Feelings are an unreliable guide to reality

Thanks to a Church of the Churchless commenter who mentioned Lisa Feldman Barrett's book about how emotions are uniquely fashioned out of our experiences and environment, rather than appearing ready-made the same way in every human brain, I've been reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain with increasing enjoyment now that I'm past the initial introductory chapters.

Barrett, a psychologist and neuroscientist, makes a strong case for her admittedly out-of-the-mainstream view of what emotions are and how they come to be. She cites lots of research, both her own and that of others, as she systematically describes why the prevailing view of emotions is wrong.

So far, I'm finding a lot to like in her book. Her stance fits with other books I've read about how the human brain constructs reality, rather than being a mirror of reality. Of course, because most human brains are similar in many regards, we tend to agree on the more objective aspects of reality, such as whether a stop light we're approaching is green, yellow, or red. 

(That's a good thing for our traffic safety; not so good for auto body repair shops.)

I'm reading the book straight through, though I was tempted to skip to the "Mastering Your Emotions" chapter, since like most people I'd like more happiness/peace of mind and less sadness/anxiety. But when I started that chapter, I realized that it contained key concepts that I hadn't been exposed to yet, like the body budget, which should be in balance for optimum well-being.

So here's some excerpts from "The Origin of Feeling" chapter that I finished this morning. I found these passages to be interesting and accurate. It's easy to believe that how we feel about something is the way that thing truly is -- whereas actually we're simply looking upon it as our affect guides us to.

A definition: interoception "is your brain's representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system."

Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features.

The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. The pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favorite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence.

The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energized feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. 

...When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world.

The psychologist Gerald L. Clore has spent decades performing clever experiences to better understand how people make decisions every day based on gut feelings. This phenomenon is called affective realism, because we experience supposed facts about the world that are created in part by our feelings.

For example, people report more happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, but only when they are not explicitly asked about the weather.

...Affect leads us to believe that objects and people in the world are inherently negative or positive. Photographs of kittens are deemed pleasant. Photographs of rotting human corpses are deemed unpleasant. The phrase "an unpleasant image" is really shorthand for "an image that impacts my  body budget, producing sensations that I experience as unpleasant."

In these moments of affective realism, we experience affect as a property of an object or event in the outside world, rather than as our own experience. "I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person." 

...You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it's mostly the other way around: that what you feel alters your sight and hearing. Interoception in the moment is more influential to perception, and how you act, than the outside world is. 

You might believe that you are a rational creature, weighing the pros and cons before deciding how to act, but the structure of your cortex makes this an implausible fiction. Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver's seat and rationality is a passenger.

It doesn't matter whether you're choosing between two snacks, two job offers, two investments, or two heart surgeons -- your everyday decisions are driven by a loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses. [Meaning, your brain.]

...Affect is your brain's best guess about the state of your body budget. Interoception is also one of the most important ingredients in what you experience as reality. If you didn't have interoception, the physical world would be meaningless noise to you.

Consider this: your interoceptive predictions, which produce your feelings of affect, determine what you care about in the moment -- your affective niche. From the perspective of your brain, anything in your affective niche could potentially influence your body budget, and nothing else in the universe matters. 

That means, in effect, that you construct the environment in which you live. You might think about the environment as existing in the outside world, separate from yourself, but that's a myth.

You (and other creatures) do not simply find yourself in an environment and either adapt or die. You construct your environment -- your reality -- by virtue of what sensory input from the physical environment your brain selects; it admits some as information and ignores some as noise.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

Good one. Food for thought. I'll need to read this a few times more to fully digest it.

While agreeing overall, absolutely, but here's one counter-take that occurs to me: One mustn't imagine that all of our assessments are affect-driven. Sure, I may perceive that that guy, or dame or beast, is malevolent, merely because yesterday's dinner disagreed with me and the day's muggy and wet --- to put it facetously --- but, while keeping this in mind, one mustn't imagine that's necessarily how it is. It could well be that said man or woman or beast appears malevolent to us because that's exactly what they are. All that all of this amounts to is a call for more and better introspection and self-awareness.

