I see somebody come up behind me. They

can see I'm trying to park. They can

move over. No, they come right up behind

me, go on the horn, and you know, you

immediately feel just an immediate anger

response, right?

>> Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So,

there was an immediate automatic

downregulation of my autonomic emotional

response to a psychological stressor, to

somebody honking at me that was trained

and generalized from the ice bath. It's

an experiment of one. I'm not claiming

this as a published study, but so I

think there's a there's a direct

autonomic training component as well in

terms of the strength and the

automaticity, the ease with which you

can regulate emotions that they can

become kind of automatically regulated.

You don't have to overthink it. It

becomes smooth and effortless to some

extent. And that's that's the place

where where you where you want to get.

Hey everyone. To celebrate the launch of

my new book entitled Protocols, I'm

pleased to share that I'll be hosting

three live events very soon. The first

live event is in New York City at Radio

City Music Hall on September 17th. The

second event is in Los Angeles at the

Dolby Theater on October 8th. And the

third live event is in San Francisco at

the Masonic on October 28th. At each of

these events, I'll be discussing topics

from the book and my favorite part,

taking questions directly from you, the

audience. To get tickets, you can go to

hubbermanlab.com/events

and use the code protocols to get early

access. Again, that's

hubbermanlab.com/events

and use the code protocols to get early

access to tickets. Welcome to the

Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss

science [music] and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[music]

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor

of neurobiology and opthalmology at

Stanford School of Medicine. My guest

today is Dr. Dr. Ralph Adolfs. Dr. Ralph

Adolfs is a professor of psychology,

neuroscience, and biology at Caltech

University and a world expert in the

neurobiology of emotions. Today, we

discuss what emotions are, how they grow

and shrink in our brain and body, and

why some emotions seem to recruit our

behavior and decision-m and some simply

don't. We also discuss where and how

emotions are mapped in the body. and we

dispel common myths about the brain body

storage of emotions from our past, which

is a very commonly discussed topic that

frankly, as you'll learn today, many, if

not most people get wrong. We also

discuss why some people are able to

observe but not react to their emotions

and what tools may assist in helping you

build better emotion regulation. As

you'll soon realize, Dr. Adolf is

uniquely positioned to explain the real

neuroscience and psychology of emotions

and how to put that information to use.

Today's conversation therefore ought to

be valuable for people of every age and

profession and for anyone interested in

improving their emotional life and

understanding of others. And now for my

conversation with Dr. Ralph Adolfs. Dr.

Ralph Adolfs. Welcome.

>> Thank you, Andrew. Pleasure to be here.

>> Longtime admirer of your work because

you're one of the few people who has

studied these things we call emotions,

brain states, cognition, and much more

in humans. There have been others in the

field of neuroscience of course, but I

would argue few people have combined a

real grounding in neuroscircuits with an

interest in what most people think of as

a psychological set of issues in a way

that also takes into account the animal

data and really the broadest picture of

this thing that we call emotions. I'm

just going to start with a statement of

gratitude. Thank you for doing that

because it's so easy for people to

stimulate a brain area, see an animal or

a human behave or speak in a certain way

and say, "Oh, this is the brain region

for this." And you've long been pushing

back on that.

>> It's a tall order, you know, and one

impetus for the work that I've been

doing in the book that I co-wrote with

David Anderson, the book uh that I have

forthcoming with Princeton University

Press, is precisely to do what you just

said is to kind of integrate and pull

together uh findings and emotion from

animal studies, findings from social

psychology. Typically, those people in

those fields don't talk to one another.

They do very different studies, very

different methodologies. And so trying

to integrate across disciplines that are

that far apart to really try and get a

get a sense for what are emotions in a

sense that would satisfy psychologists

and lay people about human emotions but

they would also speak to the mechanisms

that you can study in mice for example

or flies as David Anderson does.

>> So how do you think about emotions and

how do they relate to brain and bodily

states? The basic answer is that I think

of emotions as functional states of a

particular type. They should be

understood by what they do, their

function rather than how they happen to

be constituted in the human brain or

differently in an octopus nervous system

or in an AI which we should talk about.

Um and so the way to situate them is to

think of control of behavior in response

to particular types of environmental

challenges. So at the sort of simplest

level, you would have reflexes. You

know, I put my hand out on a hot stove

or you tap the patellar tendon on my

knee and there's like a very rigid

behavior that's adaptive that's very

rigid, but just for that particular

circumstance, I withdraw my hand. That's

a reflex. At the opposite end, you would

have, you know, goal-directed

general valition and planning

everything, you know, the stuff we do

all the time that's extremely flexible.

