recently spoke at a bookstore and newton massachusetts. this is just over one hour. >> lisa feldman barret is here tonight in celebration of her book "how emotions are made: the secret life of the brain". doctor barrett is a university distinguished professor of psychology at northeastern university with appointments at harvard medical school in massachusetts and at the 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 is a sampling of the praise for doctor barrett in her book. in a review library journal says barrett presents a new nor

scientific explanation of why people are more swayed by feelings than facts. she offers unintuitive theory that goes against not only the popular understanding but also that of traditional research. emotions do not 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 because the book freshness. in the wall street journal because it fascinating. and another review, list says quote - barrett figurative healthy of the brain is brilliance. please help me welcome, lisa feldman barret. [applause] >> thank you so much. thank you for that lovely

introduction. it is very special for 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 have been coming here since it was in newtonville. and then you know friends and family here as well. i would like to welcome - as well. i'm going to be a couple of selections from the book and then we will open up to questions. i will start with a passage i wrote about a birthday party that through my daughter when she was 12 result. 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 multiperiod so it has like fuzzy cheese. i made vomit jell-o. if you want the recipe let me know!

it actually, i used peach jell-o and put in bits and pieces of chopped up little pieces of vegetables. apple juice and medicine sample cups. but the best part of the party was the game that we had after lunch.i took baby food, mashed carrots, mashed beef and things like that. i smeared it artfully on diapers to look like poo . the kids had to take each diaper and hold up to the nose take a deep smell and identify the smell. even though the kids know is baby food, many of them had a gag when they went to smell the diapers. this exuberant joyful discussed that we had cultivated as kids and believe it or not the party actually holds the key to understanding how emotions are made. the science of emotion is filled with unintuitive detail,

very counterintuitive. each day we experience the delight of happiness, the dread of fear, the burn of anger. these days resembles the burn of anger is a very common emotion. and we are surrounded by people who are caught up in the throes of their own emotion. but these experiences, as compelling as they are, do not actually reveal what's going on inside your brain and your body. the reason for this is that the human brain is a master of deception. it creates direct actions with magician skill. never revealing how it does though. and the whole time, the brain is giving us a false sense of confidence that i was experiences that we have every day, that these reveal the inner workings. emotions seem distinct and feel built in. because that is really how we

experience emotions. we assume that joy and sadness and fear and anger and so on of separate causes inside of us because of the way that we experience emotions. as it is happening to us. it is easy to come up with the ron beer emotions because in fact we're just a bunch of grades trying to figure out how brains work. what i would like to do now is give you a, i guess started first principle. let's look around the room. when you look around you see me, he seeped book shows and each other. first it seems as if that visual information from the world just enters the retina of your eye and mrs. faye to raise vc stuff all around you.

that is actually not what's happening. and to demonstrate visibility and bite my lovely assistant and this is my husband. so who here sees a white square in the middle of this image? actually is no white square on that page. so what is your brain doing to conjure an image where no square exist where there is just in fact open space? well, this is something that we talked about in the book. the book explains what is happening in your brain to create the perception of a square there is none and it also explains what this has to do with how the brain makes emotions. thank you my lovely assistant. your brain is basically, when it looks at the image your

brain is adding stuff from its vast array of experiences of other squares, boxes, rooms, angles and so on. and it is constructing the square that you saw. neurons in the visual cortex in the back of the brain constructed image for you. they were changing the firing for their own firing to create lines that weren't present so you could see a shape that actually wasn't physically there. so you were in a matter of speaking hallucinating. not the scary kind of i better get to the hospital kind of hallucination but the every day, my brain is built to work like a hallucination. your experience of that square reveals a couple of insights. first of all your past experiences from direct encounters for movies and books and so on give meaning to your

present sensation. your entire process of this is invisible to you. no matter how much you try you cannot experience yourself constructing that square. and we need an especially designed example tools unmask the fact that this is occurring in your brain. the process is so habitual that in fact, it is 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 fire of its own neurons. in the absence of the incoming sensory information. there are no lines there that caused you to see a square -- simulation can be visual as we just saw but they also involve

other senses. for example, have you ever heard a song playing in your head that you just cannot get rid of? did that ever happen to anyone? yeah. so that kind of audio hallucination is also a sort of simulation. so now i want to do some simulation with you. we will do an example right now. think of the last time someone handed you a red juicy apple. he reached out for it, took a bite and experience the tart flavor. during those moments neurons in your brain and the northern parts of your brain refinery. motor neurons fired and sensory neurons fired so that you could process the sensations from the apple. like the color, it may be a blush of green, maybe it felt smooth against her hand. when you bit into it you could taste the tangy taste with a hint of sweetness.