Not saying that the book's claiming otherwise. But that takeaway is implied in the passage, or at least in how I read it, so I thought it right to flag this. Hear hoofbeats conclude horses, that isn't completely overturned, but only tempered by the (very right) thought that it might simply be indigestion on a cloudy day when your favorite football team has lost to some joke of a non-team. Maybe those, and not horses after all, with marauding bandits atop them; but only maybe.

[Ron E.]

I have just finished reading Barretts shorter book 'Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain'. A slimmed down but relevant series of essays on the predicting brain. The over-riding message I get from these essays is that the brain did not evolve for thinking but to predict how to respond to sense data and equally important to internal (interoceptor) sensations.

The brain's network of neurons and their clusters (hubs), continually carry information of how to deal with external and internal data. This information has been wired into the brain from birth – and interestingly it is not 'stored' as a static memory bank but is reconstructed on demand from concepts existing within its network. It seems incredible that there are no controlling 'centres' in the brain but only neural networks predicting the bodies responses – but current studies show this is so. Barretts' theories carry some weight.

Incidentally, I have long understood the mind as being a repository of information, of past experiences that arise or are drawn upon where conditions demand. But I can accept that 'information loaded neurons' arrive in awareness creating a predictive response to deal with a given situation.

This means that the term mind does not denote a ready source of knowledge and experience to be drawn upon, but the end product of the brains' prediction (or predictions) as they arise in awareness. The mind then has no existence whatsoever but is merely the name we give to an end-product of the brains' predictive networking. And yes, that leaves the question of awareness still open.

[Appreciative Reader]

Just re-read your comment, Ron. Your final conclusion, about no self no mind? Nothing new there, it's Buddhism 101 after all, and now borne out by hard science.

But it is one thing to intellectually apprehend it, or even to momentarily, so to say, grok it, before flowing on with the next distraction.

Once you've fully internalized it, though? Completely digested it, internalized it through and through? As you appear to have done? Where do you go from there? How in the world would you then be able to bother with the hundred pointless inanities that occupy us all day long? The Buddha's detached removal from the world then makes sense. Or the Zen sage's very basic drawing water chopping wood thing. But the full on headlong immersion in the complexities and convolution of the world, how would one, how would YOU, reconcile yourself to continued engagement with that, not just as a one-off child's game played with other children, but as a prolonged, immersive, day in day out thing? Without which immersion and total engagement our complex modern jobs and indeed our lives overall, are a complete impossibility?

I'm curious what your take might be on that, both as a generalization and abstraction ; as well as a personal thing, in terms of how YOU deal with it.

[Kranvir]

Feelings manipulated by emotions are a bad guide to making choices. Look at how RSSB and gurinder singh dhillon use every dirty trick in the book to manipulate the minds of innocent people. They use imagery, of a baba , white turban, gown, sitting high on a white stage to stir up feelings of being unworthy in people, amongst a so called self proclaimed god. They use influencers, disguised as key sevadar , to stir a flock mentality. Then they use manipulated spells , they call them shabads, to stir up feelings of love for a living guru. The guru uses a kind of hypnosis, his eyes, like a snake, to seduce the innocent sangat, the prey, and they call this dreshti. Finally they hide behind an image of a charity, which means they get the innocent sacrificing there free time for the RSSB empire for absolutely no return and a false promise of god realization - a totally wasted life. All this sacrifice for a low life fake guru, who in reality as committed multiple murders; a greedy little man, that cares only about himself, his sons, and his billions he stole from his nephews. He's a thief, and even sacrificed his own wife to save his own pathetic image and the image of the RSSB empire. It's also came to light that he, and his relations, majithia, ordered the murder of his bank manager. Gurinder Singh Dhilllon your days are numbered, and you are being exposed. You will face your karma very soon, and revenge will be sweet