider that the same stomachache can also occur when you are sniffing a diaper that heavy with purced lamb as a kid did at my daughter's birthday party or you might experience the eight as longing if your

lover walks into the room or if you are in a doctor's office waiting for the results of a medical test, you might experience the eight as an anxious feeling. in these cases of disgust and longing and anxiety, your brain is using past experience to make sense of the meaning of your aching stomach together with the other sensations around you in the world. this is how your brain constructs your experiences and guide your actions. this is actually how emotions are made . emotions are meaning. they explain your body sensations in terms of what is going on around you. the simulations make a motion not only give you your feeling, they also allow your brain to know exactly what to do next. they are prescriptions for action.

so your emotions are not your reactions to the world even though it feels that way to you. in fact, they are your constructions of the world or more precisely your brain is constructing a representation of your body in the world at any given moment and this representation is your experience, often it is an experience of emotion. this perspective i realize is new to many of you. the book actually provides plenty of examples and a lot of evidence to help you understand how your brain works. when we talk about this as a new theory, we are using the word theory and a specific scientific way. a theory is not just a set of ideas. in science, iberia is a group of ideas that are backed up by a tremendous amount of scientific evidence as is the case with its theory. in how emotions are made, you will learn how the brain works. you will learn how this information empowers you to be able to better control your own emotions and improve your emotional intelligence.

it will show you how understanding how your brain works can benefit you in many domains of your life. and in addition, it explains why the theory of constructed emotion is so counterintuitive. how emotions are made uses the science of emotion as a convenient flashlight to eliminate all sorts of issues where emotions are important like in the relationship between physical health and mental health, in the law, in communicating across cultures, in rearing your children. and even in, it addresses whether animals have emotions like human emotions. the book also takes on one of my favorite topics which is how this new science of emotion fundamentally changes our understanding of human nature, of what it means to be human.

so what i'd like to do now is just take your questions or listen to your comments and thoughts and encourage you to have a close look at the book . so thanks very much. yes. how is this information about how the brain is forcing sound through mris? >> there's a number of different scientific literatures. one thing we know for example is from an anatomical standpoint, just looking how the brain is wired, we can see the brain is not wired for reaction. it's wired for prediction. the brain is wired in such a way when we look at how neurons are talking to each other we can see that the brain is wired use your past experience to make guesses about what's going to happen next and it's continually doing this. neuroanatomy tells us something about how the brakes brain works productively. there's evidence from signal processing.

your neurons have electrical signals that that's part of how neurons talk to each other with electrical signals so there's evidence from signaling, evidence from physiology, certainly evidence from brain imaging as well. evidence from lesion studies of humans and other animals who have brain lesions. there's evidence from observing young babies and children and how they learn to have emotion and learn to experience other people as having emotion, to perceive emotion in others. there's evidence from cross-cultural work where teams of researchers including some of my own have gone to remote cultures around the world including to africa, we've sent two teams to africa. there's a lot of evidence from a lot of different domains of science to reveal to us that even though to us it feels like we are reacting

to the world and that emotion lurks in some deep animalistic part of our brain, actually our brains are really structured that way and they don't work that way. it sounds like we have very little control in certain ways so you know, if i'm feeling and emotion i would assume it's not legitimate exactly but to appreciate the range of constructing this. so where it is me in a certain way. that's a great question. i talked a little bit about the self and your ownership of your own emotions. one of the things that becomes clear when you start to think about how the brain works, a couple things become clear. one of the things is you will never be able to snap your fingers and change how you feel just like that. that's not possible for most people to do.

you might be able to take a feeling of distress and change it from sadness to anger, for example, just by changing the kind of simulation that your brain does but turning down the volume on the intensity of the feeling is super hard to do. that being said, this understanding of the predictive power of the brain allows you to broaden the horizon of control for your emotions. for example, if it's really the case that your brain is using your past experience to predict and construct what's, what you are about to feel like in the immediate future, it means that if you invest a little bit of effort to cultivate new experiences in the present, that feed your brain to more automatically make different emotions in the future. that's one way to for example learning new emotion words.