And so if you have a bear or a tiger,

you know, something charging at you,

that challenge requires a control of

behavior that's intermediate between

those two extremes. I can't have a

reflex for a bear if it's far away or if

it's close or if it's a rattlesnake or

or or a tiger or all the different kinds

of potential threats out there. Instead,

I need something that's more flexible,

which emotions are. So that's the sort

of big picture that emotions are

functional states that have particular

features or operating characteristics

for dealing with certain types of

environmental challenges like running

away from a bear. I mean first of all I

think the question what is an emotion is

a good and a valid question. It's not an

illposed question. You occasionally run

into the view that [snorts] well

emotions don't really exist or we don't

really you can't really say anything

about them. question is just ill-posed

or meaningless. I don't think that's the

case. Paul Griffith's philosopher wrote

a book some years ago, I think 97 or so,

what emotions really are, uh, where he

first kind of made the claim that, well,

they don't really exist, you know, and

you could see how people come to that

conclusion if you survey all the

different theories that are out there,

Joe Leoo or Lisa Feldman Barrett or Paul

Ecman, they look pretty different. And

so you might come away with the

impression, look, even the experts can't

agree on what emotions are. The words we

have for emotions predate modern

science. So it's just a confused

concept. I don't think that's the case.

I think I mean there's room for

revision, but I think everybody kind of

knows what emotions are and I think it

deserves a straight answer that science

should provide. I think the question is

well posed enough to admit of an answer

and then how could you start getting to

an answer. So let's just start sort of

from the simplest case would be to list

some examples. So you could say well you

know emotions are anger, fear, disgust.

You could list specific examples that

are uncontentious I would hope where

pretty much everybody agrees. Okay,

these are examples of emotions right?

You could do the same if I asked you

what's a car, right? And you would say,

well, you know, it's a Mercedes and a

Honda and a Toyota. Or if I asked you,

what's a bird? And you would say, it's a

robin and a hummingbird and an eagle. So

you could list examples. That's not an

answer yet. What you would then want to

say is, well, what is it in virtue of

which these examples, what makes them

all instances of an emotion? What do

fear, anger, etc. share in common? What

[clears throat] features do they have

that makes them emotions? just like what

the cars or the bird species have in

common that makes them cars or birds.

And so David Anderson and I did that in

our book a decade ago or so now the

neuroscience of emotion where we listed

some features of emotions that helps to

answer the question and sort of get a

handle on what is it that these all

share in common. I elaborate on that and

have a longer list and really go into

detail and okay so what are the features

of emotions in my forthcoming book?

Maybe I'll just list a couple to go

through them quickly. So, one feature of

emotions is priority, which is that they

can take over your behavior that they

share in common with reflexes. If I put

my head on a hot stove, you know, I

can't help but withdraw it. And if

you're suddenly confronted by the bear,

you can't help but run away or crawl

into a ball or whatever your adaptive

behavior is. So they have priority and

interrupt your behavior which is

something that the the noble laurate

Herbert Simon already pointed out in a

paper back in the 50s or 60s that

they're interrupt mechanisms of a

certain kind. If you're just going about

your business and normal goal- directed

behavior you always need to be

monitoring for the bear or the tiger the

predator that's out there and if you

detect that emotions have to take over

or you're dead. So priority is sort of

one that doesn't distinguish emotions

from reflexes or fixed action patterns.

They they share that. Another one is

veilance that psychologists ubiquitously

mention which is sort of the simplest

dimension along which you can organize

emotions in terms of their similarity.

So anger, disgust, fear you might say

are more similar to one another than

either of those is with say happiness.

There's some similarity structure. Some

emotions cluster together. Some are

further apart and the simplest dimension

which is one that Charles Darwin already

mentioned in his book the expression of

the emotion in man and animals he called

it principle of antithesis is veilance

which is approach or avoid pleasant or

unpleasant this basic veilance

dimension. Are there any neutral

emotions? I I ask this because your

colleague at Caltech who I respect

tremendously, Marcus Meister once wrote

a review where he said, you know, a good

way to think about sensory systems and

maybe neural systems of all kind is that

they're encoding for yum, yuck, or meh.

>> And the me is a very interesting one.

Just like an animal or including us can

go forward, backward, or stay put. Now,

we can go side to side, too, of course.