other neurons in your brain because your mouth to water, to release enzymes and begin digestion. and cortisol to prepare your body to process the sugars and maybe make your stomach churn a little bit. but now here is the really cool thing. just now, when i said the word apple, your brain responded to a certain extent that the apples actually present. your brain combines bits and pieces of knowledge of previous apples that you have seen and tasted and changed the firing of neurons in your sensory region to construct a mental image of an apple. your brain simulated nonexistent apple using sensory and motor neurons. so who here right now can imagine in their minds eye and apple?

like one that you each champion who here can hear the crunch of the apple when you bite into it? and what about the taste of the apple? sort of tart, maybe some sweetness. yeah. some people want to give this example actually start to say that they can feel themselves started to salivate. right now, your brain is changing the firing of its own neurons so that you have the image of an apple that taste of an apple, the sound of an apple and so on. this kind of simulation, even though we are doing it very deliberately right now as an example, is actually very quickly and very automatically occurring in your brain. it is kind of business as usual for how the brain works. in my book, how emotions are made, explain how the square and the apple are no different

from what you are doing right now. you may think that you're listening to me speak, reacting to my words. but in fact, the brain is creating simulation predicting every single word that comes out of my - mouth and effects that another body part you would be surprised. your brain when i was doing something very remarkable. neurons in some part of your brain are changing the firing of neurons in other parts of your brain to anticipate what is coming next. here is how i like to think about it. your brain works like a scientist. it is always making a slew of predictions. just like a scientist makes competing 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 these predictions by comparing them to incoming sensory input from the world. much like a scientist compares the hypotheses against the data in an experiment. and if your brain is predicting well, and input from the world confirms your predictions. for example when you are simulating the apple if i pulled out an apple and actually showed it to you, and it was exactly as you has stimulated it, as you predicted it then no new information from this apple would enter very far into the 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 are prediction errors and your brain, like a scientist has some options. it can be a responsible

scientist and changes predictions to respond to the data. so let's say the apple was slightly more green than what you had simulating or what you predicted. your brain would then change, it would learn the error and change its representation of the apple. so you would see the apple differently. we have a very fancy name for this in the science of psychology and neuroscience, we call it learning. this is what you do when you learn. your breathtaking information that does not have the force of a can use it to better in the future. your brain can also be an unscrupulous scientist and ignore the dater altogether maintaining its predictions are reality like we saw with the square. or, like the quintessential scientist, your brain can run

armchair experiments to imagine a world, pure simulation without any sensory input or any prediction error at all just as he did as he imagined everyone or hearing the sound of your song that you cannot 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 have used here so far about objects and events in the outside world apples and squares. but the really important and wonderful thing is that the same process about the sensations inside your own body. and this is the key insight into understanding how emotions are made. so - i am at the wrong page. there we go. from the brain's perspective, your body is just another source of sensory input than it

has to make meaningful. sensations from your heart pounding, your lungs expanding, metabolism, changing temperature and so on are ambiguous. these purely physical sensations inside your body have no objective psychological meaning. if you feel an ache in your stomach at the dinner table you might experience that is hunger. if flu season is around the corner, the same ache 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 cannot be trusted. at a given moment in a given context brain uses the past experience to give meaning to the internal sensations from your body as well as external sensations from the world. this is all happening continues and simultaneously throughout the entire life. from an aching stomach, your brain constructs hunger or

nausea or mistrust not considered the same stomachache can also occur when you're sniffing a diaper that is heavy with purced lamb as kids sit at my daughter's birthday party or you might experience the ache as a longing if your lover walks into the room. or if you are a doctor's office waiting for the results of a medical test you might experience the same ache 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 that make emotion not only give you your feeling, they ally your brain to know what to do next. their prescriptions for actions. so your emotions are not reactions to the world even though it feels that way to you. in fact, they are constructions of the world or more precisely your brain is constructing a representation of your body in the world any given moment and this representation is your experience. often, it is an experience of emotion. this perspective i know 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 is in a scientific way. and science a theory is a set of ideas hypotheses are backed up by a tremendous amount of scientific evidence. as is the case with this theory. and 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 emotions and improve your emotional intelligence. it will show you how understanding how your brain works actually can benefit you in many domains of your life. and in addition it also explains why the theory of constructed is so counterintuitive. how emotions are made also uses the signs of emotion as a convenient flashlight to eliminate all sorts of issues where emotions are important like in the relationship between physical and mental health. in the law.