learning emotion concepts from other cultures can actually broaden the repertoire or vocabulary of emotions that your brain can might make and if you practice, it can make them automatically with very little effort from you. and there are additional benefits to learning emotion where it's for example for school age children, when you teach them to broaden their emotion vocabulary, 20 or 30 minutes a week, it doesn't just improve their social functioning and ability to communicate, it improves their test scores and it changes the whole emotional climate of the classroom because the kids have more control over their experience and over their behavior. yes, montana. >>. [inaudible] ... the realization because a lot of time we think of emotions as these innate and uncontrollable actions that just happen but like, sort of being able to recognize that

there's nothing about and emotion that is an action, it's alljust prediction . that means that you in theory have the capability to recognize that prediction before you act which is great. it's more kind of degrading to realize that and being able to change your emotions by situations around you instead of these learning experiences, i learned some of that in different disparities like bbt therapy where you sort of change the sensations around you in order to sort of change what your are simulating, i guess .

>> that's exactly right. oftentimes i'll get questions where people will ask me how is this theory, how does it relate to dbt or cbc which are different cognitive behavioral therapies and so on and what you are describing is exactly one really important piece of this. so your brain is automatically constructing simulations as predictions of what's going to happen next. so with using the present sensory array right now, the sights and sounds and smells and feelings from your body in the present moment to predict what's going to happen in the next moment and then it uses the date, the evidence from the next moment to either confirm those predictions and maybe become your experience or to modify them.one way to also control your emotions is to notice more details.

to be mindful of more details in the present moment. that actually gives your brain more freedom to simulate new and different things. there's a very cool thing that our brains do. our brains don't just search for a match in our prior experience and retrieve a memory kind of like a file, right? our brains and take different pieces of past experience and use them and assemble them in a brand-new way to make simulations and therefore predictions so that how we have terrific imaginations. that's how we daydream that's really also how we make emotions. so we can make emotions sometimes we don't even have words for because we can make the simulation on the fly using bits and pieces of past experience. for example, before we had

the german word shannon freud which means, does anyone know what this emotion is? it's too yes, experience pleasure in someone else's discomfort. and but even before we knew that word, we could make that emotion and we could perceive that emotion in others. it's just that it was effortful to do it because our brains had to combine bits and pieces of past experience in a new way. there's a scientific term for that called generativity. and if i wanted to explain to you the feeling of pleasure in someone else's misfortune, it would take me a bunch of words do not only explain to you the experience but to also explain the context in which i was experiencing this emotion so that you didn't think i was a horrible person because if you don't know me at all and i just told you how i'm feeling pleasure at somebody else's misfortune, you might

think what's wrong with her, seriously so i would have to give you the whole context and describe the feeling and it would take me a long time just like it is right now, it would be very verbose. instead, when we learn the word i can just say a single word to you and conjure in your brain a simulation with many, many features in a very efficient way. so the more detail that you pay attention to in the world, the more words that you learn concepts that your brain learns to make, the more control you have over your emotions. one last thing, i think controlling your emotion doesn't just mean not making some emotions and making others, it sometimes means not making an emotion at all so in the book for example i describe this instance where, which is a story actually

where i was in graduate school and there was this guy who was asking me out. and i kept saying no and eventually i thought okay, i'll go have coffee and then we can both be on our way. so i didn't find them particularly compelling but i went out for coffee with him and while we were having coffee i realized i'm starting to feel flushed and i'm kind of jittery and i was having a little bit of trouble concentrating andi thought okay , i must be really attracted to him so okay, he asked me to go out again and i was like for sure. i was feeling dizzy but i said okay. then we parted, we parted ways and i went home and i put my keys in the door, turned the lock, open the door, ran to the bathroom and i was in bed for a week. now, this spreading nest, the

jitteriness, all of that, it wasn't that i was mistaking that attraction but i was using those sensations to create a feeling of attraction and i actually did date this guy for a couple months but imagine how much grief i would have saved myself if i had been able to not take those feelings and construct an emotion out of them but to construct nearly a physical symptom as in oh, i must be coming down with the flu. i point is that sometimes it's better not to experience , not to create an emotion, sometimes a physical sensation is better perceived as a physical can sensation instead of a big emotional event that can dictate your actions . sometimes for several months later. other questions? >> you talked about actually seeing what's going on in the world, actually looking at it.

