Lisa Feldman Barrett
@LFeldmanBarrett
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Neuroscientist, psychologist, and author of "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain" (Amazon "Best Books") and "How Emotions are Made"
Boston, MA
Joined August 2015
SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN: Best Books 2020 (Amazon + Barnes & Noble), Starred Review (Kirkus), "Must-read" (Discover Mag), "Beautiful writing" (@DavidEagleman), "Remarkable insights" (@DanielPink). The world's first neuroscience beach-read.
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The most expensive tasks that brains do are (1) moving your body and (2) learning something new. They have a metabolic cost that may feel unpleasant. So, feeling bad doesn't always mean that something bad happened. You might just be doing something really hard.
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This tweet speaks for itself.
Darwin was wrong: but some random columnist for "Scientific" American is right. Probability? Zero. More woke idiocy and thinly veiled Marxist criticism of "essentialism" masquerading as enlightened science
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Most brain-imaging studies make 3 questionable assumptions: mental events are localizable, map uniquely to dedicated #brain circuitry, & are independent of larger context. These 19th-century views need an update. New #OpenAccess paper in @TrendsCognSci. 1/
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In a social species, animals regulate each other's nervous systems, which is vital for health. Insects do it with pheromones. Mammals add sounds & touch. Humans, uniquely, can do it with WORDS. There is a real biological benefit in treating one another with kindness & dignity.
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Dear friends: Yesterday, I learned that I've been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in neuroscience. Honors like these are never the effort of a single individual. THANK YOU to my many generous collaborators who patiently shared their expertise so I could become a neuroscientist.
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People say about trauma that the body “keeps score,” making you more vulnerable to illness. But in fact, your brain keeps the score. Your body is the scorecard.
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If you hide toys while a baby watches, they can remember up to 3 hiding places. But if you name the toys aloud with nonsense words ("dax," "blicket") before hiding them, babies can remember up to 6 hiding places. Even if all the toys look identical. Words have power.
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The new @HubermanLab podcast is now available! Thanks so much, Andrew, for a truly enjoyable & thought-provoking discussion about the science of emotion.
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@rowancheung This system appears to be detecting muscle movements, not feelings, and making guesses about their meaning, most likely based on Western stereotypes (like smile = happy, pout = sad, etc.).
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IT'S FINISHED! I just handed my publisher the complete draft of a new book, "7½ Lessons About the Brain." It is a collection of short essays; each one covers a little-known but critical topic about the brain and human nature. To be published in late 2020.
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Had a BLAST speaking with Andrew on the @HubermanLab podcast yesterday! Looking forward to the episode in a few weeks.
I had the privilege of hosting @LFeldmanBarrett on the Huberman Lab podcast yesterday. I simply can’t wait for people to hear & learn from her. Thanks to Lisa, you’ll learn what emotions truly reflect and how we can use that knowledge to improve our mental and physical health.
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New video! For the past year, my lab has been working with filmmaker @VanYang to present ideas from my book, "How Emotions are Made," as a 40-minute "cinematic lecture." Today you can see the results. We hope you'll find it intriguing and enjoyable.
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Honors like these are never achieved by just one person. They belong to the entire community of mentees, scientists & other scholars with whom I’ve had the privilege of collaborating. I'm deeply grateful to all of you. Thank you to @PsychScience for the William James Award.
After decades spent studying emotions, #Northeastern distinguished professor of psychology @LFeldmanBarrett has received a lifetime achievement award from @PsychScience. Read more:
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I recently gave a series of four lectures on #philosophy and #neuroscience at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Each lecture builds upon the previous ones. Here is the first lecture, "Three Lessons about Emotion."
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Interested in my upcoming book of short essays, "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain"? Here is the table of contents as a teaser. 🙂 More info is available on my website.
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Thank you to everyone for your kind wishes as I recover from recent spinal surgery (3 weeks ago). Recovery is going very well. I'm now walking a few miles each day as physical therapy. Lots to tweet about.🙂.
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Honors like these are never the result of a single individual's efforts. I am so grateful for my wonderful lab, generous collaborators, & patient mentors. Congratulations also to fellow awardees Megan Gunnar (@GunnarMegan) and Henry Roediger.
Congratulations to my brilliant spouse, @LFeldmanBarrett, who has been awarded one of #Psychology's highest honors, the @APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.
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The feeling that we call "certainty" is an illusion that the brain manufactures to help us make it through each day. Giving up a bit of certainty now and then is a good idea. It's an opportunity for discovery.
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Recently I had a 90-minute discussion with @Mark_Solms, a neuropsychologist who plans to critique my research and who proposes natural kind categories of affect (which in my view the data do not support). We recorded the discussion for anyone interested.
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Your overall mood is largely created by a brain network that also sends predictions to areas important for vision, hearing, & other senses. So, you may think vision & hearing influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around. What you feel alters what you see & hear.
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When you experience emotion, what's happening inside you? And how can you control it? New video from @BigThink.
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We come into the world with a basic brain plan that can be wired in a variety of ways to construct different kinds of minds. What we call "human nature" is really many human natures. Variation is the norm.
