The human brain is a master of deception. It creates experiences and directs actions with a magician’s skill, never revealing how it does so, all the while giving us a false sense of confidence that its products—our day-to-day experiences—reveal its inner workings. Joy, sadness, surprise, fear, and other emotions seem so distinct and feel so built-in that we assume they have separate causes inside us. When you have a brain that essentializes, it’s easy to come up with a wrong theory of the mind. We are, after all, a bunch of brains trying to figure out how brains work.
For millennia, the deception has been largely a success. Oh, the essences of the mind received a makeover every century or two, but for the most part, the idea of mental organs has pretty much stuck around.* Casting away those essences remains a challenge today because the brain is wired to categorize, and categories breed essentialism. Every noun we utter is an opportunity to invent an essence without intending to do so.
Little by little, the science of the mind is finally removing its training wheels. The skull is no longer the force field that it was, now that brain-imaging technology can peer harmlessly into a human head. New wearable measurement devices are moving psychology and neuroscience out of the lab and into the real world. As we amass petabytes of brain data with our twenty-first-century tech toys, however, the media, venture capitalists, most textbooks, and some scientists are still interpreting that data with a seventeenth-century theory of the mind (having upgraded to a fancy version of phrenology from Plato 1.0). Neuroscience has delivered a far better understanding of the brain and its function than our own experiences ever could, not just for emotion but for all mental events.
If I have done my job correctly, you now realize that many seeming facts about emotions in textbooks and in the popular media are highly doubtful and must be reconsidered. In these pages, you’ve learned that emotions are part of the biological makeup of the human brain and body, but not because you have dedicated circuits for each one. Emotions are a result of evolution, but not as essences passed down from ancestral animals. You experience emotions without conscious effort, but that does not mean you’re a passive recipient of these experiences. You perceive emotions without formal instruction, but that does not mean that emotions are innate or independent of learning. What’s innate is that humans use concepts to build social reality, and social reality, in turn, wires the brain. Emotions are very real creations of social reality, made possible by human brains in concert with other human brains.
In this final chapter, we will employ the theory of constructed emotion as a flashlight to focus on larger issues of the mind and brain. We’ll take a hard look at the predicting brain and everything we’ve learned about it, such as degeneracy, core systems, and the wiring for concept development, to illuminate the kind of mind most likely to emerge from this kind of brain. We’ll see which aspects of the mind are universal or inevitable, which are not, and what this means for your broader understanding of other people and yourself.
For as long as people have been writing about humanity, there’s been a pervasive assumption that the human mind is created by some all-powerful force. For the Ancient Greeks, that force was nature, embodied as gods. Christianity wrenched human nature away from Mother Nature and placed it in the hands of a single, omnipotent God. Darwin yanked it back and attributed it to a specific feature of nature called evolution. Suddenly you were no longer an immortal soul, and your mind was no longer a battleground of good and evil, righteousness and sin. You were instead a collection of specialized inner forces, sculpted by evolution, that struggle to control your actions. Your brain allegedly battles your body, rationality battles emotionality, cortex battles subcortex, and forces outside of you battle forces within you. With your animal brain wrapped in rational cortex, you are supposedly distinct from other animals in nature, not because you have a soul while they are soulless but because you are the pinnacle of evolution, endowed with insight and reason. You therefore came into the world preformed to respond to what it has to offer in a specific way, not in God’s image but by your genes. Experiences like emotions are heralded as evidence that you are an animal through and through. But you are considered special in the animal kingdom because you can overcome your inner beast.
As you have learned in this book, however, new discoveries about the brain have revolutionized our understanding of what it means to be human.
Your mind is definitely a product of evolution, but it is not sculpted by genes alone. Sure, your brain is made of networked neurons, but that’s just one factor in growing a human mind. Your brain also developed inside of a body, nestled among other human brains in bodies, who balanced your body budget and expanded your affective niche through actions and words.
Your mind is not a battleground between opposing inner forces—passion and reason—that determine how responsible you are for your behavior. Rather, your mind is a computational moment within your constantly predicting brain.
Your brain predicts with its concepts, and while scientists debate whether certain concepts are innate or learned, it’s unquestionable that you learned a slew of them as your brain wired itself to its physical and social surroundings. Those concepts come from your culture and help negotiate the quintessential dilemma of living in groups—getting ahead versus getting along—a tug-of-war that has more than one solution. On balance, some cultures favor getting along, while others favor getting ahead.