i may be totally wrong about this but i don't think so. i've read that the visual cortex is constantly bombarded by billions of photons which it could not possibly begin to organize in a stream and that what it does is it creates in a sense templates so that if you come out of your front door and you are walking down your street, you think you are looking at your street, what you're looking at is a generalization that your brain has made about the street, if a dog was over here, you notice it etc. and am i going off the deep end here? >> what i would say is that i think that your brain is creating generalizations but it is, there's a lot of sensory information in the world that is very regular and so what your brain is

very efficient. it needs to be efficient. it's important for your brain to be efficient. when i say efficient, i mean metabolically efficient. if your brain is not efficient,it's problematic so , because your brain is a very expensive organ. those neurons are very expensive. take up about 20 percent of our entire metabolic budget even though our brain only weighs about three pounds so it's important for us to be frugal, to be metabolically efficient. and what allows you to be metabolically efficient is that your brain gets rid of redundancies so your retina for example is wired in such a way as to remove redundant signals so only what is different. for example, right now your retina is taking in information that is going to your visual cortex but it's actually removing all the correlated redundant signals, only sending the differences

in the visual sensations from the last moment. so it's very efficient in that way it's like the dog running across the street or the person that you know only showing up but that it is possible to consciously make yourself see, to actually look to kind of dispel this generalization and ... >> it is but it's very hard. a couple years ago i wanted to learn to paint so and i'm saying this when i have two artists in the audience but you'll forgive me but i wanted to learn to paint and i learned was that that if you take a three-dimensional object and you just take the object and you try to transfer it on a two-dimensional canvas you will get a pretty crappy looking object. i would have used more colorful language but we are on television.

you will get a crappy looking object. so what you can do is you can train yourself to deconstruct the object into pieces of life. and if you train yourself to see pieces of white and you transfer the pieces of light onto the canvas, you will get a reasonably looking three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional canvas unless you are me in which case you will get a crappy looking at book but the point is you can train yourself to see the world differently. but what you're doing there is you are essentially simulating differently. i want to give you another example, maybe my assistant will come back up and i have another example of this that might answer your question. so here's an image that i'm going to show you, the black and white, yeah.

yeah, that one. so for any of you who've seen this before, fernando, don't say anything. what do you see in this image? anyone? anyone? right. so a lot of people what they see in this image is just blocks of black and white. and if that's what you are seeing, then you are experiencing something called experiential blindness. your brain can't predict, can't simulate in advance what this is so you don't really see anything. so now, i'm going to give you an experience that is going to cure your experiential blindness. are you ready to be cured?

okay, here we go. okay, now take this, yes. you look at this, how many of you can still see a thing? not too many. what to do it again? it works better when i have a computer because i can just overlay one on top of the other but take it away. so for many people, they can still see the head of the snake. they can still see part of the body of the snake and this is very similar to what happens with the kinesis square, the white with the four pack that made the square. what's happening now is that i've given your brain and experience. you've cultivated an experience that has seeded

your brain to allow it to make predictions. so if you see parts of the snake there, your brain is able to simulate, to change the firing of its own neuron to see lines where there are no lines so you see an object where there is no object. now recently, when i was doing an event a woman came up to me afterwards and she said i want you to tell me what's wrong with my brain. and i said okay, i don't know but i'm happy to, she said when i look at those black-and-white blobs, i see a louisiana swap. and then when he we showed a snake, i saw, i showed this show the snake and then i show the black-and-white blobs again and she said she saw a snake for an instant but then it went away and i said a louisiana swap again. what is wrong with my brain? and i was like, nothing's wrong with your brain, it's working perfectly. how long have you lived in louisiana, she had no accident so i didn't know and she said my whole life. i said you spent your whole

life looking at louisiana swamps, your brain is able to simulate this really well. i just gave you an experience of a snake for what, 10 seconds. so your brain has an ability to make that, to modulate its own neurons to make that image in your head is much weaker than to make a louisiana swap which you been making your whole life. so you have to practice and you have to practice being able to make a new simulation and if you process it a little bit, it will be easier to do so that it becomes automatic for you to do. so it is possible for you to change how you see things, absolutely. yes. >> quick question, this may be sort of semantics but when you talked about how you see the snake and then you see

