new york times a few years back. we did a profile case of the new york times book review. if you like to see that go to the website, book to be.org and type in pamela paul. you can watch the entire clip. >> every month, book to bnc spent two features an in-depth conversation with a nonfiction author about their writing career. join us on september 3 when our guest is eric the task is. his latest book is, if you can keep it. october 1, author new york times columnist, maureen dowd will discuss her books, bush world, are men necessar necessary, mics will talk about his books including his latest, the undoing project. he is written the big short, and the new, new thing. join us for in-depth, at noon

eastern. >> mrs. helen barrett is here tonight in celebration of her book. she is the university distinguished professor of psychology at northeastern university. with appointments at harvard medical student school massachusetts general hospital in psychiatry and radiology. she received a national institute of health director's pioneer work for her research on emotion in the brain. she's elected member of the royal society of canada. here's a sampling of the praise for her book. in the review, the library journal says, she presents in

new neuroscientific explanation of why people are more swayed by feelings the facts. she offers unintuitive theory that goes against not only the popular understanding, but also that of traditional research. emotions don't arise, weather, we construct them on the fly. furthermore, emotions are neither universal or located in specific brain regions. they vary by culture and result from dynamic neural networks. scientific american calls the book remarkable for its freshness of its ideas. in the wall street journal calls a fascinating. and another starred review, booklist says quote, her figurative selfie of the brain is brilliant. please help me welcome our author. [applause] >> thank you so much. thank you for that lovely introduction. it's very special for me to be

here to talk about the book. this is our home bookstore. we live in newton. we've been coming to this bookstore since it's been in newtonville. and then friends and family here as well. i'd like to welcome the rest of you as well. what i will do is read a couple of selections from the book. and then we'll open it up for questions. i'm going to start with the passage that are brought about a birthday party that through for my daughter sophia when she was 12 years old. we through the birthday party with the theme of gross foods. i made pizza that was doctored to look like it was green and moldy. so it had fuzzy cheese. i made vomit jell-o. if you want recipe, let me know. these peach jell-o and then put in bits and pieces of chopped up pieces of vegetables.

i served apple juice and medicine urine sample cups. but the best part of this party was the game that we had after lunch. i took babyfood, mashed carrots, mashed beef, things like the and i smeared it artfully on diapers to look like too. then the kids had to take each diaper and hold it up to their nose and take a good deep with identify the food by its smell. even though these kids news babyfood, many have a full body gay when they went to smell the diapers. this was exuberant, joyful discussed that we had cultivated. believe it or not, this party holds the key to understand how emotions are made. the signs of emotion are filled with unintuitive detail, very counterintuitive.

each day we experience the delight of happiness, the dreaded fear, the burn of anger, sometimes these days the bird of anger is a comedy motion. were surrounded by people who are caught up in the throes of their own emotion. as compelling as they are, they don't actually reveal what's going on inside your brain and body. the reason 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. the whole time, the brain is giving us a false sense of confidence that our experiences that we have every day, these products reveal its inner workings. emotions feel distinct and built-in because that is how we

experience emotion. so, we assumed that joy, sadness, fear and anger have separate causes inside of us because of the way we experience emotion. as if it's happening to us. when you have a brain like ours it's easy to come up with the wrong theory of emotion. we are just brains trying to figure out how brains work. what i would 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 enters the retina of your and makes its way for your brain to see stuff or entry. that's not what's happening.

i'm to demonstrate this i want to invite my lovely assistant up. this is my husband. i want to show you an image. who here sees a white square in the middle of this image? but, there is no white square on that page. so what is your brain doing to conjure an image of a square will know square exist. there's just open space? this is something 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 not. it also explains what this has to do with how the brain makes emotion. thank you my lovely assistant. when your brain looks at that image it's adding stuff from its

vast array of prior experiences of other squares, boxes, rooms with angles and so on. it's constructing the square that you saw. in your visual cortex at the back of your brain constructed that image for you. there are changing the firing to create lines that were present so that 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 ability to the hospital hallucination. but the everyday my brain is built to work like this hallucination. your experience of that reveal some insight. your past experiences from direct encounters give meaning