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Your brain makes predictions constantly, behind the scenes. If it didn't, sports could not exist. #HowEmotionsAreMade
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Guess what just showed up on my front porch? The first official copies of "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain"! Publication date is November 17. So excited.
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Did you know: your #mood influences what you see & hear? Part 1 of a 2-part series. #HowEmotionsAreMade
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When TED approached me in mid-2017 to give a talk about emotion, I had no inkling it would become popular. Yesterday, the talk reached 5,000,000 views. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has watched & shared it!
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Friends: I'm taking a break from social media while I recover from (successful) surgery. See you in a few weeks. [Tweeted by Lisa's husband]🙂
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New conversation with @LexFridman!.
Here's my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett (@LFeldmanBarrett) where we discuss her convention-challenging ideas about how the brain works, including emotion, empathy, prediction, dreams, and free will. Pre-order her new book. It's a great read.
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Our personal experiences often don't reveal how the natural world actually works. That's why we invented science.
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The human brain is not more evolved than a rat brain or lizard brain. Just differently evolved. Each species is uniquely and effectively adapted to its environment.
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So pleased to receive the U.K. edition of "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain," which will be published on March 4!
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The world's languages include many emotion words that have no equivalent word in English. One that I find compelling is gigil (Filipino): The urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable.
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Just received the official page proofs from my publisher for my upcoming book of short essays, "Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain." Very exciting to see the book in close-to-final form! Due on November 17.
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Rainbows have no stripes. You perceive stripes because your brain groups together (categorizes) certain wavelengths of light based on colors that you've learned. People from different cultures, with different color concepts, may see different stripes.
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Lex (@LexFridman) asked me back on his show for "Round 2" of our in-depth conversation about mind, brain, and the meaning of life.
Here's my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett (@LFeldmanBarrett) about love, evolution, and the human mind.
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His Holiness the @DalaiLama is presented with a Tibetan translation of my book, "7½ Lessons About the Brain," at a research conference in India. I received these photos unexpectedly from a colleague. How cool!
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Think that the #brain contains circuits for "fight and flight"? Think again. Congratulations to @AlexFischbach_ et. al on a careful and groundbreaking study. @AffectiveSciLab #Neuroscience
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Kindness is good for your brain & body — and the brains & bodies of those around you. I'll share a list of the best novels I've read in which kindness plays a major role. They're complex, sometimes funny, and engaging stories that kept me thinking and left me optimistic. 1/7.
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Your mind is a computation moment within your brain and body.
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Some of the most fun & in-depth discussions I've had were with @LexFridman. We've spoken three times: twice on his podcast & once at @MIT before he became known as a podcaster. The first episode was "Counterintuitive Ideas About How the Brain Works." 1/3
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Does your brain really contain "fight-or-flight" circuits? New article in Scientific American (@SciAm).
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My book "How Emotions are Made" is currently FREE at Amazon for Prime members. This is the Kindle edition. (I don't know how long this promotion lasts.)
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AI can detect scowls, smiles and frowns, but algorithms cannot reliably infer someone’s underlying emotional state from them.
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You can't change your past, but with your predicting brain you can change your future. Read something that challenges your beliefs. Try new activities. Curate new experiences. Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict (and act) differently tomorrow.
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@RDembroff In general, women believe they have stronger, more frequent emotions than men do, and men agree. But when my psychology lab tracked the emotional lives of hundreds of men & women using handheld computers, on average there were few differences by sex.
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Just learned that my TED talk was one of the 25 most popular of 2018!
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When people talk about brain wiring, it's a metaphor. Neurons aren't soldered together. They're separated by small gaps called synapses. Connections are completed in the synapses by chemicals. This arrangement lets your brain configure into different patterns of activity quickly.
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Brand new talk! In my recent award lecture at AAAS, I call for a paradigm shift in all sciences that study human behavior. This video is more "science-y" than my TED talks (with experiments & data).
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The key sentence in this article appears second from the end: "every brain has unique ways of representing meaning." In other words, a general mind-reading AI that works on most people is highly unlikely. 1/2
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The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is. also another human. (Free excerpt from "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain".)
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It's hard to entertain beliefs that are very different from your own; it's a withdrawal from your body budget. But if you can say, "I utterly disagree with those people, but I understand why they believe what they do," and mean it, we're 1 step closer to a less polarized world.
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Our lab's new paper in @NatureComms examines how famous actors portray emotion with their faces. The findings have important implications for so-called "Emotion AI" systems. I'll summarize our novel method and findings. @AffectiveSciLab 1/13
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Check out our new paper. Traditionally, BOLD signal is interpreted as measuring brain “activity,” but what is “activity”? We suggest that increases in BOLD signal specifically track unexpected sensory signals (i.e., prediction error) as opposed to generic "local processing." 1/2.
New paper! BOLD “activity” is caused by local hemodynamic/metabolic changes—but what does “activity” mean in functional terms? .Our review examines oft-overlooked increases in glucose metabolism (coinciding with BOLD increases) and proposes an answer. 1/6.