the black-and-white picture, yours you simulate seeing lines. >> could you also say that you're not seeing the black-and-white picture differently, you just are interpreting it differently. ask your interpreting the image. >> you could say that but of course every thought and feeling and interpretation that you have occurs somewhere in your brain. >> so even if you were saying first of all, i have to tell you it isn't just an interpretation, it actually is vision . i'll see if you an example in a moment as evidence of that but what i want to do is sort of address the philosophical issue that you are raising when you say isn't it just interpretation, i would say and interpretation also in occurs in the firing of your neurons. if you didn't have neurons that fire in a particular way, you wouldn't have an interpretation, everything , every mental event you experience is a computational

moment in your brain. if your brain, if your nerds are working, you don't have experience. so but let me say it slightly differently, when we can influence the kinds of addictions that people make without their awareness so for example we have, it's a procedure that's called continuous flash suppression. so to one eye, we present a neutral face, like a face of a person that's not making any expressions, just at rest area and then we will also maybe flash visual noise or some black-and-white skate squares and the neutral face again so there's a lot of dynamic visual information that's being flashed, including a neutral face. and in the other eye, we

present information that is positive or negative that's going to make the person more pleasant or more unpleasant so we're actually changing the physical state of their body without their awareness because this image is very low contrast so when i present you images here to your face or eyes, your brain only, your brain encodes both but you consciously only see one.so the other one is still being, your neurons are still capturing it but you're completely visually unaware. when we do that, it does change peoples interpretation of the face. so when i make the field more pleasant, i change your physical sensations with an image that you will make you feel more pleasant. you see that neutral face as more trustworthy, more likable, more competent, more intelligent, more attractive . when i without your awareness change your feelings to be

more negative, more unpleasant, you see that person as less trustworthy, less likable and so forth. that's changing the interpretation of the face but it actually changes the visual image of the face. the visual image of the face, that is people actually see the face as slightly more pleasant or slightly less pleasant depending on how we've manipulated their physical state. so the point is that when you're, when you have good evidence to show that when your brain is creating a simulation, you are changing the firing not just of regions that are thought to be important for interpretation, you're changing the prime firing of primary sensory neurons so for example when we do these studies a simulation where we put someone in a scanner, we are relying completely still and their eyes are closed and

they are listening to a brief prompt to create a whole simulated image and then we scan them while they are playing the simulation, their line completely still but we see massive activity, changes of activity in the sensory cortex and mortar cortex even though they're not moving. their eyes are closed, we see massive changes of activity in the primary visual cortex. we see changes in auditory cortex but even though they are no longer listening, to the scenario we still see those changes. we also see changes in the regions of the brain that represent sensations from the body and that actually control the body so we see activation in brainstem regions all the way down that are controlling the body. so simulations are fully embodied which means that it isn't just changing what we

would conventionally understand as the interpretation, it's actively changing the way that sensations are perceived. was that your one question? >> the other question, you said at the beginning that you have some suggestions or ideas in the book about how to either change your emotions or control your emotions or something like that. can you talk more about that? >> i've given one example about exposing your brain to that very cartesian way that sounds but to basically cultivate new experiences that increase the vocabulary or the range of simulations and therefore emotions your brain can make. here's another, there are a lot of examples i give but here's another example. your brain, we think of

brains as necessary for us having evolved for thinking and feeling and seeing but actually, brains evolved for the purpose of controlling your body. so if you didn't move and you didn't need to extend resources in order to take in more resources, you would need a brain. >> so the brains one of its primary jobs is to control the symptoms of your body, to control your autonomic nervous system which controls your heart and lungs and so on, to control your immune systems which keeps you healthy, and lets you develop an autoimmune disorder and your metabolism. and it does this productively. it's preparing your body to move in advance of the movement.

so for example, if you are sitting down and your brain is about to stand you up, it needs to change your blood pressure so that oxygen can get to your brain before you stand. because if you did it after you stand, you think. >> when you're playing baseball for example, it seems to you as if the picture is throwing the ball and you look at the ball and then you go to swing. so that the ball is the stimulus and you swing as a reaction but in fact if you waited until you consciously saw the ball and swung, the ball would go whizzing by because you can't now plan and mount a physical movement fast enough to react to a ball once you see it. what's happening when people play baseball is that where they see where the ball is at any given moment and they are predicting where the ball is going to be in the next moment and they begin to prepare to swing in advance