to your present sensation. additionally, the entire process is invisible to the matter how hard you try to get intersect to experience yourself. we need an example to unmask the fact that it's occurring in your brain. the process is so habitual that it's difficult for people to not see the square and to see blank spaces instead. this magic trick is called simulation. it means that your brain was changing the firing of its own neurons in the absence of incoming sensory information. there were no lines i caused you to see a square. certain parts of your brain retreated the fire you of the neuron and other parts of your brain which led you to see a square. simulations can be visual but also involve other senses. have you ever heard a song

playing in your head that you can get rid of? that kind of audio hallucination is also a part of assimilation. i want to do simulation with you. think of the last time someone handed you a red juicy apple. you reached out for, he took a bite, you experience the tart flavor. during those moments neurons in your brain the motor parts were firing. motor neurons fire to produce movement, sensorineural inspire seek a process than sensation from the apple, its color maybe it had a blushing 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 cause your mouth to water and release enzymes and begin digestion. release cortisol to prepare your body and maybe even major stomach churn a little bit. now, here's the cool thing. just now, what i said the word apple, your brain responded to a certain extent as if the actual apple was present. it combined bits and pieces of knowledge of apples and change the firing of neurons in your regions to construct a mental image of an apple. your brain simulated and nonexistent apple using sensory neurons. who here right now can imagine their minds i and apple, macintosh apple of the kind that you eat? who here can hear the crunch of

the apple when you bite into it? what about the taste of the apple. tart, maybe some sweetness. some people want to give this example actually can feel himself start to salivate. right now, your brain is changing the firing of assault sensory neurons see have the image, the taste, the sound of an apple and so on. the simulation, even though were doing it deliberately right now is an example occurs very quickly and automatically in your brain. it's business as usual for how your brain works. in my book, how emotions are made, i explained how the square and apple are no different than what you're doing now. you might think you're listening

to me speak, reacting to my words, but the brain is creating simulations that are predicting every word that comes out of my mouth. if i have named a different body part you would have been surprised. think about it, your brain, right now is doing something really remarkable. neurons in some part of your brain are change in the firing of neurons and other parts to anticipate what's coming next. here's how i like to think about it. your brain works like a scientist. it's always making predictions, just like a scientist makes competing hypotheses. like a scientist, your brain is doing knowledge, past experience, test me how

confident you can be that each prediction is true. your brain testes by comparing to incoming sensory input from the world, much like a scientist compares hypotheses against the data in an experiment. if your brain is predicting well and input from the world confirms your prediction. sophia pulled out an apple and showed it to and it was exactly as you had stipulated. i don't know information from the sample would enter far into your brain, then your neurons are fiery in a way that captured that from the apple. you are already prepared to see it. sometimes there's prediction error in your brain like a scientist has options. it could change its prediction to respond to the data.

solicit the apple was slightly more green than what you had simulated or predicted. it would then change its representation of the apple. see you see it differently. we have a fancy name to this in the science of science we call it learning. it's also taking in information that it doesn't have before so you can use it to predict better in the future. your brain can be an unscrupulous scientist and ignore the data altogether. or, like the quintessential scientist, your brain can imagine the world, pure simulation without sensory input

just as you did when you mentioned the apple or when you hearing the sound of the song you can't get out of your head. and how emotions are made explained about how simulations give meaning to sensations that allow you to experience an act in the world. the examples here are about objects and events in the outside world. like apples and squares. the really important and wonderful thing is that this same process happens about the sensations in your own body. this is a key insight understanding how emotions are made. from your brain's perspective, your body is just another source of sensory input that it has to make meaningful. sensations from your heart, your

heart pounding your funds expanding in metabolism and changing temperature is ambiguous. these purely physical sensations inside your body have no objective psychological meaning. if you feel an ache in your stomachs at the dinner table you might experience that is hunger. if flu season is round the corner the same ache might be the experience of nausea. if your judge in the courtroom, you might experience it as a gut feeling that the defendant cannot be trusted. in a given moment and context your brain uses past experience to give meaning to the internal sensations of your body and external sensations from the world. this is happened simultaneously throughout your life. so, from an aching stomach your brain constructs hunger, nausea

mistrust, now consider the steam stomachache can occur when you are sniffing a diaper that is heavy with. leah is kids did, or you might experience the ache is longing if your lover walks into the room. or if your doctors office, waiting for the results of a medical test you could experience it as an anxious feeling. in these cases of it discuss common longing and anxiety your brain is using past experience to make sense of your aching stomach together with your other sensations in the world. this is how it constructs and guides your actions. it's how emotions are made. emotions are meeting. they explain your body sensation in terms of what's going on around you.

