change people's lives if you look at the chinese philosophers or will change youit will changr everyday living so i am looking forward to is the guy that spent time on the wester western phily to take a deeper look in the chinese philosophy. >> here tonight in celebration of the book how emotions are made the secret life of the brain. a university distinguished univd professor of psychology at northeastern university with a

pretense at harvard medical school and massachusetts general hospital and psychiatry radiology. she received a national institute of health directors pioneer award for the groundbreaking research on emotion in the brain. she's an elected member of the society of canada. here's the sampling. in the star review of the library journal says it presents a scientific explanation of why people are more persuaded by feeling they in fact. she offers and unintuitive theory that goes against not only the popular understanding but also that of traditional research. he motions don't rise. furthermore they are neither universal or located in specific regions. they vary by culture and result

from dynamic networks. they called the book remarkable for freshness of its ideas and "the wall street journal" calls it fascinating. in another review of the booklist says it is brilliant. [applause] >> thank you for that introduction. it's very special for me to be here to talk about the book this evening because this is our home bookstore and we've been coming here since it was in newtonvil newtonville. we have family and friends and i would like to welcome the rest of you as well. we will read a couple selections

from the book and then open up to questions. i will start with a passage i wrote about. i made pizza that was doctored to look as if it were green and moldy. i made fun of jell-o, let me know if you increase recipe. i used peach jell-o with little pieces of vegetables and i served apple juice in medicine urine sample cuts. but the best part of this party is the game we had after alleged. i took baby food, mashed carrots, beets, things like that and i smeared it artfully on diapers to look like t and the kids had to take each diaper and

hold it up to their nose. many of them had a full when they went to smell the diapers. this was a joyful discussed we have cultivated and believe it or not it actually holds the key to understanding how emotions are made. it's filled with unintuitive details, very counterintuitive. each day we experienced that the light of happiness, the dread of fear, the burn of anger that is these days a very common in motion and we are surrounded by people caught up in the throes of their own emotions. but these experiences as compelling as they are don't actually reveal what is going on inside of your brain and body.

the reason for this is the human brain is a master of deception that creates experiences and direct actions with a magician scale never revealing how it does so and the whole time it is giving a false sense of confidence that the product does the experience we have every day that the products reveal its inner workings. he motions seen the distinct because that is how we experience it so we assume they have separate causes inside of us because of the way that we experience the emotion and how it is happening to us. it's easier to come up with the wrong theme of emotions because we are just a bunch trying to figure out how brains work.

you see me, bookshelves, each other but to us it seems as if the visual information from the world so you see stuff all around you but that is not actually what is happening and i am to demonstrate this flu season a white square in the middle of this image? there is no white square on that

page so what is your brain doing to conjure an image of the square where no square exists this is something we talk about in the book this explains what there is to do with how the brain makes the motion. it's adding stuff from its array of experiences with others with angles and so on and it is constructing the square that you saw. at the back of your brain is constructed that image. they were changing their own to create lines that were present

so you could see the shape that was not physically there so you were in a manner of speaking hallucinating, not the kind of i better get to the hospital sort of hallucination. it reveals a couple of insights. the past experiences from photos and movies and so on giving meaning to the present sensations. it's invisible no matter how much you try you can't construct a square. we unmask the fact that it is occurring in your brain and the process is so habitual but its process to not see the square to see blank space instead.

this magic trick of the brain is called assimilation and it means that your brain was changing the firing of its own in the absence of incoming sensory information. there were no lines that caused you to see the square. they were changing other parts of your brain that let you to see the square. have you ever heard a song in your head that you can't get rid of, that is a sort of assimilation so now i want to do some with you think of the last time someone handed you a red juicy apple. you reached out for it, took a bite, experience the flavor and

during those moments they produced the movements so that you can process the sensation from the apple like its red color. when you bite into it it had a hint of sweetness and others caused her mouth to water and release enzymes, released cortisol to prepare your body to metabolize the sugar and apple and maybe even made your stomach turn a little bit of here's the cool thing just now 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 had seen and tasted and changed the firings to construct the mental image of an apple. your brain assimilated non- existent apple using sensory and motor neurons. so who here can imagine in their minds i am apple, like a mcintosh apple the kind you eat? who can't hear the crunch of the apple when you bite into it? and what about the taste, sort of parts with some sweetness? some people when i give this example start to salivate. right now, and your brain is changing the firing of its own

sensory neurons that you have the image of an apple, the taste of an apple, the sound of an apple and so on. this kind of simulation coming even though we are doing a very deliberative right now as an example is actually it occurs very quickly and very automatically in your brain. it's kind of business as usual for how your brain works. in my book, i explain how the square and apple are no different from what you are doing right now. you may think you are listening to the speech and reacting to my words but in fact your brain is creating simulations that are predicting every single word that comes out of my mouth. and if i had named a different body part, he would have been surprised. if you stop and think about it for a minute, your brain right now is doing something

remarkable. in some part of your brain they are changing the firing in other parts of your brain to anticipate what is coming next. here's how i like to think about it. your brain works like a scientist. it's always making a slew of predictions just like a scientist makes hypotheses 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 speeds by comparing them to incoming sensory input in the world much like a scientist compares hypotheses against the dangerous experiment and if your brain is predicting well, then they confirm the predictions of example if i pulled out an apple and showed it to you and it was

exactly how you simulated and predicted it, then no new information would enter very far into your brain because your neurons are already firing in a way that captured the visual information. you already were prepared to see it. sometimes though there is prediction after and your brain is like a scientist. it can be responsible and change its prediction to respond to the data so let's say the apple was slightly more green than what you had predicted, your brain would then change, it would learn the error and change its representation of the apple so you would see it differently. we have a fancy name for this in

the science of psychology. we call it learning. this is what you do when you learned. your brain is taking in information that it didn't have before so they can use it to predict better in the future. ..