and hit the ball where they are predicting it's going to be so really, that's why baseball is this very cool kind of dynamic between the picture and the batter because the picture is trying to get the batter to miss predict where the ball is going to be essentially. as your brain controls your body in this manner, it also is anticipating the sensations from your body. so the beating of your heart and the expansion of your lungs and so on and so forth. >> most of the time you can't feel that. >> and you don't, none of us feel the sensations from our body with the same degree of detail that we experience the outside world.and the reason why, we are not wired to feel every eight and pain in our body is because if we did, we never pay attention to anything in the outside world so think about when someone has appendicitis, even whensomething is wrong , you get this kind of dull ache in your old abdomen and it takes hours and hours for

it to become a very precise pain. so most of the time when that , most sensations from our bodies we experience as pleasant feelings, unpleasant feeling, feeling worked out or calm, you have very simple feelings but scientists call affect your mood. >> they're not specific to emotion. your brain is controlling your body your whole life so every waking moment of your life you also have some feelings of affect. sometimes when they are intense you make emotions out of them but other times you make other things like perception so if somebody cuts you off on the highway you're like, that guy is an hassle. that's perception or a delicious drink or so forth. here's the thing. when your brain is , you can think of your brain as the financial office of your body. it's helping to figure out where resources are needed to keep everything in balance.

so if you are about to stand up and you need oxygen to your muscles, it will move oxygen to your muscles and less oxygen somewhere else for example. when your brain is having trouble regulating your body, when your body budget is trying to regulate your expenditure of energy and your intake of energy, the revenues that you get from the world, and when your budget is a little bit in the red. you experience that not as physical sensations in your body, you experience it as feeling crappy. now, we have the kind of culture that is designed to throw our body out of balance. >> there are many things which throw a body budget out of balance. if we had to design from scratch a context that would cause people to feel crap a lot of the time, it would be

our culture. things like we don't sleep enough. we eat pseudo-food. we often don't exercise enough. we regulate each other's nervous systems because we are social species. the best thing for the human body budget is another human. the worst thing for another human's body budget is another human so social media, social evaluation. if i want to disrupt your body budget, all i have to do is make you think that i might be evaluating you negatively. not that for sure i am but just some ambiguity. that will not your body budget out of balance immediately. a lot of times, we are walking around, people are walking around with unbalanced body budgets and they feel like crap and if you feel like crap in an intense way, your brain will make an emotion out of it. a lot of what we feel as negative emotion, it comes

from an unbalanced body budget. so another thing i talk about in the book, it sounds like i'm being a mother instead of a scientist when i say eat vegetables, get enough sleep, exercise every day . that sounds really like i'm being a mother and i am a mother so i do say that to my daughter and she has the appropriate eye roll and whatever but i'm also telling you as a neuroscientist that a lot of things you can do is control one of the ingredients to making emotion and that is to keep your body budget as healthy as possible because that will affect how that happens and how you make negative emotion and what kind of negative emotion you will make . so that's one whole domain that i talk about in the book and i also talk about how the connection between your mind and your body is not metaphorical.

understanding the architecture of the predictive brain, it becomes clear exactly on what the relationship is between mental health and physical health or mental illness and physical illness. so that's another example of how you can control your emotions in ways that wouldn't necessarily seem to be important to emotion but in fact are extremely potent ways to regulate your feelings. other questions? >> what are the reaction from others in your field to your novel ideals, it's a very broad field but popular. >> so i'm sorry, what's your name? kate mentioned that trying brain. for those of you who don't know what that word means, it's the idea that it's

really the idea that comes from plato originally so when plato wrote about the human psyche or mind as we would call it now, he talked about the human mind having three parts, appetite, like hunger and a desire for sex, thirst and so on. emotions which he called the passions and appetites and passions or emotions were represented as to wild horses that were controlled by a chariot driver which was representing rationality or cognition. well, many, many centuries , a long time scientists believe this also represented how the brain evolved. so who here has heard of a lizard brain, that we know we have this lizard brain? the idea is that our appetites are part of our lizard brain.they are deep inside the brainstem of our

brains and then wrap around that is a limbic system which evil to represent emotion so this is where emotions are supposed to be, that the hypothesis and then controlling all that is our highly evolved neo cortex which is where cognition live or rationality lives. and that rationality is controlling these other parts of the brain. that's a great story. it's a story that's very popular. it's popular in industry, in the media, everybody loves that story. the problem with the story is that your brain didn't evil, no rain evolved with