All these discoveries reveal a crucial insight: The human brain evolved, in the context of human cultures, to create more than one kind of mind. People in Western cultures, for example, experience thoughts and emotions as fundamentally different and sometimes in conflict. At the same time, Balinese and Ilongot cultures, and to a certain extent cultures guided by Buddhist philosophy, do not make hard distinctions between thinking and feeling.1
How do different kinds of minds emerge from one kind of brain with the same set of networks? How can one type of brain create your mind, full of emotion concepts and experiences, and my mind, which has different instances of the same concepts or maybe some different emotion concepts, and a Balinese mind that has no separate concepts or experiences for thoughts and feelings, each of which is adapted to its physical and social environment?
On the surface, all normally developing human brains look pretty similar, particularly if you take off your glasses and squint. They all have two hemispheres. Every cortex has five lobes, with up to six layers. The neurons within every cortex are wired to compress information into efficient summaries, creating a conceptual system that shapes action and experience. Many of these features are present in other mammals, and some truly ancient aspects of your nervous system are even shared with insects. (One example is Hox genes, which organize a vertebrate’s nervous system from head to tail.)
Nevertheless, brains vary significantly from person to person: in the placement of every cortical groove and ridge, in the number of neurons within particular layers of the cortex or in subcortical regions, in the microwiring between neurons, and in the strength of connectivity within brain networks. When you take into account these fine details, no two brains from the same species are structured completely alike.2
Also, within a single brain such as your own, the wiring is not static. Just as the arbor of a tree grows in the spring and shrinks in the fall, interconnections between your axons and dendrites increase and decrease as you age. You even grow new neurons in certain brain regions. This kind of anatomical change, called plasticity, also occurs with experience. Your experiences become encoded in your brain’s wiring and can eventually change the wiring, increasing the chances that you’ll have the same experience again, or use a previous experience to create a new one.3
And from one moment to another, your billions of neurons continually reconfigure themselves from one pattern into another. Chemicals called neurotransmitters make this possible. They enable signals to pass between neurons, and they dial up or dial down neural connections in a split second, so information flows along different paths. Neurotransmitters empower a single brain with a single set of networks to construct diverse mental events, creating something greater than the sum of the parts.4
Then, of course, we have degeneracy: different sets of neurons produce the same outcomes. Plus, no matter how finely or coarsely you look at brain tissue—as networks, regions, or individual neurons—that tissue contributes to more than one category of mental event, such as anger, attention, or even vision or hearing.5
Microwiring. Neurotransmitters. Plasticity. Degeneracy. Multipurpose circuitry. Neuroscientists sum up this incredible well of variation by calling the brain a “complex system.” I don’t mean complexity colloquially, as in “gosh, that brain sure is complicated,” but something more formal. Complexity is a metric to describe any structure that efficiently creates and transmits information. A system with high complexity can create many new patterns by combining bits and pieces of old patterns. You can find complex systems in neuroscience, physics, mathematics, economics, and other scholarly disciplines.6
The human brain is a high-complexity system because, within one physical structure, it can reconfigure its billions of neurons to construct a huge repertoire of experiences, perceptions, and behaviors. It achieves high complexity via an ultra-efficient arrangement for communication centered on the critical “hubs” mentioned in chapter 6. This organization permits the brain to integrate so much information from multiple sources so efficiently that it can support consciousness. In contrast, the model of the brain posited by the classical view—independent blobs with distinct functions —would be a low-complexity system because each blob would accomplish its single function by itself.7
A brain with high complexity and degeneracy brings distinct advantages. It can create and carry more information. It’s more robust and reliable, with multiple paths to get to the same end. It’s more resistant to injury and illness; you’ve seen living examples in the twins with amygdala damage (chapter 1) and Roger with his ravaged predictive brain circuitry (chapter 4). Such a brain therefore makes you more likely to survive and pass your genes to the next generation.8
Natural selection favors a complex brain. Complexity, not rationality, makes it possible for you to be an architect of your experience. Your genes allow you, and others, to remodel your brain and therefore your mind.9
Complexity implies that the wiring diagram of a brain is not a set of instructions for a single kind of mind with universal mental organs. But the human brain has few preset mental concepts, such as perhaps pleasantness and unpleasantness (valence), agitation and calmness (arousal), loudness and softness, brightness and darkness, and other properties of consciousness. Instead, variation is the norm. The human brain is structured to learn many different concepts and to invent many social realities, depending on the contingencies it is exposed to. This variability is not infinite or arbitrary; it is constrained by the brain’s need for efficiency and speed, by the outside world, and by the human dilemma of getting along versus getting ahead. Your culture handed you one particular system of concepts, values, and practices to address that dilemma.10
We don’t need one universal mind, with one set of universal concepts, to claim that we are all one species. All we need is an exceptionally complex human brain that wires itself to its social and physical surroundings, ultimately producing different kinds of minds.