Those are just different versions of

forward in in this context. And I

sometimes wonder because algorithms are

repurposed across different neural

systems if there is indeed a meh emotion

or maybe the emotion is meh. I don't

want to take us down a philosophical

path but does that make sense because as

as long as we're talking about veilance

>> sure anger and happiness clearly you

know sad and happy okay opposite ends of

the spectrum but what was it apathy is

there a state of prioritization of doing

nothing? It's a really good question. I

mean I think you know when you list

these features um like priority veilance

I I'll get to some others. One question

is which of these are necessary? Um you

know like a package of uh all of these

features uh that emotions have. Do you

need all of them or can are some of them

sufficient? And I think the answer is

some of them are sufficient but there's

some that are necessary. I think

priority is necessary. I think veilance

maybe not as you were alluding to. I

could imagine there's still veilance but

it's at a neutral region of the of the

spectrum. But then there's other ones

which are the ones that David Anderson

has studied in particular in the

hypothalamus in mice and I think goes

into great detail in the podcast that

you had with them which are scalability

and temporal persistence. And so

scalability would be that an emotion can

scale in intensity. uh one of the best

examples of that has been is is for the

case of fear and the bear coming at you.

So typically it would scale from anxiety

and monitoring you know there's the bear

sort of out there to fear where you

might run away or hide to panic. So that

sort of threat imminence scalability and

that's something where emotions are

different now from reflexes because

reflexes are binary. It's all or

nothing. I either pull my hand away or

nothing. The knee jerks or not. It's not

there's not like some scalable package

in there. And then temporal persistence

is even more something that's essential

to emotions and speaks to their function

which is you have this internal state

let's say of aggression or of fear that

has to last some time because the the

bear might be around for some time. So

you might be running away or you might

be attacking in anger. Those are phasic

little bouts but the actual internal

state that is motivating those persists

for quite a long time. So temporal

persistence is really important and it

allows the person or the animal to

incorporate lots and lots of information

that's coming in and to have a

motivational state that would be suited

for that kind of environmental

challenge. It's not like a hot plate

where if you pull your hand away you're

done. The bear is out there and it might

might come back. It might still be

lurking in the forest. So you better be

afraid for some period of time. David

Anderson studied this a lot in terms of

what neural circuits, what properties of

neurotransmitters in the brain could

actually implement persistence. Would

you have really slow neurotransmitters

like neuropeptides for instance, which

is what he studied. But my colleagues at

the University of Iowa actually did a

really cool study in humans that showed

the temporal persistence of emotions

independent of memory. So here's a

study. They took patients with amnesia.

So these were like four or five people

who had medial temporal lo hippocample

damage. They live in a time window of

maybe a minute or so. I used to study

these patients when I first started as a

posttock at the University of Iowa with

with Damasio. And you know, you can talk

to them, you they can uh process

information, but if you go to the toilet

and you come back five minutes later,

they would stand up and shake your hand,

introduce themselves to you because they

would have no recollection of having met

you before. So just no memory, very

strong antrograde amnesia as it's

called. So they had those end controls.

They showed them really sad movie clips

in all cases. The patients can

understand and watch the movie clip.

They get really sad and weepy. Right

after watching these sad movie clips,

everybody rates, "How sad do you feel?"

The amusement patients feel really sad.

The controls feel really sad. You wait

five minutes. You then ask the controls,

"Well, how do you how sad do you feel?"

And they say, "Yeah, I still feel a

little bit of sad sadness in me because

I remember having seen the movie." And

if you ask them, "Why do you feel sad?"

They say, "Well, because you showed me

the sad movie 5 minutes ago." The

amnesic patients, you ask, "How do you

feel?" They say, "I feel really sad and

I don't know why. I have no idea." and

you ask them, "Do you remember seeing a

movie?" Say, "Nope." There's like no

declarative memory of the movie, but

there's still the temporal persistence

of the sadness. It lasts some time.

>> So, I thought this was a really cool

study because it showed very clearly

that there is temporal persistence in

emotions and sadness probably has one of

the longest time constants as we know

from personal experience. But it's

separate from just declarative memory.

It's not that you're remembering that

the bear is there. That's going on too.

But independently of that, the emotion

state has its own temporal persistence.

The state has to last some time. And

again, that's something that reflexes

don't have. It just goes straight

through. There's there's no temporal

persistence.

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It is striking to me that maybe 30 years

or ago or so, there was discussion about

whether animals have emotions based on

these criteria, priority, veilance,

scalability and persistence. Is it

generally agreed upon that animals have

emotions? I believe they do because I

love my dog and other animals and I want

to believe that. But as scientists, if

we step back, do they meet the criteria

for emotions that you're setting up here

for us?

