Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: How to Understand Emotions

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is the chief scientific officer of the center of Law. Brain and behavior Dr. Baird is considered one of the top world experts in the study of emotions, and her laboratory has studied emotions using approaches both from the fields of psychology and neuroscience. Indeed, today you will learn about the neural circuits and the psychological underpinnings of what we call emotions. You will learn what emotions truly are and how to interpret different emotional states. You will also learn how emotions relate to things like motivation, consciousness, and affect. Affect is a term that refers to a more general state of brain and body that increases or decreases the probability that you will experience certain emotions. During today's discussion, Dr. Feldman Barrett also teaches us how to regulate our emotions effectively, as well as how to better interpret the emotional states of others. You will also learn about the powerful relationship that exists between our emotional states and the movement of our body. In fact, much of today's discussion is both practical and will be highly informative in terms of the mechanisms underlying emotions, and it is likely to also be surprising to you in a number of ways. It certainly was surprising to me. I've been a close follower of Dr. Feldman Barrett's work over many years now and have always found it to be tremendously informative. And when I say her work, I mean both her academic published papers as well as her public lectures that she's given, and her two fabulous books on emotions in the brain. The first one entitled how emotions are made, and the second book, which includes information about emotions, but extends beyond that, entitled seven and a half lessons about the brain. As you'll see from today's discussion, Dr. Feldman Barrett is not only extremely informed about the neuroscience and psychology of emotion, she's also fabulously good at teaching us that information in clear terms and in actionable ways. You'll also notice several times she pushes back on my questions, in some cases even telling me that my questions are ill posed. And I have to tell you that I was absolutely delighted that she did that, because you'll see that every time she did that, it was with the clear purpose of putting more specificity on the question and thereby more specificity and clarity on the answer, which, of course, she delivers. By the end of today's discussion, you will have both a broad and a deep understanding of what emotions are and.

Their origins in our brain and body.

You will also have many practical tools with which to better understand and navigate emotional states, and moreover, you will have many practical tools in order to increase your levels of motivation and better understand your various states of consciousness. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is eight sleep. Eight sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature has to drop by one to three degrees. And in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by one to three degrees. With eight sleep, it's very easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. It's a mattress cover that allows you to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle and end of your night, and in doing so, allow you to fall and stay deeply asleep throughout the night and wake up feeling extremely refreshed. I started sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover well over two years ago and it has greatly improved the quality of my sleep. If you'd like to try eight sleep, you can go to eight sleep Huberman to save up to $150 off their pod.

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Again, that's eight sleep Huberman today's episode is also brought to us by levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and behaviors affect your health by giving you real time feedback using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors impacting your immediate and long term health is the way that your body manages its blood glucose, or sometimes referred to as blood sugar levels, to maintain energy and focus throughout the day, you want to keep your blood glucose steady without big spikes or dips. Using levels, you can monitor how different types of foods and different food combinations, as well as food timing and things like exercise combine to impact your blood glucose levels. I started using levels a little over a year ago, and it gave me a lot of insight into how specific foods were spiking my blood sugar and then leaving me feeling tired for several hours afterwards, as well as how the spacing of exercise and my meals was impacting my overall energy. And in doing so, it really allowed me to optimize how I eat, what I eat, when I exercise, and so on, such that my blood glucose levels and energy levels are stable throughout the day. If you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself, go to levels link slash Huberman. Right now, levels is offering an additional two free months of membership. Again, that's levels link L-I-N-K slash Huberman to get two free months of membership. And now for my discussion with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, welcome.

Wow. It's my pleasure to be here.

I've wanted to talk to you for a very long time. I'd like to talk about emotions. I think everyone has a sense somehow of what an emotion is. Feeling happy, feeling sad, feeling excited, feeling curious, perhaps is even an emotion. I don't know. He'll tell us, what are the core components? What are the sort of macronutrients of an emotion? Because I know there's a debate about whether or not we should be talking about emotions versus states, but what is an emotion? We all are familiar with what one feels like to us, but from a scientific perspective, how do you define an emotion?

Well, this is a scientist debate about this. Nobody in the last 150 years has ever been able to agree on what an emotion is. And I think from my perspective, the interesting but tricky bit is that anytime you want to talk about what the basic building blocks are of emotion, none of those basic building blocks are specific to emotion. So, for example, there are a group of scientists who will tell you, well, an emotion is a coordinated response where you have a change in some physical state, a change in the brain, a change in the physical state, which leads you to make a particular facial expression. So you've got physiological changes in the body, changes in the brain, changes in the face, or in motor movements. But that describes basically every moment of your life. Your face is always moving in some way. If it wasn't, you would look like an avatar, basically. So we're constantly engaged in movements, and those movements have to be coordinated with the physiological changes in the body, because whether we're in a state that we would conventionally call emotion or not, because the physiology is supporting those, it's supporting the glucose and the oxygen and all the things that you need to make movements of your body. And, of course, all these movements are being coordinated by your brain. So, of course, there's a coordinated set of features that doesn't really describe how emotions are distinct from any other experience that you have. But the claim was for a really long time that there would be diagnostic patterns. Okay? So when something triggered fear, you would have an increase in heart rate, and you would have a propensity to run away or to freeze or not just to fall asleep, although that is something animals do when they are faced with a predator. But that's not part of the western stereotype for fear. So that wasn't what scientists were looking for. And also that you would make a particular facial expression, which was presumed to be the universal expression of fear, where you widen your eyes and you gasp, like that set of facial movements. In other cultures, like in melanesian culture, for example, is a symbol of threat. Where you are threatening someone, you are threatening them with aggression, basically is a war face. But in western cultures, that's the face that western scientists believed was part of that distinctive pattern for fear. And so the way that scientists defined emotion for a long time was these kind of states where you'd see this diagnostic ensemble of signals, and that would mean that anytime someone showed one of those signals, they may move their face in a particular way or their heart increased at a particular time. You'd be able to diagnose them as being in a state of fear, as opposed to a state of anger or sadness or whatever. The empirical evidence