A human brain can create many kinds of minds, yet all human minds do have some common ingredients. For millennia, scholars believed that the inevitable bits of the mind were essences, but they are not. The ingredients are three aspects of the mind that we’ve encountered in this book: affective realism, concepts, and social reality. They (and perhaps others) are inevitable and therefore universal, barring illness, based on the anatomy and function of the brain.
Affective realism, the phenomenon that you experience what you believe, is inevitable because of your wiring. The body-budgeting regions in your interoceptive network—your inner loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist with a megaphone—are the most powerful predictors in your brain, and your primary sensory regions are eager listeners. Body-budget predictions laden with affect, not logic and reason, are the main drivers of your experience and behavior. We all think a food “is delicious” as if the flavor were embedded in the food, when flavor is a construction and the deliciousness is our own affect. When a soldier in a warzone perceives a gun in someone’s hands when no gun is present, he might actually see that gun; it’s not a mistake but a genuine perception. Judges who are hungry during parole hearings render more negative decisions.
Nobody can completely escape affective realism. Your own perceptions are not like a photograph of the world. They are not even a painting of photographic quality, like a Vermeer. They are more like a Van Gogh or Monet. (Or on a very bad day, perhaps a Jackson Pollock.)11
But you can recognize affective realism by its effects. Anytime you have a gut feeling that you know something to be true, that’s affective realism. When you hear some news or read a story that you immediately believe, that’s affective realism too. Or if you are immediately dismissive of a message, or even dislike the messenger, that is also affective realism. We all like things that support our beliefs, and usually dislike things that violate those beliefs.
Affective realism keeps you believing something even when the evidence puts it highly in doubt. It’s not because of ignorance or malevolence—it is simply a matter of how the brain is wired and operates. Everything you believe, and everything you see, is colored by your brain’s budget-balancing act.
Affective realism, when left unchecked, leads people to be dead certain and inflexible. When two opposing groups believe deeply that they are right, they engage in political skirmishes, ideological battles, even wars. The two views of human nature you’ve seen in this book, from the classical view and construction, have been duking it out for several thousand years.12
In this ongoing battle, affective realism has led each side to stereotype the other’s point of view. The classical view is caricatured as biological determinism, that culture is completely irrelevant and genes are absolute destiny, justifying the present social order of who is wealthy and who struggles. That caricature depicts an extreme version of favoring “getting ahead” over “getting along.” Construction, on the other hand, is criticized as absolute collectivism at the expense of the individual, or as the mistaken view that humans are one big superorganism like the Borg from Star Trek, and that the brain is “a uniform meatloaf” in which every neuron has exactly the same function. It’s an exaggerated version of “getting along” trumping “getting ahead.” Each side in this battle ignores the subtleties and variations that necessarily arise in scientific communities. If you’ve read this far, you’ve seen that the evidence points to a more nuanced conclusion: the dividing line between biology and culture is porous. Culture arose from natural selection, and as culture gets under the skin and into the brain, it helps to shape the next generation of humans.13
Affective realism is an inevitability, and yet you are not helpless against it. The best defense against affective realism is curiosity. I tell my students to be particularly mindful when you love or hate something you read. These feelings probably mean that the ideas you’ve read are firmly in your affective niche, so keep an open mind about them. Your affect is not evidence that the science is good or bad. The biologist Stuart Firestein in his lovely book Ignorance encourages curiosity as a way to learn about the world. Try to become comfortable with uncertainty, he suggests, finding pleasure in mystery, and being mindful enough to cultivate doubt. These practices will help you take a calm look at evidence that violates your own deeply held beliefs and experience the pleasure of the hunt for knowledge.14
The second inevitability of the mind is that you have concepts, because the human brain is wired to construct a conceptual system. You build concepts for the smallest physical details, like fleeting bits of light and sound, and for incredibly complex ideas like “Impressionism” and “Things Not to Bring on Airplane Rides.” (The latter includes loaded guns, herds of elephants, and your boring Aunt Edna.) Your brain’s concepts are a model of the world that keeps you alive, serves to meet your body’s energy needs, and ultimately determines how well you propagate your genes.
