How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Categorization” occurs when your brain chooses a “winning instance” of emotional state that furthers your goals in the moment. For example, when feeling angry about losing a promotion at work, you may act overtly enraged and yell, express your anger quietly in whispers, or simply start to make other plans. Barrett outlines her plan for this chapter: to try to explain how the brain produces and uses emotion concepts. She begins by noting that infants are “experientially blind” and suffer frequent “prediction errors.” Nevertheless, infants are constantly learning and pick up on many aspects of their environments. While adults have a “lantern” or “spotlight” that illuminates only what they’re actively focusing on, infants pay broad attention to everything. While infants aren’t born with built-in concepts for specific emotions, their cerebral cortex is continually separating differences and similarities. This helps them efficiently process and store information and build their neural networks. For instance, through many interactions with their mothers, infants’ brains summarize the similarities of each situation to help differentiate their mothers from other things or people. Barrett reveals that concepts and predictions are essentially the same brain process. “Concept cascades,” or predictive reasoning prompted by incoming information, begin in the interoceptive network.