[Neurons] 2024 Neurons #16 THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF EMOTIONS

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2024 Neurons #16

April 8, 2024

Emotional Intelligence Series #16

**

 

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING

OF EMOTIONS

 

For many people it is a disturbing fact to realize that emotions are
constructed.  You construct them!  Well, after all, whatever emotion you are
experiencing-it is in your body and it was constructed by your mind.  All of
your emotions are also functions of your learning history and environment as
well as a function of today's environment.  That's because emotions are
systemic in nature- as they are product of your mind-body nervous systems.

 

Nor is this idea new.  In spite of what Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) has
written, this idea has been around for a long time.  While she acknowledges
that the construction theory of emotions existed in ancient Greece, she
seems to think that she, and she alone, pioneered it in the twenty-first
century. Yet ninety (90) years ago, Alfred Korzybski presented "emotions"
and "thoughts" as aspects of a singular system and constructed via our many
nervous systems (Science and Sanity, 1933).  He always put "emotions" in
quotes because they do not refer to a self-contained entity, a point in
Barrett's book, How Emotions are Made, except she presents the Construction
Theory of Emotions as if it were a new thing that she pretty much invented
out of the blue!

 

I like most of what is in her book, but not her failure to acknowledge
others in the field and/or to criticize others in the field in order to
build herself up.  NLP, built on the foundation of Korzybski as well as the
Cognitive Psychology Movement of George Miller and associates has been
presenting emotions as a systemic construct since 1975.  NLP, in fact, began
using a more systemic word for emotions- states.  In NLP, a state is a
state-of-mind, state-of-body, and a state-of-emotion.  You can't get more
systemic than that!

 

Yet Barrett presents the idea "Emotions are Constructed" (chapter 2) as if
it was a brand new revelation.  It is not!  "Simulations are your brain's
guesses of what's happening in the world" (p. 27).  Ah yes, a mental map as
Korzybski would say.  

"The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in
psychology and neuroscience" she asserts completely oblivious to NLP.
"Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell
are largely simulations of the world..."  

 

Duh, yeah!  That's NLP 101!  So is this:

"Each time your brain stimulates sensory input, it prepares automatic
changes in your body that have the potential to change your feeling." (p.
28)

 

Yes, a nice way to talk about the mind-body as a system.  She then brings in
"mental concepts" disregarding that a concept is a thought because she wants
to argue that we construct emotions primarily through our bodies and the
"body budget" of energy rather than thoughts.  "Concepts give meaning to the
chemicals that create tastes and smells." (p. 29).  Wow.  That almost sounds
like we as thinkers don't do it, but "concepts" are doing it!  Again: 

"In these cases of disgust, longing, and anxiety, the concept active in your
brain is an emotion concept." (p.35)   Question: Do we have a little man,
"The Concept" active in the brain that's doing this instead of you, the
thinker?

"An emotion is your brain's creation of what your bodily sensations means,
in relation to what is going on around you in the world." (p. 35) You are
not the meaning-maker?

 

Now there are lots of good things in the Barrett's book: she emphasizes the
role of predictive thinking in the brain, that social reality plays a major
role in what and how we learn and pick up understandings about things, that
culture is a "superpower" for humans in that we are born into a world of
ready-made concepts and she emphasizes the role of concepts:

"Social reality is the human superpower; we're the only animal that can
communicate purely mental concepts among ourselves." (p. 286)

"You need an emotion concept to experience or perceive the associated
emotion (p. 141). 

"Your brain works like a scientist.  It's always making a slew of
predictions, just as a scientist makes competing hypotheses. ... to estimate
how confident you can be that each prediction is true." (pp. 64-5)

 

Yet all in all, she works very hard to avoid saying that "thinking causes
feelings" or that "cognition create emotions."  In fact, she boldly denies
such, and throughout the book she uses various vague phrases to get around
thinking.  The most common one is "the brain..."  