What is not inevitable, however, is that you have particular concepts. Sure, everyone may have some basic concepts as a function of their wiring, such as “Positive” versus “Negative,” but not every mind has distinct concepts for “Feeling” and “Thinking.” Any set of concepts that helps you regulate your body budget and stay alive, as far as your brain is concerned, will do just fine. The emotion concepts that you learned in childhood are just one salient example.
Concepts are not just “in your head.” Suppose you and I are chatting over coffee, and when I make some witty remark, you smile and nod. If my brain predicted your smile and your nod, and the visual input to my brain confirms these movements, then my own prediction—say, to nod back at you—becomes my behavior. You in turn might have predicted my nod, along with a host of other possibilities, which causes a change in your sensory input, which interacts with your predictions. In other words, your neurons influence one another not only through direct connections but indirectly through the outside environment, in an interaction with me. We are performing a synchronized dance of prediction and action, regulating each other’s body budgets. This same synchrony is the basis of social connection and empathy; it makes people trust and like each other, and it’s crucial for parent-infant bonding.15
Your personal experience, therefore, is actively constructed by your actions. You tweak the world, and the world tweaks you back. You are, in a very real sense, an architect of your environment as well as your experience. Your movements, and other people’s movements in turn, influence your own incoming sensory input. These incoming sensations, like any experience, can rewire your brain. So you’re not only an architect of your experience, you’re also an electrician.
Concepts are vital to human survival, but we must also be careful with them because concepts open the door to essentialism. They encourage us to see things that aren’t present. Firestein opens Ignorance with an old proverb, “It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat.” This statement beautifully sums up the search for essences. History has many examples of scientists who searched fruitlessly for an essence because they used the wrong concept to guide their hypotheses. Firestein gives the example of luminiferous ether, a mysterious substance that was thought to fill the universe so that light would have a medium to move through. The ether was a black cat, writes Firestein, and physicists had been theorizing in a dark room, and then experimenting in it, looking for evidence of a cat that did not exist. The same applies to the classical view of emotion, whose mental organs are a human invention that mistakes the question for the answer.
Concepts also encourage us not to see things that are present. One illusory stripe of a rainbow contains an infinite number of frequencies, but your concepts for “Red,” “Blue,” and other colors cause your brain to ignore the variability. Likewise, the frowny-faced stereotype of “Sadness” is a concept that downplays the great variation in that emotion category.
The third inevitability of the mind that we’ve discussed is social reality. When you are born, you can’t regulate your body budget by yourself—somebody else has to do it. In the process, your brain learns statistically, creates concepts, and wires itself to its environment, which is filled with other people who have structured their social world in particular ways. That social world becomes real to you as well. Social reality is the human superpower; we’re the only animal that can communicate purely mental concepts among ourselves. No particular social reality is inevitable, just one that works for the group (and is constrained by physical reality).
Social reality is in some ways a Faustian bargain. For some crucial human activities, such as building civilizations, social reality confers distinct advantages. Culture works most smoothly if we believe in our own mental creations, such as money and laws, without realizing that we’re doing so. We don’t suspect the involvement of our own hand (or neurons, as it were) in these constructions, so we just treat them as reality.