simulations that make emotion not only give you your feelings but allow your brain to know what to do next. they are prescription for action. so, your emotions are not your reactions to the world even though it feels that way. there your constructions of the world your brain is constructing a representation of your body in the world in a given moment and this is your experience, often it's an experience of emotion. i realize this is new to many of you, the book provides plenty of examples and evidence to help understand how it works. when we talk about this is a new theory reusing that in a specific way. in science at the area is ideas about hypotheses backed up with

scientific evidence. and how emotions are made, you'll learn how the brain works. you will learn how the 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 can benefit you in many domains of your life. it also explains why the theory of constructive emotion is counterintuitive. it also uses the science of emotion as a flashlight to illuminate issues where emotions are part like in the relationship between physical and mental health. in the law, and communicating across cultures.

in rearing children and even whether animals have emotions like human emotions. the book takes on one of my favorite topics which is how the new science of emotion fundamentally changes her understanding of human nature and what it means to be human. i like to take your questions or listen to your comments and thoughts. encourage you to have a close look at the book. thank you. >> how is this information about how the brain is working been found, through mris? >> there's a number of different scientific literatures. one thing we know from an anatomical standpoint we can see the brain is not wired for reaction, it's wired for

prediction. when we look at how narratives are talking we can see the brain is wired to use past experience to make guesses about what will happen next. so narrow anatomy tells us about how the brain works predictably. there is neurons that have electrical signals that's how they talk to each other, so there's evidence from signaling, physiology and brain imaging. evidence from studies of humans and other animals for brain lesions. and those from observing young babies and children and how they learn to have emotion and experience other people as having emotion. there's evidence from call

cross-cultural work were teams of researchers have gone to remote cultures around the world including to africa. it's a lot of evidence from different domains of science to reveal that even though it feels like were reacting to the world and emotions lurk in some parts of our brain actually her brains are not structured that way. >> it sounds like we have very little control of certain things. if i'm feeling and emotion i would assume just to appreciate that the brain has constructed this, so. >> that's a great question. i talk about the self and your ownership of your own emotions. one thing that becomes clear

when you think about how the brain works a few things become clear. you're never going to be able to snap your fingers and change how you feel. that's not possible for most people to do. you might be only take a feeling of distress and change it from sadness to anger by changing the simulation that your brain does. turning down brain allows you to broaden the horizon of control for your emotion. so if your brain is using your past experience to predict and construct which are about to feel in the immediate future it means if you invest effort to

cultivate new experiences in the presence, that feed your brain to make different emotions in the future. that's one way, learning new words and concepts from other cultures can broaden the vocabulary of emotions your brain is to make. you can make those with very little effort with practice. for school-age children when you teach them to broaden their motion vocabulary, 20 or 30 minutes a week it doesn't just improve their social functioning it improves their test scores and changes the emotional climate of the classroom. because the kids have more control over their experience and behavior.

>> i've had this realization that like a lot of the time we think of emotions as sort of these innate and uncontrollable actions that happen. so being able to recognize there is nothing about an emotion that is an action, it's just prediction. it means that you have the capability to recognize that prediction before you act. like it feels liberating to realize that i'm being able to change your emotions by your sensations around you.

and these new learning experiences, i've learned some about different types of therapies like dbt therapy where you sort of change the sensations around you in order to change what you're simulati simulating. >> that's exactly right. oftentimes okay questions or people ask, how is this theory, how does it relate to bbt for different therapies? what you're describing is exactly one important piece of this. your brain is automatically constructing simulations as predictions of what's going to happen next. it's using the present sensory rate right now.

the sights, sounds, smells and feelings from your body in the present moment to predict what's going to happen in the next moment. then it uses that evidence to either confirm those predictions or to modify them. >> one way to control your emotion is to notice more details to be mindful of more details in the present moment. that gives your brain more freedom to simulate new and different things. there's a cool thing that her brains do, our brain structures search for a match in our prior experience in the retriever memory like a file. our brains can take bits and pieces of past experience and use and assemble them in a new way to make simulations and predictions.

