Understanding Emotions: Fear, Dread, and Neural Networks

An elaboration on episode 49's description of the brain as a prediction engine, focusing on a theory of what emotions are, how they're learned, and how emotional experiences are constructed. Emotions like anger and fear turn out to be not that different from concepts like money or bicycle, except that the brain attends more to internal sensations than to external perceptions.

If the predictive brain theory is true, the brain is stranger than we imagine; perhaps stranger than we can imagine.

Main sources

• Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017.
• Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017.
• Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, 2024.

Other sources

• "... Chemero’s approach in his book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (episode 43)..."
• "... Clark suggests something like this in his 1997 book, Being There, covered in the unnumbered episode just before episode 41..."
• "... Remember how, last episode, I distinctly remember driving seated on the left side of the car while in Ireland..."
• George A Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information,” 1956. ("... replicating an experiment from 1949...")

Credits

Picture of the University of Illinois Auditorium is from Vince Smith and is licensed CC BY 2.0. It was cropped.