And yet, this same superpower that makes us effective civilization-builders also impedes our own understanding of how we do it. We constantly mistake perceiver-dependent concepts—flowers, weeds, colors, money, race, facial expressions, and so on—for perceiver-independent reality. Many concepts that people consider to be purely physical are in fact beliefs about the physical, such as emotions, and many that appear to be biological are actually social. Even something that seems obviously biological, such as blindness, is not objective in biology. Some sightless people do not think of themselves as blind, because they get around in the world just fine.16
When you create social reality but fail to realize it, the result is a mess. Many psychologists, for example, do not realize that every psychological concept is social reality. We debate the differences between “will power” and “tenacity” and “grit” as if they were each distinct in nature, rather than constructions shared through collective intentionality. We separate “emotion,” “emotion regulation,” “self-regulation,” “memory,” “imagination,” “perception,” and scores of other mental categories, all of which can be explained as emerging from interoception and sensory input from the world, made meaningful by categorization, with assistance from the control network. These concepts are clearly social reality because not all cultures have them, whereas the brain is the brain is the brain. So, as a field, psychology keeps rediscovering the same phenomena and giving them new names and searching for them in new places in the brain. That’s why we have a hundred concepts for “the self.” Even brain networks themselves go by multiple names. The default mode network, which is part of the interoceptive network, has more aliases than Sherlock Holmes.17
When we misconstrue the social as the physical, we misunderstand our world and ourselves. In this regard, social reality is a superpower only if we know that we have it.
From these three inevitabilities of the mind, we see that construction teaches us to be skeptical. Your experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, your brain is wired to model your world, driven by what is relevant for your body budget, and then you experience that model as reality. Your moment-to-moment experience may feel like one discrete mental state followed by another, like beads on a string, but as you have learned in this book, your brain activity is continuous throughout intrinsic, core networks. Your experiences might seem to be triggered by the world outside the skull, but they’re formed in a storm of prediction and correction. Ironically, each of us has a brain that creates a mind that misunderstands itself.
Where construction advocates skepticism, essentialism is deeply committed to certainty. It says, “Your brain is as your mind appears to be.” You have thoughts, therefore you must have a blob in the brain for thoughts. You experience emotions, therefore you must have blobs in the brain for emotions. You see evidence of thoughts, emotions, and perceptions in other people around the world, so the corresponding brain blobs must be universal and everyone must have the same mental essences. Genes have allegedly produced a mind that is common to all humans. You also see emotions in this animal and that—Darwin even saw emotion in flies—and so these creatures by implication must have the same universal emotion blobs that you do. Neural activity passes from one blob to another like runners in a relay race pass a baton.
Essentialism lays out not just a view of human nature but a worldview. It implies that your place in society is shaped by your genes. Therefore, if you are smarter, faster, or more powerful than others, you can justifiably succeed where others cannot. People get what they deserve and they deserve what they get. This view is a belief in a genetically just world, backed by a scientific-sounding ideology.
What we experience as “certainty”—the feeling of knowing what is true about ourselves, each other, and the world around us—is an illusion that the brain manufactures to help us make it through each day. Giving up a bit of that certainty now and then is a good idea. For instance, we all think about ourselves and other people in terms of characteristics. He is “generous.” She is “loyal.” Your boss is “an asshole.” Our own sense of certainty tempts us to treat generosity, loyalty, and asshole-ness as if their essences actually live in those people, and as if they are detectable and measurable in objective terms. This not only determines our behavior toward them; we also feel justified in that behavior, even if the “generous” guy is just trying to suck up to you, the “loyal” woman is secretly self-serving, and your “asshole” boss has his mind on his sick kid at home. Certainty leads us to miss other explanations. I’m not saying that we are dumb or ill-equipped to grasp reality. I’m saying there is no single reality to grasp. Your brain can create more than one explanation for the sensory input around you—not an infinite number of realities, but definitely more than one.
A healthy dose of skepticism yields a worldview that is different from the genetically just world of the classical view. Your place in society is not random but neither is it inevitable. Consider an African American child born into poverty. She is less likely to receive proper nutrition during her early years of brain development—circumstances that will, in particular, negatively impact the development of her prefrontal cortex (PFC). These neurons are particularly important for learning (i.e., processing prediction error) and control; not surprisingly, the size and performance of PFC regions is linked to many skills that are required for doing well in school. Poorer nutrition equals a thinner PFC, which is linked to poorer performance in school, and less education, like not completing high school, leads back to poverty. In this cyclic manner, society’s stereotypes about race, which are social reality, can become the physical reality of brain wiring, thereby making it seem as if the cause of poverty were simply genes all along.18
Some research seems to show that such stereotypes are more accurate than we might think. Steven Pinker writes in The Blank Slate, for example, that “people who believe that African Americans are more likely to be on welfare than whites . . . are not being irrational or bigoted. Those beliefs are correct” when compared to census figures. He and others argue that many scientists dismiss stereotypes as inaccurate because we are bullied into political correctness, are condescending toward ordinary people, or are biased by our own muddled assumptions about human nature. But as you’ve just seen, there is another possibility: the official welfare statistics are true because we, as a society, made them so.19
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 in the first place. People aren’t a bunch of billiard balls knocking one another around. We are a bunch of brains regulating each other’s body budgets, building concepts and social reality together, and thereby helping to construct each other’s minds and determine each other’s outcomes.