sedimentary layers. the cortex didn't evil like icing on an already baked cake. people have known in evolutionary biology it's been known for almost a century that brains did not evolve that way, they don't grow that way, they're not organized that way. brains are like companies, to use a phrase from a neurobiologist george freed her. as they grow, they reorganize. they reorganize their composition. it's highly debated still weather, for the most part most of the cortex, cerebral cortex of your brain can be found in every mammal so there are one or two parts where people debate over whether it's new to primates, let's say but even in those cases i think it's pretty clear to a lot of us that there is no neo cortex. it's actually just certain parts of the brain have grown bigger because they developed for longer in development. so i guess just to say that one of the most deeply held views, one of the most

cherished views of human nature is embedded in the trying brain idea and it's just fundamentally flawed. and i must say that the law embodies the trying brain economics, embodies this idea that we have these, your mind is a battleground between emotion and cognition. that those two are in battle to control your behavior. that's the sort of met basically. so how do people respond? it depends, on who you ask. so evolutionary biologists have no or they celebrate the theory of constructive emotion for the most part. they actually i would say statisticians, engineers,

anyone who does anything computational, there's a whole range of computational neuroscience where their reaction to the book is interesting, what's all the fuss about, nobody really believes there are one circuit for anger, one circuit for fear, one circuit for sadness, nobody really believes that and i'm like actually, there are people who believe that. in psychology, i think it depends. the place where the debate is most intense is in the science of emotion itself. and it tends tobreak down in the following way. young people , young scientists and scientists who know something about anatomy or physiology, who do something more than just neural imaging or more than brain scans, they tend to find it very compelling and useful. >> because the ideas in this book, the theory in this book doesn't just explain the

existing evidence, doesn't just explain the existing anomalies of classical view of emotion which is the idea that we have these in a emotions and it doesn't just explain the anomalies, doesn't explain all the existing evidence, it also opens up brand-new questions that nobody's ever thought to ask before which is the value of a good theory. not just to explain what we know, it's also to broaden what we don't know so that we can make additional discoveries that will help people in their everyday lives. now there are some people who stillcling to the classical view of emotion , for sure. there are some. i even think some of them in the acknowledgments section of my book because you know, they have their whole careers are wrapped on this idea of

the classical view of emotion. and to some extent, they participate in the process of science just as much as anybody else so what i will say is this, that in 20 years from now , i hope that a lot of what's in this book will still be, we will still believe it to be true. but even if some of it isn't, even if some of it is improved by the people who intrude on it, it's still part of theprocess of science is i think you know , is using theory and existing theory and existing tools to push the boundaries of discovery which means sometimes some of the things that you think are true today turn out to be maybe only conditionally true, under certain conditions tomorrow so in the classic view of emotion what i would say is i

don't think it's true in the sense that it's highly doubtful that that classical view is true but it's useful in certain contexts area in the sense that we know that ptolemies equations don't actually tell us how the universe works but they are super useful for plotting the trajectories of satellites around the earth. they are useful in a particular context. einstein, einstein's discovery didn't invalidate everything newton had to say. newton, what that showed that is what you know newton thought was universal was only under certain conditions. i think that part of, one of the things that i tried to make clear in the book is that the classical view of emotion, the people who study that view, it's not that

they've discovered nothing or what they've discovered is completely wrong. it's that the discoveries are revealing something that's important but maybe different from what they thought. >> if the emotions, if it feels to ask like emotions happen to us, it feels as if we look at them in one space and we can read the emotion in someone's face the way we would read words on a page, even though it's not true that we have circuits in our brains for emotion, even though it's not true that we have circuits that allow us to make expressions innately and recognize them innately, even though that's not true, the fact that we have those experiences, it feels that way not to everybody in the world but to us it feels that way. it's an indication that there's something really important there to be explained. the insight is not the experience is not wrong. it's just that what we learned from those insights and experiences just somewhat different from what those

scientists thought they learned, the data are still valuable. >> okay. sure. [applause] so lisa will be sitting on the table out front to sign copies of her book which you can purchase at the front desk and a reminder that anything else you purchase is 20 percent off if you buy one of her books. thank you all. >> thanks very much for your attention, great questions. [applause] can i pass this to you? >>. [inaudible conversation] i think he knows i do his job. i've had some training, yeah. my pleasure. >>.