that's how we have terrific imaginations, that's how we daydream. it's also how we make a motion. so will we can make emotions that sometimes we don't have words for. because we can make the simulation on-the-fly using bits and pieces of past experience. before we had the german word -- which means to simply know what this motion is? >> it's to experience pleasure as someone else's discomfort. but even before we knew that word we could make that emotion. we can perceive that emotion and others. her brains had to combine bits and pieces of past experience in a new way. there's a term for that called generativity.

for wanted to explain feelings of pleasure at someone else's misfortune, it would take me a bunch of words to not only explain to the experience, but to explain the context in which i was experiencing this emotion so you do not think i was a horrible person. if you don't know me at all and i'm just starting to tell you this you might wonder what's wrong with her. so i need to give you the whole context and describe the feeling. would take me long time. instead the, i can say single word. the more detail that you pay attention to in the world, the more words your brain

learns. >> i describe this instance which is a true story

>> imagine if i had been able to construct a physical symptom as in, i must be coming down with the flu. my point is, sometimes it's better not to experience, not to create an emotion.

sometimes of physical sensation is better received as a physical sensation. sometimes, for several months. other questions? >> we talked about actually seeing what was going on in the world and looking at it. i might be totally wrong but i don't think so. the visual cortex is bombarded which it cannot possibly begin to organize. what it does is creates, innocence templates so if you come out the front door and walking down the street if a dog comes over here you see that a notice that. the my going off the deep end?

>> i don't think your brain is creating generalizations. there sensory information in the world that is very regular. so your brain is very efficient. needs to be efficient, when i say fission i may metabolically efficient. if your brain is it efficient is metabolically a problem. those neurons are very expensive. they take out about 20% of our metabolic budget. it's important for us to be frugal, to be metabolically efficient. what allows this is your brain gets rid of redundancy. your retina for example is wired to remove redundant signals so

only what is different, for example right now your retina is taking information that's going to your visual cortex. 's removing all the correlated redundant signals and only sending the differences in visual sensations from the last moment. >> like the dog running across the street or the person you know suddenly showing up. it is possible to consciously make yourself see. to actually book. to dispel this generalization. >> it is, 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 when i have two artists in the audience. forgive me. what i learned is that if you

take a three-dimensional object and you take the object and tried to transfer it onto a two-dimensional canvas you get a crappy looking object. i would've used more colorful language but were on television. what you can do, is train yourself to deconstruct the objects into pieces of light. if you train yourself to see pieces of light and you transfer the pieces of light onto the canvas, you will get a reasonably looking three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional campus. unless you're me. the point is, you can train yourself to see the world differently. what you are doing is

essentially simulating differently. another example. maybe my assistant will come back up. i have another example that might answer your questions. here is an image i will show y you. for any who have seen this before, don't say anything. so, what you see in this image. anyone? anyone? >> a lot of people what they see are blobs of black and white.

if that's what you're seeing, you're experiencing something called experiential blindness. your brain can predict, can simulate in advance of this is so does anything. so now i will give you an experience that will cute cure your blindness. you ready? here you go. -- now when you look at this, how many of you can still see a snake? not too many? want to do it again? it works better when i have a computer. i can overlay one on top of the other. for many people, they can still see the head, they can see part of the body. this is very similar to what

happened with the white square. what's happening now is that i've given your brain and experience. you've cultivated that experience that has a larger brain to make predictions. so, if you see parts of the snake your brain is able to simulate and change the firing of its own neurons to see lines where there are no lines c can see an object where there is no object. recently a woman came up to me after an event said, i want you to tell me what's wrong with my brain. i said okay. she said when i look at those black-and-white blobs, i see a louisiana swamp. and then, when he showed the snake, so i show the snake and

the black-and-white blobs again she said i saw snake for an instant but then it went away and i saw louisiana swamp again. what's wrong? i'm like nothing's wrong. your brain is working perfectly. how long have you lived in louisiana? she said, my whole life. they said you spent your whole life looking at louisiana swamps. your brain can simulate that very well. i just gave you an experience for of a snake for ten seconds. so your brain's ability to modulate its own neurons and make that image in your head is much weaker to make a louisiana swamp and what she been making your whole life. today have to practice been able to make a new simulation. the practice a little bit it will become easier so eventually