Some readers might dismiss this sort of constructionist worldview as a stereotypically bleeding-heart liberal ivory tower academic viewpoint from the Land Where Everything Is Relative. In fact, this view cuts across traditional political lines. The idea that you’re molded by your culture is stereotypically liberal. At the same time, as we discussed in chapter 6, you are responsible in a broad sense for the concepts you have, which ultimately influence your behavior. Individual responsibility is a deeply conservative idea. You are also somewhat responsible to others, not only the less fortunate but also future generations, for how you influence their wiring. It matters how you treat other people. That is a fundamentally religious idea. The American Dream traditionally says, “If you work hard, anything is possible.” Construction agrees that you’re indeed the agent of your own destiny, but you are bounded by your surroundings. Your wiring, determined in part by your culture, influences your later options.
I don’t know about you, but I find some comfort in a bit of uncertainty. It’s refreshing to question the concepts that have been given to us, and to be curious about which are physical and which are social. There is a kind of freedom in realizing that we categorize to create meaning, and therefore it is possible to change meaning by recategorizing. Uncertainty means that things can be other than they appear. This realization brings hope in difficult times and can prompt gratitude in good times.
Now it’s time for me to drink my own Kool-Aid. Prediction, interoception, categorization, and the roles I’ve described for your various brain networks are not objective facts. They are concepts invented by scientists to describe the physical activity within a brain. I claim these concepts are the best way to understand certain computations being performed by neurons. However, there are many other ways to read the brain’s wiring diagram (some of which wouldn’t call it a wiring diagram at all). The theory of constructed emotion maps to the brain more closely than do so-called psychological essences or mental organs. In the future, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more useful and functional concepts for the brain’s structure emerge. As Firestein observes in Ignorance, no fact is “safe from the next generation of scientists with the next generation of tools.”20
The history of science, however, has been a slow but steady march in the direction of construction. Physics, chemistry, and biology began with intuitive, essentialist theories, rooted in naive realism and certainty. We progressed beyond these ideas because we noticed that the old observations held true only under certain conditions. So, we had to replace our concepts. A scientific revolution swaps out one social reality for another, just like a political revolution does with its new government and social order. Again and again in science, our new sets of concepts have led us away from essentialism toward variation, and from naive realism to construction.21
The theory of constructed emotion predicts and matches the latest scientific evidence about emotion, the mind, and the brain, and yet so much about the brain is still a mystery. We’re finding that neurons aren’t the only important cells in the brain; glial cells, long ignored, turn out to do a hell of a lot, possibly even communicating with each other without synapses. The enteric nervous system, which controls your stomach and intestines, is looking more and more important for understanding the mind, but it’s extremely difficult to measure and therefore largely unexplored. We’re even finding that microbes in your stomach have a huge effect on mental states, and nobody knows how or why. There’s so much innovative research going on that in ten years, today’s experts might feel like Plato in the presence of a brain-scanning machine.
As our tools improve and our knowledge grows, I am confident that we’ll discover the brain to be even more steeped in construction than we now know it to be. Perhaps our core ingredients like interoception and concepts will one day be seen as too essentialist, as we discover something even more finely constructed going on behind the scenes. Our scientific story is still evolving, but that’s not surprising. Progress in science isn’t always about finding the answers; it’s about asking better questions. Today, those questions have forced a paradigm shift in the science of emotion, and more broadly in the science of mind and brain.
In the coming years, I hope we’ll all see fewer and fewer news stories about brain blobs for emotion in people or rats or fruit flies, and more about how brains and bodies construct emotion. In the meantime, whenever you see an essentialism-steeped news story about emotion, if you even feel a twinge of doubt, then you’re playing a role in this scientific revolution.
Like most important paradigm shifts in science, this one has the potential to transform our health, our laws, and who we are. To forge a new reality. If you’ve learned within these pages that you are an architect of your experience—and the experiences of those around you—then we’re building that new reality together.