>> Absolutely. Yes. So if you have those

criteria, those functional criteria and

you would add one or two others, many

states in animals and certainly the

states that we would ordinarily

interpret as emotions in our pets, in

our dogs, cats. By the way, I loved your

dog in the in the waiting room there.

They would meet those criteria and they

would have functional emotions.

>> Uh we should talk more about this is

also the the claim now from anthropic

that large language models have

functional emotions as well.

>> That's so wild. we have to return to

that because I think it it kind of

boggles the mind you know how could a

machine have emotions but

>> well but again these are functionally

defined emotions and there's I think

there's no problem assigning to AI to

some extent and certainly to many

animals uh those functional emotions

where it gets complicated is that in us

and also by assumption in animals I have

no doubt they also have conscious

experiences of emotions and most people

take the conscious experience of the

emotion as the ground truth for the

emotion. Emotions without conscious

experiences of emotions sound like an

oxymoron. It's like you can't have that.

They the conscious experience is the

emotion,

>> which is what William James said, which

is what Joe Leoo says. And I think it's

implicitly there across essentially

every psychological theory is the

assumption that emotions really are

types of conscious experiences which I

think is the intuition that if I ask you

how do you know what's the ground truth

right how do you know you're having an

emotion you would say because it's a

certain type of conscious experience

because of how it feels. And if I asked

you more specifically how do you know

it's sadness versus anger versus fear

you would say because of how they feel.

They feel different. And so we take the

conscious experience, our own

introspective access to the conscious

experience as the ground truth. That has

a lot of problems associated with it.

Deep philosophical problems. But just

practically it has two big problems that

I think science should avoid. One is it

gets really problematic to know whether

or not animals have emotions because we

don't know how to test whether or not

they have conscious experiences. I have

no doubt that they do. It's just that

there's no scientific way to test

currently. So we should have different

criteria. And the other question is if

you tie emotion to the the conscious

experience of emotion, that is you

equate you conflate emotions with

feelings. Well, then you're not studying

emotions, you're studying consciousness.

We spoke about Kristoff Kau earlier.

Great respect for people that are

studying consciousness, but I don't want

to study consciousness. That's too hard.

>> And there's lots and lots of debates and

disagreements. So if we can avoid that

and study emotions in the absence of

needing to study conscious experiences

of emotions, we can move forward with

the science which is what every other

discipline does. So if you're a vision

researcher, right? So you study vision,

you study consciousness. No, you don't

you don't need to. I mean you can but

there's a huge amount of work that

people do studying vision and how that

works in the brain studying memory you

know any other cognitive process without

needing to study conscious experiences

they're typically accompanied in humans

and if you if you talk to the lay person

on the street and you say I'm a vision

researcher they take you to be studying

the conscious experience of seeing

perhaps or if you say I'm a memory

researcher they take you to be studying

the conscious experience of recollection

But scientifically most people working

in those fields don't study

consciousness and it's perfectly valid

to study vision and memory you know in

in in horseshoe crabs or alesia where

nobody has any claims about

consciousness. We should do the same

thing with emotion and then we can have

an integrated science across species

that can move forward without needing to

tackle the difficult problem of

consciousness. Again, yes, for sure we

and other animals have conscious

experiences of emotions and that's very

important. But we also have conscious

experiences of seeing and memory. As a

scientific discipline, we should

separate the conscious experience from

the process from the emotion and that's

the way we make progress. That's the one

of the main arguments that David and I

had in our book and that I reiterate in

the forthcoming book. At risk of taking

us in a philosophical direction, I'd

like to actually ask a biological

psychological question. Given these

criteria, you know, priority, veilance,

scalability, and persistence, but really

focusing mainly on priority. I think all

of us have had the experience of an

emotion coming on, but not in its kind

of overtaking maximal form. Like, okay,

we feel ourselves getting annoyed and we

can observe the emotion growing. The

arousal state is familiar to us. We

understand. Let's assume in this example

that we understand why it's happening.

Maybe you're in line at the store and

the person ahead of you is taking

everybody's time by doing something

that's really unnecessary and kind of

obnoxious to us in that moment. And so

our frustration is is rising and we are

observing the emotion even though the

emotion is us, right? It's within us.

And then at some point we might blurt

something out or we might feel compelled

that we have to just say, "Excuse me,

like could this maybe be taken care of?"

>> But you have some control.