it becomes automatic. it is possible to change how you see things. >> i have two questions. this might be semantics. when you talk about when you see the snake and then the black-and-white picture, you simulate your say lines, could you also say that you're not seen the black-and-white picture differently, you're just interpreting that differently. >> you could but every thought and feeling and interpretation that you have occur somewhere in your brain. first of all, it's not just and interpretation. it is vision. i'll give you an example in a moment as evidence.

what i want to do is address the philosophical issue when he say's it just interpretation i would say it also occurs in the firing of your neurons. if you didn't have been that fired in a particular way you and have interpretation. every mental event to experience is a moment in your brain. . . twenty-one i we present a

neutral face of a face of a person not making and expressions. and we also have flash some black-and-white squares in the neutral face again so there's a dynamic visual information that is being flashed, including a neutral place. in the other i we present information that is positive or negative and make the person more pleasant or unpleasant. this image is low contrast and when i present to images to your face and eyes your brain encodes both but you consciously only seek one. the other one is capturing it but you are on the visua unawarf it. it took us.

when i make you feel more pleasant change it with an image you see the neutral face as more trustworthy more likable, more confident, more when i change your feelings and to be more negative or unpleasant you see that person who is less trustworthy, less likable and so on and so forth. that changes your indication of the face. it also changes the visual image of the face people actually see the face as more pleasant or slightly less pleasant depending on how we manipulated their physical state. the point is that when -- there is 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 into patient, you are changing the firing of primary sensory neurons and for example, when we do these simulation when someone goes into a scanner and they like completely skill in their eyes are closed and there listening to a brief prompt to create a cool simulated image and then we scan them while they create that simulation, they live completely still but we see a lot of movement in their cortex their eyes are closed with the massive change of activity and primary visual cortex and pc changes in auditory cortex but even though they are no longer listening to the scenario we see those changes. we also see changes in the

region of the brain that represent sensations from the body and that actually control the body so we see activision in the brainstem that are controlling the body. simulations are fully embodied which means that it isn't just changing what we would conventionally understand as the station but it's actually changing the way that sensations are perceived. was that your one question? >> thank you. my other question was 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? >> have already given one example and i can talk more about that. i talked about exposing your

brain to cultivate new experiences that increase the vocabulary or the range of stimulations and therefore emotions that your brain can make. here is another -- there are a lot of examples i give but here's another. your brain -- we think of brains as necessary as having evolved for thinking and feeling and seeing but actually brains evolved for the purpose of controlling your body. if you didn't move and you didn't need to extend resources in order to take in more resources you wouldn't need a brain. one of the primary jobs is to control the systems of your body and to control your autonomic nervous system which controls

your heart, lungs and so on to control your immune system which keeps you healthy unless you develop an autoimmune disorder and your metabolism. it does this productively. it's preparing your body to move in advance of the movement. for example, if you are sitting down and your brain is about to stand you up it needs to change her blood pressure so that oxygen can get to your brain before you stand because if it did it after you stand you would paint. or when you play baseball, for example, it seems to you as if the picture is throwing a ball and you look at the ball and then you go to spain so that the ball is the stimulus and you swing as a reaction but, in fact, if you waited to you consciously saw the ball and then swung the ball would go whizzing by because you can't

mount a physical movement fast enough to react to a ball when you see it. what's happening when people play baseball is that they see where the ball is and they're predicting where the ball will be in the next moment in their brain begins to prepare the swing in advance to hit the ball where they are predicting it will be. really that is why baseball is this very cool dynamic between the picture in the batter because the picture is trying to get the batter to miss pics where the ball will be essentially. as your brain controls your body in this manner it also is anticipating the sensations from your body so the feeding of your heart and the expansion of your lungs and so on and so forth. most of the time you cannot feel that and none of us feel the sensations from her body the