and communicating across cultures. and 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 the new science of emotion fundamentally changes our understanding of human nature of what it means to be human. and so what i would 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. thank you very much. yes? >> how is this information about how the brain is working been found, through mris? >> actually there is a number of different scientific literatures. one thing we know for example is from an anatomical standpoint. just looking at how the brain is wired. we can see that the brain is not wired for reaction.

it is actually wired for prediction. so the brain is wired in such a way that neurons are talking to each other. you can see that the brain is wired to use your past experience to make guesses about what is going to happen next. and it continually does this. so neuroanatomy tells us something about how the brain works predictably. there is also signal processing so neurons are actually having electrical signals, that is part of how neurons talk to each other with electrical signals.so there is evidence from signally, evidence from physiology, certainly evidence from brain imaging as well. evidence from studies of humans and other animals who have brain lesions. there is evidence from observing young babies and children and how they learn to have emotion and learns to experience other people as having a motion to proceed

emotion in others. there is evidence from cross-cultural work where teams of researchers including some of my own have gone to remote cultures around the world and including to africa. we sent two teams to africa. there's just a lot of evidence from a lot of different domains of science to reveal to us that even obsessive physically or reacting to the world and that emotions lurk in some deep animalistic parts of our brain actually our brains don't really work that way. >> secondly, it sounds we have very little control when feeling and emotion, i would assume it is not legitimate exactly but you appreciate the brain has constructed this so where is me in a certain way? >> that is a great question. actually i talked about the self and your ownership of your

own emotions. one of the things that becomes clear i think we start to think about how the brain works, a couple of things become clear. one is that you will never be able to snap your fingers and change how you feel just like that. that is just not possible for most people to do. you might be able to take in filling with distress and change it from sadness to anger for example. just by changing the kind of simulation but turning down the volume on the intensity of the feeling is super hard to do. that being said, this understanding of predictive power of the brain allows you to broaden the horizon of control for your emotions. so for example if it's really the case, the brain is using your past experience to predict and instruct what is it about or what you are about to feel. like in the immediate future, then it means that if you

invest a little bit of effort to cultivate new experiences in the present, that feeds your brain to more automatically make different emotions in the future. so that is one way that for example learning and emotional work, learning emotion concepts from other cultures can broaden the repertoire or vocabulary of emotions that your brain is to make and that you practice good it can make it automatically with no effort from you.and there are additional benefits to learning emotion where it is for example, for school-age children we teach them to broaden their emotion vocabulary just 20 or 30 minutes a week, it does not just improve their social functioning and ability to communicate with each other. it actually improves their test scores and changes all emotional climate of the classroom. because the cans have more control. over their experience and

behavior. yes, montana. [inaudible question] >> i had this realization because like a lot of time to think of emotions as sort of these innate and uncontrollable actions that just happen but sort of like being able to recognize that there is nothing about emotion that is an action. it is just a prediction. it means that you and thierry have the capability to recognize that prediction before you act. which is like very, it feels kind of like more, it feels liberating to realize that and being able to change your emotions by your temptations

around you and sort of the new learning experiences. i learned about different therapies, a therapy where you change the sensations around you in order to sort of change when you're simulating i guess and change her emotions. >> that is exactly right. oftentimes i get questions where people ask me how is this theory, how does it relate to cbt or cognitive behavioral therapy and so on. what you're describing is exactly one really important piece of this. your brain is automatically instructing simulations as predictions of what is going to happen next. and so it is he is in the present sensory right now, the sights and sounds and smells

and feelings from your body in the present moment to predict what is going to happen in the next moment. it uses the next moment to confirm those predictions to become your experience or modify them. one way to also control your emotions is to notice more details, to be mindful of more detail in the present moment. that gives your brain more relate new and different things. there is a very cool thing that our brains do. i'll grant you not just search for a match in our prior experience and then retrieve a memory kind of like a file. our brains can take bits and pieces of past experience and use them and assemble them in a brand-new way to make simulations and therefore predictions.

that is how we have terrific imaginations and that is how we daydream. but that is also really how we make emotions. so we can make emotions sometimes we do not 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 - which means, does anyone know what this emotion is? [inaudible] >> it is to pleasure someone else's discomfort. but even before we knew the word, we could make that emotion and we can perceive that emotion in others. it was effortful to do it. without brain had to combine its empties the past experience in a new way. it is called generativity.

