How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

you must show that no other explanations can account for your results.

Faces are constantly moving, and your brain relies on many different factors at once—body posture, voice, the overall situation, your lifetime of experience—to figure out which movements are meaningful and what they mean.14

As it turns out, facial EMG presents a serious challenge to the classical view of emotion. In study after study, the muscle movements do not reliably indicate when someone is angry, sad, or fearful; they don’t form predictable fingerprints for each emotion.

A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.2

The classical view of emotion holds that we have many such emotion circuits in our brains, and each is said to cause a distinct set of changes, that is, a fingerprint.

By virtue of our values and practices, we restrict options and narrow possibilities for some people while widening them for others, and then we say that stereotypes are accurate. They are accurate only in relation to a shared social reality that our collective concepts created

Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, puts it succinctly: “So, do other animals have human emotions? Yes, they do. Do humans have animal emotions? Yes, they’re largely the same.”

Emotional harm is not mere discomfort but can shorten a life. In short, every perception and experience within the courtroom—or anywhere else—is a culturally infused, highly personalized belief, corrected by sensory inputs from the world, rather than the result of an unbiased process.

whole culture collectively plays a role in the concepts you build and the predictions you make, and therefore in your behavior.

It’s a culmination of multiple factors, including predictions from your brain, prediction error from your five senses plus interoceptive sensation, and a complex cascade involving billions of prediction loops. And that’s just the story inside a single person. Your brain is also surrounded by other brains in other bodies.