Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that science proceeds in fits and starts.  Scientists believe in one model of an area of science, until there is enough accumulated, powerful evidence for another model to supplant it.  One era ends and another begins.  One of the most clear-cut examples of this shift is the one from a stable universe described by Newtonian physics to a relativistic one as described by Einsteinian physics.

We may be at such a point in neuroscience, specifically the neuroscience of emotions.  What we might call the traditional view, as developed over many years by giants in the field like Paul Ekman, holds (in summary form) that emotions are feelings that arise in the body and show up in body language, such as the scowl that reveals anger or the smile that signals happiness.  Under this view, emotions are reactions to the world and the things that happen to us.  Someone gives me a free bowl of ice cream, and I am happy.  Someone criticizes my driving, and I am mad.

A lot of research suggests that the outward manifestations of these emotions – the clenched fist, the smile, the wide-open eyes – all of that – can be read all around the world in roughly the same way.  If you show pictures of actors portraying these emotions to people in all corners of the earth, they pretty reliably say, yes, that’s happiness.  Or yes, that’s sadness.

But what if none of this was true?  How else could we interpret the butterflies, the pain, the excitement, all those feelings that we learn to label as such?

What if they were not reactions to the outside world at all, but rather predictions in the brain in order to keep us alive and safe in the moment?  What if your brain was busy predicting what was about to happen to it (and the rest of the body) and sending chemicals in a ‘body budget’ to prepare the body to deal with what the brain guessed was about to happen?

That’s the argument of a recent, potentially paradigm-shifting book by Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made:  The Secret Life of the Brain, published in 2017.

What’s the big deal?  Let’s look at an example.  Let’s say you are preparing to give a speech.  Your brain compares this coming state with other instances that it has seen before.  It says, “wow, let’s get some arousal signals to the body so that it will be ready to be alert, ready to go, and full of wit and speedy reactions to the audience!”  The pounding of your heart, the racing of the mind, all the rest of those familiar feelings that accompany the giving of a speech – those are your brain’s predictions about what your body will need to get through the next 45 minutes.

Under this view, feelings and emotions are not reactions to the world, they are predictions of future brain states from a brain trying very hard to keep you alive and primed for whatever might be coming at you.

More than that, the emotions that we think we “see” – the smiles, the frowns, the puckered brows – all of it is actually a social construct that your brain has learned from infancy onward.  “When Mommy smiles like that it means she is happy.”

What’s the evidence for any of this?  It comes from our new ability to watch the brain at work, in the moment.  When you scan the brains of people subjected to various stressors, no one reacts in the same way.  There is no brain signature for anger, or happiness, or sorrow.  There are no regions of the brain where the emotions are located.  Your brain is making it up as it goes along, predicting a future state, reacting in certain ways, and then labeling those constructs as “real” emotions.  And the fact that they are constructed, of course, doesn’t make them unreal, just not anything innate.  They must be learned.  And they apparently differ a great deal.  What you think of as anger might feel like mild arousal to me.

According to this new view, there are only four physical states that the body actually has.  Think of it like a 2×2 matrix with arousal – quiescence along one axis and pleasant – unpleasant along the other.  From this simple body state matrix, the brain predicts, budgets, constructs, and identifies those things we call emotions, the sublime state of human awareness that we like to think separates us from the animals.

OK, if your mind isn’t rebelling yet, then you haven’t been paying attention to neuroscience over the last several decades.  And what is the practical point of all this new thinking, you ask?  Well, it suggests that we need to think about body language differently, as something learned and constructed in a moment-to-moment unfurling of your brain’s journey through the world.  As speakers, if Barrett is right, we can learn to manage both our own body language, and discern the messages coming from others, with much more precision – and much more variety.

Will Barrett’s view of the brain and emotions stick, or will the traditional view reassert itself?  That depends on how the neuro-scientific community reacts to her work.  I can’t wait to see what happens.

It is indeed a brave new world.