to have pleasure in someone else's misfortune, it would take me a bunch of words to not only explain to you the experience but also to explain the context in which i was experiencing this emotion so you did not think i was a horrible person. because if you don't know me at all and you do not know the context and i start telling you that i am feeling pleasure as owners of misfortune you might think, what is wrong with her? so it had to give the whole context and to describe the feeling. it would to be a long time just like right now. instead though, 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. right? 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 emotion. i will just say one last thing. control your motion does not just mean not making some emotions and making others. it sometimes means not making any emotion at all. so in the book for example, i describe this instance where, which is a true story oxley where i was in graduate school and there was this guy who is asking me out. and i kept saying no. eventually i thought all right, i will just go him and then we can both be on our way.so i did not find him appealing but i went to coffee with him. while we were having coffee i realized i was starting to feel flushed actually and kind of jittery. and i was having a little bit of trouble concentrating. and i thought, i must really be attracted to him so okay!

he asked me to go out again and i was like sure, i was feeling okay. so then we parted ways and i went home and put my keys in the door. i turned the loss, opened the door, dropped my keys on the floor, ran to the bathroom and i was in bed with the flu for a week. now, the sweating this, the genuineness, all of that was not just that i was mistaking it for traction but i was using those sensations to create a feeling of attraction.

talk about actually seeing what's going on in the world and actually looking at it. i may be totally wrong about this, but i don't think so. i have read about the original cortex is bombarded by billions of photons that it cannot begin to organize and what it does is creates templates so that if you come out of your front door and you were walking down your street you think you are looking at the street but it is a generalization that your brain has made about the street. am i going off the deep end?

>> what i would say is i don't think your brain is creating generalizations. there's a lot of sensory information that is very regular. so it's important for your brain to be efficient. when i say a session id metabolically. it's actually very problematic. even though it only weighs about 3 pounds so it's important for us to be frugal and metabolically efficient. what allows you to be metabolically efficient is that it sort of gets rid of redundancy. your retina is why you're been such insuch a way to remove redt

signals and what is different so for example, right now your retina is taking in information going to your visual cortex but it's removing the signals and only sending the visual sensation from the last moment. >> or the person that you know suddenly showing up. but it is possible to consciously make yourself see to actually look to dispel this generalization. >> but it's very hard. let me give you an example. a couple of years ago i wanted to learn to paint. and i'm saying this i have two artists in the room, so forgive

me but i wanted to learn to paint and what i learned is that if you take a three-dimensional object and try to transfer it onto a two-dimensional canvas, you will get a pretty crappy looking object. i would have actually use coulda more colorful language but we are on television. so, what you can do is train yourself to deconstruct the object and pieces of white. 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 meeting in which case, but the point is you can train yourself to see the world differently. but what you are doing

essentially is stimulating differently. maybe my assistant will come back up and i have another example of this that might answer your questions. here is an image i am going to show you. for any of you that have seen this before coming and don't say anything. but a lot of people see in this image is blobs of black and white. and if that's what you are

seeing that you are experiencing something called blindnes experl blindness. it can simulate in advance what this is, so you don't see anything. now i'm going to give you an experience that is going to cure your blindness. are you ready? okay. here we go. now, when you look at this, how many of you can still see the sneak? it works better when i have a computer because i can just overlay one on top of the other. so, for many people they can still see the head of the snake and they can still see part of the body of the sneak and again

this is very similar to what happened with the canisius. what's happening now is i've given your brain inexperience and youth cultivated inexperience to allow it to make predictions so if you see parts of the snake, your brain is able to simulate change the firing of its own neurons to see lines where there are no lines. she said i want you to tell me what is wrong with my brain. i see a louisiana swamp and then when we showed the snake, then

she said i saw one for an instant but then it went away. i was like nothing is wrong with your brain is working perfectly. how long have you lived in louisiana. she said my whole life. i just gave you inexperience for what, ten seconds. so the ability to make that and to modulate its own, to make that image and its head is much weaker. since you have to practice being able to make a new simulation. and if you practice it a little bit it will be easier to do so

it becomes very automatic for you to do so it is possible to change how you see things absolutely. >> two questions. this may be sort of semantics. could you also say that not seeing the black-and-white picture differently you are just interpreting it differently. the interpretation occurs somewhere in your brain isn't just an interpretation. it actually is visions of i will give you an example in a moment

as evidence of that. if they didn't fire in a particular way you wouldn't ha have. every mental events that you experience is a computational moment in your brain. we can influence the kind of predictions people make about their awareness. so, for example it is a procedure that is called continuous flush depression.

