How our expectations shape what we see, hear, and feel

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, psychologist Paul Eckman, PhD, and psychotherapist Esther Perel, PhD, explain how the brain constantly rebuilds emotions from memory and prediction. According to their research, by choosing new experiences today, we can reshape how our past influences us, gain more control over our feelings, and create new possibilities for connection and growth.

We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: It can certainly feel like emotions happen to you. That they bubble up and cause you to do and say things, but that experience is an illusion that the brain creates.

Not everybody has as much control as they might like, but everybody has a little more control than they think they do. When you’re experiencing emotion or you’re in an emotional state, what your brain is doing is telling itself a story about what is going on inside your body in relation to what’s happening in the world. Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sensory information back to your brain, and your brain isn’t wired in a way for you to experience those sensory changes specifically. Instead, what you experience is a summary. And that’s where those simple feelings come from.

If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain’s ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present. Just in the same way that you would exercise to make yourself healthier, you can invest energy to cultivate different experiences for yourself. The fact that your brain is using your past experience to predict what you’re going to see, and hear, and feel means that you are an architect of your experience, and that doesn’t involve breaking predictions. It involves seeding your brain to predict differently.

PAUL EKMAN: It’s my belief that the way in which emotions evolved was to deal with things like saber-toothed tigers, the current incarnation of which is the car that’s suddenly lurching at your car at a high speed. You don’t have time to think. In split seconds, you have to do and make very complex decisions, and if you had to think about what you were doing, you’d be dead. It’s a system that evolved to deal with really important things without your thinking about it.

So that means that sometimes, you’re gonna be very unconsidered, very thoughtless. Well, these exercises that we’re giving people, moving their facial muscles, concentrating on the sensations to make them more aware of an emotion when it arises, so that they will feel it at the moment and then can say, “Did she really mean to ignore me? No, it was just an accident.” Or, “Maybe I shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that she doesn’t care about me at all.”

The way in which we can improve our emotional life is to introduce conscious awareness. Nature did not want you to do that. So you have to do it yourself.

ESTHER PEREL: All relationships are colored with expectations about myself and about the other. My expectations influence that which I then see or hear. It is a filter, as well as my mood. That is one of the most important things to understand about relationships and communication — how people actually co-create each other in the context of a relationship because those people make part of who we are.

We will draw from them the very things which we expect from them, even when it’s the opposite of what we really want. A lot of emphasis is put on our ability to say certain things, to say them in the right way, to articulate our needs, our feelings, our thoughts, our positions, our opinions. What is lacking is the ability to see that speaking is entirely dictated by the quality of the listening that is reflected back on us.

If I’m talking to someone who is on their phone, I will be expressing myself and experiencing the communication completely differently than if I am speaking to someone who is looking at me in the eyes, who says to me, “I get it, I understand. Not necessarily I agree.” Because ultimately, if I speak to you and in the end, I leave feeling even more alone, I am literally in an existential crisis. There is nothing worse than to be alone in the presence of another.

So when you listen to me, the first thing I need to know is that I have your attention. The second thing I need to know is that maybe you can acknowledge the validity of my point of view and, potentially, you may even empathize with my point of view. You can understand why I would think, or feel, or experience things the way I do. That reflecting back, acknowledging, validating, empathizing — that sequence is where the depth of communication takes place.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: When you enter this world, you’re not wired full of memories that your brain will use to predict. Other people cultivate your world, and as a consequence, they are wiring your brain full of experiences that your brain will then use to predict.

So, as an adult, you can make decisions about what you experience now. You can make choices about how you act. And those decisions and choices either reinforce the predictions that your brain makes or they change them.

Sometimes, in life, we are responsible for changing things, not because we’re culpable or to blame for those things, but because we’re the only ones who can change them. You always have tools available at your disposal to heal yourself, to act differently, and to feel differently.