>> you very much. >> i'm just thinking about that at school. and all the ways and feeling like it's tradition. >> i've never heard that word years ago. >>. >> we've been talking with our entire school about mindfulness, being able to slow down and you know, change it just slightly, and i can't do that. >> i can't do that at the moment. but's i have to know, i think there's a lot there. >> i have to tell you that a couple of things, one is that there are programs that actually teach young children emotion words. and it's remarkable actually what the effects are.

i'm thinking for example of the work done by i think yale, the center for emotional intelligence. >> and it's really remarkable. >> part of the reason why they have such a big effect is that they actually help kids first of all notice details that the otherwise wouldn't have noticed. but also the parts of the brain that are involved in learning words and learning concepts actually, those parts of the brain regulate your body directly. so concepts and words, emotion words or mental state words are tools that your brain uses to literally control the physical systems of the body. >> i published a paper about this on monday in the journal of nature. >> and acumen behavior. and laid out this, i described in the book. the second thing i think is that for all older kids, i think that the culture of

casual brutality where kids talk to each other, the way they talk to each other and treat each other is very bad. >> i agree. >> and it's very bad for their health, very bad their mental health, and it bad for their nervous systems in general. >> i think that in fact in the process of putting together an article for a magazine about this but i think one of the major barriers to innovation, we are at an innovation culture, right? our ability to compete in the global economy depends on innovation. more innovation requires people and kids to learn to fail and then they learn to innovate. it's the key aspect of innovation is learning to fail. when you want to learn, how do you learn? you have to work hard and it can sometimes be unpleasant

but if you are walking around burden by social uncertainty, where people are evaluating you. maybe they are speaking toyou in a way that is very unpleasant . there are social media all the time, they're not sleeping enough. i'm not talking about you know, bullshit liberal political correctness here. i'm talking about we have a culture of casual brutality. it's on television, people bully each other to laugh tracks. people have studied this. it's very, very bad and that's something that can be changed so easily. with a little bit of education. a little bit of education and a little bit of teaching of emotional vocabulary words. and this could change quite a bit for the kids in our schools but you know, >> people have to understand that the mind and body really

are connected in a really fundamentally real way. it's not metaphorical. >> so that's a little bit of, i go into a little bit of that in the book about mindfulness and vocabulary and about if we are collecting brains then we really do influence each other's nervous systems because we are commercial animals, that our responsibility is only to ourselves and to control our own emotions. we have an impact on other people and we need to think about that. >> i can't wait to get into this book. >>. >> book tv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading. >> i'm going to start by inching up the essays of montana which i've been reading and then i'm going to move into a reread of fools,

fraud and firebrand by roger written. then after that, i will continue on with my research in the studies i've been doing on the 1960s particularly the 6068 elections. and so i began there with gary wills, the discussion of the conventions in miami and chicago in 68 and have gone from their and i will do on bartow echoes fraud cemetery and i will also finish up with a couple michael creighton fiction. >> the first two books you listed, what's the purpose of reading? >> the mantegna book is i'm reading is he is right at the nations. of moving into the enlightenment era in some ways.

he's considered to be a prototypical humanist in some ways. i think the educated on the western civilization should probably read mantegna. secondly, the fools, firebrand and whatever else that rogers group is calling these folks, it's a look at the new left. >> taking us through the from probably 1920s forward. >> and the new left and how that develops and i'm interested in that. >> how many books you have going at one time. >> right now i think i got six books going. >> so. >> how you manage that? >> i don't speak sleep much. >> and you read whatever you're in the mood to read. >>

at the doctrine of liberty is in another itself that is her doctrine of liberty within my faith which is the church of latter day saints. jim demint started working with a group to try to get an article v convention to rewrite aspects of the other states constitution which i adamantly opposed to. i used to fight that all the time and debate that. i'm tired of debating. underscored right a book parts i wrote a book and it's called back.com. >> booktv wants to know what

you're reading. send us your summer reading list via twitter @booktv or instagram at book underscore booktv or for our facebook page facebook.com/booktv. >> booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> jack unit has been as a journalist in germany since 1994 including more than a decade as a correspondent at business week magazine here he joined "new york times" county joined a times in january 2010 a as a business and economics writer based in frankfort. during his rookie year at his new job, he won in your times publisher award in 2011 for coverage of the european debt crisis. keeping state in his pursuit of having and a lustrous international career as a journalist, jack continue to write about business,