so it's not making any expression. so a lot of information is getting flashed including the neutral phase and then we present information that is going to make the person feel more pleasant or unpleasant. so we are changing the physical state of their body without theithe body without theirawares very low contrast so when i present two images, your brain encodes both you consciously only see one of them. so, the other one is still unaware of it is.

it changes people's interpretation of the faith. when i make you feel more pleasant i changed or image that would make you feel more pleasant. you see that as more trustworthy, more likable, more competent, more intelligent, more attractive. when i change the viewing to be more negative and unpleasant user the person is less trustworthy so on and so progressive that is changing the interpretation of the phase but also actually changes the visual image of the face and that is people actually see the face as slightly more or less pleasant depending on how we've manipulated their physical state.

so there is evidence to show when your brain is creating assimilation you are changing the aspiring not just of the regions that are thought to be important for interpretation that the changing of primary sensory and iran's. they are listening to a brief prompt to create a simulated image and then we scan them while they are in assimilation even though they are not moving that are either closed and we see massive changes in activity in the primary visual cortex. we see changes in auditory cortex that even though they are not listening to the scenario, we see the changes and we also

see them in the regions of the brain that represent sensations from the body and actually control the body so we see that in the regions all the way down that are controlling the body. so the simulations are fully embodied which means it isn't just changing what we would conventionally understand as the interpretation. it's actually changing the way that the sensations or perceived. >> you said at the beginning that you had some suggestions or ideas in the book about how to either changed or emotions or controls your emotions or something like that. can you talk about that? >> i gave an example of exposing

your brain to cultivate new experiences that increased vocabulary or the range of simulations that here's another example that i gave. we think of the brain as necessary in having evolved for thinking and feeling and seeing. but actually, it's for the purpose of controlling your body. so, if you didn't move and you didn't need to expand resources to take in more resources you wouldn't need a brain. one of its primary jobs is to control the systems of your nervous system and control your

immune system will which keeps you healthy unless you develop an autoimmune disorder and metabolism. and it does this predictably. it needs to change or blood pressures of oxygen can get to your brain before you stand. it seems to you as if the pitcher is throwing a ball and you look at it and go to swing as a reaction but if you waited until you saw the ball and then use one then it would provide

because you cannot plan and mount a physical movement fast enough to react once you see it. what's happening when people play baseball, they see where the ball is in a given moment and they are predicting where it is going to be and the brain begins to prepare the swing in advance to hit the ball where they are predicting it is going to be. so, that is why it is this kind of dynamic picture to predict where the ball is going to be essentially a. it's also anticipating the situation. the beating of your heart and expansion of your lungs and so on and so forth.

it's what we experience in the outside world and the reason we are not fired to the collider to feel every pain we wouldn't pay attention to anything in the outside world. you get this kind of ache in your whole abdomen and it takes hours and hours to become a very precise pain. we experience views as pleasant feeling, unpleasant feeling, very simple feelings scientists call the affect or mood.

you make the perception getting cut off on the highway that is the affect or that is a delicious drink or so on and so forth. so here's the thing. you can think of your brain as kind of the financial office of your body. it's helping to figure out where the resources are needed to keep everything in balance. when your brain is having trouble regulating the body and your body budget is trying to regulate your expenditure of energy and intake of energy into revenues that you get from the world, and when the budget is a little bit in the red, you experience that not as physical

sensations that feeling crappy. we have the kind of culture that is designed to throw our body back out of balance. if we had to design from scratch a context that would cause people to feel crappy a lot of time things like they don't sleep enough, we don't exercise enough, we regulate each other's nervous system because we are a social species and the best thing for the human body budget is another human. the worst thing for another 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.

a lot of times we are walking around with unbalanced and if you feel like this in a very intense way, your brain will make an emotion out of it. a lot of what we feel comes from an unbalanced body budget. eat enough vegetables, get enough sleep and exercise every day that sounds like i'm being a mother. and i am a mother so i didn't say that to my daughter and she has the appropriate on a roll and whatever but also one of the things you can do is control one of the ingredients to making emotion if it is to keep your body as healthy as possible because that will affect.

that is one domain i talk about in the book and i also talk about how the connection is not metaphorical. that's another example of how you control your emotions that would necessarily to be most important of our extremely potent ways. other questions?

