Emotions Aren’t Hardwired

According to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, emotions aren’t hardwired in your brain but are instead “made in the moment.“

Historically, scientists believed your brain triggers an evolutionary response to external factors, causing your body to act in a predetermined way. For example, if you saw a bear in the woods, you didn’t have a choice of how you would react. The ‘fear circuit’ in your brain would cause your heart to race, your blood pressure to soar, and your face to form the universal expression of fear. Other emotions were thought to have similarly hardwired blueprints.

Furthermore, scientists believed the fear circuit was a region in the brain called the amygdala. They designed lots of pseudo-experiments showing new circuits could be created tied to specific emotions. For example, once you’ve been involved in a car accident, the sound of screeching tires might cause a fear response – even if you’re not truly in danger.

However, this prevailing view of the amygdala as the fear circuit has been disproved. For one, people who don’t have an amygdala can still feel fear. In addition, the amygdala has been shown to be involved in many of processes such as thinking, memory, empathy (and all other emotions). For these two reasons, the amygdala can’t be a hard-wired fear circuit.

Instead, Feldman Barrett claims “feelings are the result of three things: your body, your past, and your environment.” Your brain form emotions as guesses in response to these three context clues. If one of the three contexts tells a different story, the emotional is less likely to be triggered. For example, the screeching tires might not cause fear if you’re on your couch watching a movie rather than if you’re in your car on the freeway.

Knowing these three factors are involved provides a tool to potentially control your emotions. As Feldman Barrett encourages, when you feel a powerful emotion like fear, ask yourself if it’s coming from either your physical body or your environment. If it’s not (and in most cases it’s not), recognize the emotion is based on the memory of a past event rather than something current. Then, acknowledge the past event triggers the emotion but try to re-focus your mind on what’s going on at the moment. If you do this several times, “your brain may override the past association and re-align the experience to a different emotion.”

In summary, we should neither ignore nor fixate on our emotions. Instead, we should recognize that they are clues as to what is happening in our brains and embrace the fact that responses to our emotions aren’t hardwired. By short circuiting our normal responses, we can learn new responses and even control our emotions.