Hi everyone! 👋🏻
Happy Friday. I hope you’ve had an amazing week.
I woke up on Tuesday feeling like:
It is, in fact, September.
Which means [at least] two things:
1.) Summer is (almost) over. I hope you managed to get outside once or twice.
2.) We have a new book for our book club!
Our book for September is How Emotions are Made by Lisa Barrett Feldman.
As someone who tends to intellectualize things and is drawn to the theoretical, this book seems like a great way to deepen my understanding of my emotional experiences.
By understanding how emotions are made, so my thinking goes, I can more deeply understand how my own emotions are made and how that impacts my life and experience of the world.
Here is a quick summary of the book:
The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture. A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution.
The first few chapters lay out Dr. Barrett’s Contructed Theory of Emotion briefly discussed above. From Wikipedia:
The theory is given in simplified form as:[2]
"In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion."
In greater detail, instances of emotion are constructed throughout the entire brain by multiple brain networks in collaboration. Ingredients going into this construction include interoception, concepts, and social reality.[2] Interoceptive predictions provide information about the state of the body and ultimately produce basic, affective feelings of pleasure, displeasure, arousal, and calmness. Concepts are embodied knowledge (from your culture), including emotion concepts. Social reality provides the collective agreement and language that make the perception of emotion possible among people who share a culture.
This challenges the commonly held view that emotions are “genetically endowed” and a product of dedicated brain circuitry (e.g. fear being produced in the amygdala). Instead, Dr. Barrett argues that emotions are concepts that are learned and constructed.
As of this writing, I’ve made my way through the first few chapters. In them, Dr. Barrett deconstructs the classical view of emotion while laying the foundation for her discussion of the constructed theory of emotion.
We can make better sense of our own emotions with this understanding. We can tease out exactly where our emotions are coming from and how that is impacting our present experience and understanding of reality.
If this sounds interesting to you, please join us.
If you find it helpful to read a summary of a book and its main concepts before (or while) you read a book, Tiago Forte’s summary is unparalleled.
For now.
We will be meeting to discuss the book on Sunday, October 4 @ 10AM CDT. Click here to see it in your local time zone.
I’d love to see you there.
That’s it for this week.
I’ll talk to you next Friday.
Until then,
KB