>> is a broad field -- and study what is your name? kate mentioned dutch riding brain and for those who don't know what that means, it is the idea that comes from plato originally. they talk about appetites and emotions are. appetite was represented as to why old horses that were controlled by a chariot driver representing rationality or cognition.

well, for many centuries are a long time, scientists believe that this also represented how the brain evolved. so who here has heard of a lizard brain so the idea is that the appetites are deep inside the brain stem and then wrapped around that is a system which evolved to represent emotions. that is the hypothesis. and then controlling all of that is dark vortex where the rationale for the lives and their rationality is controlling these other parts of the brain. if it ithat is a great story. it's a story that is very

popular in the industry, the media, everybody loved that story. the problem is your brain didn't evolve into sedimentary layers. the cortex didn't evolve like icing on an already baked cake. brains are like companies to use a phrase from neurobiologist as they grow, they reorganized to become efficient. it is highly debated for the most part, the cortex can be found in every mammal so there's two parts about whether it is new to the primates let's say.

certain parts have grown bigger because they've developed for longer in development so to say onsuch asthe one of the most ded views is embedded in this idea. your mind is a battleground between the cognition and those two are in battle with controlling the behavior. that is just a myth basically. so how do people respond?

it depends on who you ask him. evolutionary biologists don't celebrate this theory of constructive emotion for the most part. they actually i would say statisticians, engineers, anyone who does anything computational there is a whole branch where their reaction to the book says this is interesting what is all the fuss about. nobody really believes that the there are people that believe that. in the psychology it depends. the place where the debate is most intense is in th in the scf emotion itself and it tends to break down in the following way.

they do something more than brain scans and they tend to find this compelling and useful. it doesn't just explain the anomaly is of the classical view of emotion. it doesn't explain the evidence. it also opens up brand-new questions. they can make additional discoveries that will help people in their everyday life

are there still some people that claim to the classical view of an emotion for sure some are in the acknowledgment section of the book is. to some extent, they participate in the science just as much as everybody else. i hope a lot of what is in this book will still be believed to be true but even if some of it is improved, some of the process of science as you know is using

the existing theory and tools to push the boundaries of the discovery which means sometimes some of the things you think are true today turned out to be maybe only conditionally true under certain conditions to tomorrow. so in the classical notion i would say i don't think it is true in the sense that it's highly doubtful that that's classical view is true but it's useful in certain contexts. we know the equations don't actually tell us how the universe works, but they are useful for plotting the trajectories of satellites around the earth. dear useful in a particular context. einstein's discovery did not invalidate everything that's new

in hand to say. it wasn't universal it is only true under certain conditions. so, i think that part of, one of the things i try to make clear in the book. what they discovered is completely wrong at the discoveries are revealing something that's important but may be different from what they thought. the emotions just happen and if we can read the emotion in someone's face a clear read on n the page even if it isn't true that we have circuit to make expressions and if we recognize them immediately as we have the

experience in that way it is an indication that there's something important to be explained. the insight, the experience is not wrong. what we learn from the insight and experience is somewhat different from what those scientists thought they learned ththat the data is still eligib. [applause] lisa will be sitting at the table signing copies of her book that you can purchase at the front desk and a reminder anything else you purchase is 20% off can i pass this to you

[inaudible conversations] and about being able to slow

down. i can't do that at the moment. there is a lot there and i have to tell you a couple things. one is that there are programs that teach young children emotion words and it's remarkable what the effects are. i'm thinking of the word about yale center for emotional intelligence for example it's remarkable and part of the reason they have such a big affect is that they help kids to notice the details that they otherwise wouldn't have noticed. concepts and emotion words are actually like tools your brain

uses to control the physical systems of your body. i published a paper about this on monday about the nature of human behavior into a sort of laid out that circuitry. the second thing is the culture of casual brutality o are the wy they treat each other is very bad, i'm 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 an innovation culture and the ability to compete in the global

economy depends on innovation, it requires kids to sell and innovate. one of the keys to innovation is learning to fail. you have to work hard and sometimes it can be unpleasant in the moment but if you are already walking around burdened by social uncertainty where people are evaluating new, maybe they are speaking to you in a way that is unpleasant, they are on social media all the time and not sleeping enough, i'm not talking about political correctness but we have a brutality, people bully each other to laugh tracks.

it's very bad and that is something that can be changed so easily with a little bit of education. the body and the mind are connected in a fundamentally real way that is not metaphorical. so i go into a little bit of that in the book about mindfulness and vocabulary and about if we are predicting and influence each others' nervous systems like social animals, then the responsibility isn't only to