The Theory of Constructed Emotion

In the case of our nervous system, degeneracy means that more than one neuron or sets of neurons could lead to the same emotion. And it turns out that we don't have categories stored in our brains. When someone asks us about a category, we kind of conjure up an instance of that category. So even if I said to you, so these are true experiments actually, you see CTA subjects, test subjects, tell me all the properties of a fish. If you do this and you're asking people and they are in a laboratory with very little context or you provide people with a context like they're in a pet store, for example, people will say a goldfish.