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Have you ever guided a baby's attention? You draw their gaze to (say) a balloon & talk about it. You switch your gaze back & forth between them & the balloon. This "sharing attention" helps to wire their little brain so they learn which parts of the world matter.
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So-called emotion AI systems do not detect emotions. They detect muscle movements, which may have many meanings (or no meaning at all).
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In a sea anemone, sensory neurons are directly connected to motor neurons, so when a fish brushes against its tentacles, it moves reflexively. Your brain has intermediaries, called association neurons, between sensation and action. They are the biological basis of choice.
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In stressful times, a surprising lesson from neuroscience may help to lessen your anxieties.
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@ethicsoftech Four senior scientists (with diverse viewpoints) and I spent two years evaluating the data in 1000+ research papers on facial expressions and emotion. The data clearly suggest that facial expressions are not universal.
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Thrilled to share that SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN is an @amazonbooks Editors’ Pick for Best of November — and it's on an NYC billboard!
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"Where do feelings come from?" So excited to be a guest on @HiddenBrain (I'm a big fan). Host @ShankarVedantam & team are lyrical & scientifically precise; it's a joy to be on the podcast. I particularly appreciate how they approach personal questions w/.
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Better assumptions: (1) Mental events comprise distributed activity across the whole brain; (2) Brain & behavior are linked by degenerate, many-to-one mappings; (3) Mental events emerge as a complex ensemble of non-linear, interacting signals from brain, body, & outside world. 2/.
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Sometimes it’s necessary to say things that other people don’t like, or even find offensive. That’s an essential part of democracy. But it’s a good idea to speak in a way that encourages others to listen. There's a real biological benefit in treating each other with dignity.
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Why is it that you can text a few words to a friend across the world and change their heart rate and breathing?.Many of the same brain regions that process language also control the insides of your body. Words have power.
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"Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain" is now fully typeset and off to the printers! And in a few days, I head into the recording studio to create the audiobook. (Reading it myself this time.) Should be fun!.
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Honors like this are never the result of one person's efforts. They belong to a community working together, including my lab members (current & former) and my collaborators.
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Feeling overwhelmed? Science gives us a set of tools for coping with distress. New interview in @MariaShriver's Sunday Paper.
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Here's my fourth and final lecture on #philosophy and #neuroscience at Ruhr University Bochum. The title is "Relational Realism as a Framework for Studying the Mind." This material is very new and it was my first time presenting it.
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The journal Nature just released a 6-minute video about the science of facial movements and emotion. It features the work of several scientists including myself.
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Interested in videos about emotion, mind & brain? I've revamped my website's video page -- it's more organized and accessible now.
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Filming in my backyard yesterday with "60 Minutes." (Yes, we all stayed 6 feet apart, and we wore masks except during the actual interview, shown here. The interviewer is on the laptop screen via Zoom.) No word yet on when the segment will be shown.
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Much of what you experience as the outside world begins inside your own head. This is the predicting brain in action.
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We are social animals. Through our words and actions, we affect the brains and bodies of those around us. This means freedom always comes with responsibility. We may be free to speak and act, but we are not free from the consequences of what we say and do.
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This is a great new book about the science of emotion and its development throughout life, by an esteemed expert. @LiCamras publishes some of the very best research on emotional development. Much of what I know about the topic I learned from her papers.
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Sometimes we're responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them.
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Many experiments in psychological science are based on outdated assumptions of what a mind is & how mental events are caused. It's time to reconsider those assumptions and forge a more valid, robust & trustworthy scientific practice. @APA @APA_Journals /1.
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The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is "Pie Day" in our household: 12 pies baked in 12 hours. Some are for Thursday's dinner and others are for our neighbors and friends. To all who celebrate Thanksgiving, my family and I wish you a peaceful and delicious holiday.
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New article! Everything you sense, and every action you take, arises from a complex web of interwoven signals. Some of the most important signals come from your own brain. In @BigThink.
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I was delighted to discover this morning that someone (@freedomintht) made an animated video about my work! They hit all the high points of the theory in an accessible & engaging way.
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Scientific ideas are more comfortable when they're intuitive and easy to understand. But comfort does not mean an idea is correct.
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Sam Harris and I explore the human mind & brain together in this new episode of his Making Sense podcast, "Constructing Minds." @SamHarrisOrg
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"Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain" is now published! It's available in hardback, e-book, and audiobook formats. HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has supported the book!
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This write-up of our analysis of "emotion recognition" research hits the main points particularly well.
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The full video from Monday's Systems Neuroscience workshop is now available, with Ben Hayden, Luiz Pessoa, Barbara Finlay, Joe LeDoux, Paul Cisek, and Patricia Churchland, and myself. The YouTube page has bookmarks to jump to each talk.
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"You have more control over your emotions than you think." Thanks to @AdamMGrant for having me on his podcast! (Also available on Spotify and other services.)
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One of the fun things about writing a book is seeing all the different covers that international publishers create. Here are the covers for "How Emotions are Made" in a dozen countries.
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On this day filled with suspense and angst, here's an opportunity for a little emotion regulation (should you need it): our puppy, a husky, encountering snow for the first time in her life. She kinda liked it.
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Detecting facial movements does not equal detecting emotion.
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