same degree of detail that we experience the outside world. the reason why is not wired to feel every ache and pain in her body because if we did we never pay attention to anything in the outside world. think about when someone has appendicitis even when something is really wrong you get this dull ache in your whole abdomen and it takes hours and hours for it to become a very, very precise pain. most of the time when those sensations bodies we experience as pleasant feeling, unpleasant feelings, feeling worked up or calm but simple feelings that science called mood or affect. they're not specific to motion. your brain is controlling your body your whole life and every waking moment of your life you also have feelings of affect sometimes when they are in intense you make emotions out of them but other times you make

other things like perceptions if someone cuts you off on the highway you think that guy is a leap [bleep]. you can think of your brain is a financial office of your body and it's helping to figure out where resources are needed to keep everything in balance. if you're about to stand up and you need oxygen to your muscles it will move oxygen to your muscles and less oxygen somewhere else. when your brain having trouble regulating your body when your body budget is trying to regulate your expenditure of energy in your intake of energy, the revenues that you get from the world, and when your budget is in the red you experience that, not his physical

sensations in your body but you feel 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 up body budget out of balance. if we had to design from scratch a context that would cause people to feel crappy 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 for social species and the best thing for a human is another human. the worst thing for another human is another human. social media, social evaluatio evaluation -- if i want to disturb your body budget all i have to do is make you think that i might be of value waiting you negatively. not that for sure i am but with just some ambiguity and that

will knock your budd body budget of balance immediately. a lot of times we 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 in emotion out of it. a lot of what we feel is negative emotion comes from an unbalanced body budget. another thing i talk about in the book is it sounds like i'm being a mother instead of a neuroscientist when i say eat vegetables, get enough sleep, exercise everyday, that sounds really like i'm being a mother and i am a mother so i do say that my daughter and she has the appropriate eye roll and whatever. but i'm also telling you as a neuroscientist that one of the 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 often you make negative emotion and what kind of negative emotion you make. that is one whole domain that i talked 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 brain becomes very clear, exactly, on what the relationship is mental health and physical health or mental illness and physical illness. so that is just 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 about the reactions from your field in general to your

novel idea of this brain and it's a very broad field and popular to. >> what's your name. >> kate. >> she mentioned the triune brain and for those of you who don't know what that word means if the idea that the idea that comes from plato originally. when plato wrote about the human psyche or mind as we would call it now he talked about the human mind having three parts. appetites, like hunger and a desire for sex, thirst and so on. emotions which he called the passions and appetites and passions or emotions are represented as to wild horses that were controlled by a chariot driver which was representing rationality or cognition.

well, for many, many centuries, for a long time, scientists believe that this represented how the brain evolved. here has heard of a lizard bra brain? right. the ideas that our appetite are part of our lizard brain, they are deep inside the brainstem of our brains and then wrapped around that is a system which evolves to represent emotion so this is for emotion circuits are supposed to be in that the hypothesis and then controlling all of that is our highly involved neocortex which is where cognition lives or rationality lives. rationality is controlling these other parts of the brain. that's a great story and the story that is very popular.

it's popular in industry and the media and everybody loves that story but the problem with the story is that your brain didn't evolve, no brain evolved with sedimentary layers in the cortex didn't evolve like icing on an already baked cake. people have known and evolutionary biology has been known for almost a century that brains did not evolve that way and they don't gray that way and not organize that way. brains are like companies, to use a phrase from the neurobiologist george streeter, as they grow they reorganize. they reorganize to become efficient. there's actually is highly debated still -- for the most part most of the cortex, cerebral cortex of your brain can be found in every mammal. there is one or two parts were people debate about whether it is new to primates let's say and

even in those cases i think it's pretty clear to a lot of us that there is no neocortex and that it's actually certain parts of the brain have grown bigger because they developed for longer in development. i guess my -- to say that one of the most deeply held views and one of the most cherished views of human nature is embedded in the triune brain idea and it's fundamentally flawed and i must say that the law embodies the triune brain. economics in this idea that we have these our mind is a battleground between emotion and cognition and that those two are in battle to control your behavior. that's a myth basically. how do people respond. it depends on who you ask.