"The human brain is wired to mistake its perceptions for reality." "Your
brain uses concepts to simulate the world."  "Your brain uses past
experiences..." "Your brain's default mode.  Your brain does not just
predict the future: it can imagine the future at will." (66)  "Your brain is
wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver's seat and
rationality is a passenger." (80)

 

Reading this may make sense until you ask, "Does the brain do this apart
from a person thinking, concluding, believing, deciding, anticipating, etc.?
It is as if she leaves out the person who has a brain which he uses in these
ways.  With a statement like: "You feel what your brain believes.  Affect
primarily comes from prediction" (p. 78), it sounds like your brain is doing
lots of stuff apart from you!   For example, she writes, "Emotions are
meaning" (p. 126) thereby leaving out the meaning-maker (you!) as the one
giving meaning to things which, in turn, constructs the emotion.  The
implication is that we are victims of our brains.

 

Throughout the book there is very, very little said about the higher
executive functions of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.  When she does, she
contradicts the current thinking in the neurosciences.  She writes, "Your
so-called rational prefrontal cortex is failing to regulate it. ...   The
prefrontal cortex does not house cognition, and emotion and cognition are
whole-brain constructions that cannot regulate each other." (p. 212).  What
she leaves out suggests that she either does not like what the neurosciences
has discovered about the executive functions where we set intentions, make
decisions, create a sense of self, encode our sense of time, etc. or
disagrees with most neuroscientists.

"Ironically, each of us has a brain that creates a mind that misunderstands
itself." (287

 

For her, emotions are made by our "body budget" and the "emotion concepts"
of our culture.  She discounts thinking by trashing it as part of "the
traditional view" which she says is invalid.  She relies on "the brain
predicting" all the while forgetting or ignoring that predicting is a form
of thinking.

"Prediction is a fundamental activity of the human brain..." (59).  "Through
prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience."  "Prediction
errors aren't problems.  They're a normal part of the operating instructions
of your brain as it takes in sensory input.  Without prediction error, life
would be a yawning bore.  Nothing would be surprising or novel and therefore
your brain would never learn anything new.  Most of the time, at least when
you are an adult, your predictions aren't too far off-base." (62)

 

Consequently, for her, "the problem in depression is misbudgeting and
prediction" (210), it is not your depressive thoughts!  Quoting the central
idea in Cognitive Psychology, "Change your thoughts or regulate your
emotions better, the logic goes, and depression will lift." (209), but she
denies that.  For her thinking rationally is worthless because it is "the
traditional approach."

"Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the
driver's seat and rationality is a passenger." (80) "You cannot be a
rational actor if your brain runs on interoceptively infused predictions."
(80)  "You cannot overcome emotion through rational thinking..." (81)

 

This book is obviously not an NLP book, not at all!  In fact it pretty much
contradicts NLP and the Cognitive Psychology.  For Lisa Barrett in this
book, How Emotions are Made (2017) what you can mostly focus on is your
"body budget" of energy.  She argues that you need to eat properly, get
plenty of sleep, some exercise, etc.  But in terms of legal issues, school
yard issues, political issues- you are pretty much a victim of your "emotion
concepts" that your culture has developed and that your brain uses.
Accordingly, her chapters on the law and politics presents a WOKE philosophy
of victimhood (women are victims, 226; African Americans are victims, 227,
even Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber is a victim 230, etc.). 

 

My recommendation, if you want a good book on Emotional intelligence- get 

7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence (1997/2000) by Patrick Merlevede; Denis
Bridoux; Rudy Vandemme, Crown House Publications.   As a basic NLP Book
which focuses on Emotional Intelligence, the authors apply nearly every
aspect of the NLP model.  As such it is a good introduction to NLP itself
even though there are numerous problems in the book and no application of
Meta-States.

 

 




 

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http://www.neurosemantics.com/thinking-for-humans/

 




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 For International mailing: If 3 of you order together, you can reduce the
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meta at acsol.net

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

 



 

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