evolutionary biologists have celebrate the theory of constructed emotion and they actually, statisticians and engineers and anyone who does anything computational there's a whole branch of computational neuroscience for their reactions and this is interesting and what is the fuss and no one believes that one circuit for anger and one for beer and one for sadness lurking in your brain. no one really believes that. 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. it tends to break down in the following way. young people, young scientists

and scientists who know something about anatomy or physiology and who do something more than neural imaging, more than brain scans tend to find this very compelling and useful. the ideas in this book, the theory in this book doesn't just explain the existing evidence and doesn't just explain the anomalies of the classical view of emotion which is the idea that we have these in a emotion circuits and it doesn't just explain anomalies and explain the evidence but opens up brand-new questions that no one has thought to ask for which is the value of a good theory. not just explain but to broaden what we don't know so that we can make additional discoveries that will help people in their everyday life.

are there some people who still cling to the classical view of emotion -- for sure. i even think some of them in the acknowledgments section in my book because, you know, they have their whole careers are resting on this idea. to some extent, they participate in the process of science just as much as anybody else. what i would say is this in 20 years from now -- i hope that a lot of what is in this book will still be believe it to be true but even if some of it isn't and if some of it is improved, right? even if it's improved it still part of the process of science, as 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 we think are true today turn out to be maybe only conditionally true under certain conditions tomorrow. in the classical 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 that classical view is true but it's useful in certain contexts. in the same way that we know that ptolemaic equations don't actually tell us how the universe works but their super useful for plotting the trajectories of satellites around the earth. they are useful in a particular context. einstein discoveries didn't invalidate everything newton had to say but it showed what newton

thought was universal wasn't universal and only true under certain conditions. i think that part -- one of the things i try to make clear in the book is that the classical view of emotion, the people who study that view it's not that they discovered nothing or that what they discovered is completely wrong but is that the discoveries are revealing something to us that is important but may be different from what they thought. right? it feels to us like emotions does happen to us and feels like if we look at some space and we can read the emotion way we would read words on a page and even though it's not true that we have circuits in our brains for emotion and even that was not true that we have circuits that are allowing us to make expression innately and recognize them innately and even

though it's not true the fact that we have those experiences to us feel that way. and it's an indication that there is something really important they are to be explained. the insight is not, the experience is not wrong, right? it's what we learn from those insights and experiences is different from what those sign to stop he learns. the data is still valuable. yes. [applause] >> lisa will be sitting at the table out front to sign copies of her book which you can purchase at the front desk. and a reminder that anything else he purchased is 20% off by one of the event books. thank you all for coming. >> thank you for your attention in your great questions.

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part of the reason why we have such a big effect is that they actually help kids, first of all, to notice details that they otherwise wouldn't notice but the parts of the brain that are involved in learning words and learning concepts actually those parts of the brain regulate your body directly and concepts and words, emotion words or mental state words are actually like tools that your brain uses to literally control the physical

systems of your body. very -- i just public a paper on monday in the journal of nature human behavior and we laid out that circuitry that i described in the book. the second thing though is for older kids the culture of casual brutality where kids talk the way they talk to each other in the way they treat each other very bad. >> i agree. >> and it's very bad for their health. it's very bad for their mental health and is very bad for their nervous systems in general. in fact i'm in the process of putting together an article for a magazine about this that one of the major barriers to innovation. we are in an individual culture and our ability to compete in

the global economy depends on innovation but what does it require? it requires students to be able to learn to feel and then they learn to innovate in one of the key aspects of innovation is learning to fail. when you want to -- how do you learn by working hard and sometimes working hard can be unpleasant in the moment but if you're walking around burdened by social uncertainty where people are evaluating you and maybe they're speaking to you in a way that is unpleasant and there on social media all the time and not sleeping enough and i'm not talking about [bleep] liberal but i'm talking about culture cultural casual brutality and it smeared on television. people bully so that they get laughs and it's very bad. it will study this.

that is something that can be changed so easily with a little bit of education. a little bit of education and teaching of emotion of vocabulary words and things could change quite a bit for the kids in our schools but, you know, people have to understand that the mind and body are connected in a really fundamentally real way and it's not metaphorical. that's a little bit and i go into that in the book about mindfulness and vocabulary and we have picking brains and we influence each other's nervous system about social animals than our responsibility isn't always to ourselves and we can control our own emotions we have impact on other people and we need to think about that. >> i can't read into this