>> You have some control. And and there's

this almost like running together of two

consciousnesses like there's like two of

us in there at the same time observing

self observing the outside world and

then at some point the prioritization

gets to the point where like we just do

something and sometimes it's a decision

and sometimes it overtakes us. Now at

the opposite extreme, we've all observed

I you can just go on X the social media

platform and for some reason the

algorithm likes to serve up a lot of

examples of people like on planes losing

it, people get going unhinged like you

know I like people just like completely

melting down and it's and it's very uh

in our language hypothalamic, right? And

so people are are drawn to that.

>> I have an antidote to those people.

>> They should take ice baths. I can tell

you more. Take ice baths. I think this

helps seriously.

>> Yeah. Well, ice baths. Yeah, let's

definitely talk about ice pass and ultra

um ultra races because uh you you're

training for one.

>> No, but [clears throat] I think I think

what you said is exactly right and

extremely important for humans and

probably unique to humans as opposed to

other animals which is that we can be

conscious of and monitor our own

emotions and by doing so we can regulate

them to some extent. So emotion

regulation and control and monitoring

emotion being aware of what emotion you

have those two go hand in hand and your

Stanford colleague you know James Gross

start spawned this huge field in the '9s

I guess when it started of emotion

regulation that is now huge um I just

finished my term as co-editor of this

journal a effect of science and I would

say like a quarter or so or a third of

the submissions are about emotion

regulation it is so important in in in

humans and most of pathologies and

difficulties about emotions are not

about the emotion per se. It's about our

ability or disability to control them to

regulate them.

>> If you don't mind, um because of your

understanding of emotions and states and

and neuroscience, but also your

experience as a human in the world, has

anything you've learned changed the way

that you watch your emotions grow,

decide when to step in, when not to step

in? you don't seem like an impulsive

person. So, we're not but most people

aren't. We're not talking about uh

pathology here. And I'll seed this

question by saying, you know, I have a

few friends who were in tier one special

operations and you know, that's

high-risisk, high consequence work.

We've had Alex Honold on the podcast,

high-risisk, high consequence endeavors.

Um, and they all say the same thing,

which are that emotions cloud logical

judgment. So, they're somehow far from

emotions or their emotions don't get

prioritized. But of course these are

this all of these people that come to

mind have you know healthy marriages now

you know healthy families they they're

loving people they have anger they have

they have emotions but they they've sort

of categorized emotions as cloud

judgment in the professional or you know

peak performance context. Therefore they

don't allow them to be prioritized.

Sounds a little bit robotic sounds a

little bit mechanical quote unquote on

the spectrum. people like will say these

things, right? But in some ways,

provided they're allowed to allow

themselves to be emotional emotional and

let emotions quote unquote take over in

the right context, that's kind of the

ideal circumstance, right? So, so what

do you know that allow that has impacted

the way that you think about emotion

regulation that perhaps people could

consider if not benefit from?

>> Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a

mixture. On the one hand, you absolutely

need emotions. If you have no emotions

as we know from Antonio Damasio's

original work in his book Daycart's

error uh which he put out just as I was

starting as a posttock in Iowa 1994 I

think you know if you have massive

frontal lobe lesions that make it the

case that you're no longer emotionally

responding to stimuli the consequences

are devastating which is that you cannot

make decisions complex decisions in your

life you can't organize your life you're

not motivated to take the right path

through life because you don't feel one

one way or the other about the different

options that are available. So, it's

clear that not having emotions is very

bad and certainly if you were out facing

the bear, which may not happen to too

many people these days, that would be

very bad. On the other hand, being able

to regulate them and control them um is

definitely a human skill that's very

important and that helps you a lot. The

first part is what you were talking

about first uh earlier which is the

ability to uh monitor your emotions to

identify your emotions. I think Lisa

Felman Barrett actually first did the

main work on this. It's a topic called

emotional granularity. It's like at what

how fine a grain can you conceptualize

and be aware of your own emotions.

>> And then once you're aware of them, you

can bring em various emotion regulation

strategies mostly cognitive reappraisal

type of strategies to bear on the

emotion and thereby to some extent

control your emotions. How important is

it to use language to provide that

granularity? I've certainly experienced

like feeling a bunch of things around a

particular scenario and it if you can't

separate out the elements, it can feel

overwhelming. People always say if you

can name the emotion, but I I find that

a little tricky because sometimes it's

not one emotion. It's a bunch of things.

It's confusion. It's frustration. Are

those the same thing? I don't know, you

know. And and I think many people,

>> myself included, sometimes just like it

just feels like too much. Not because

the emotion is so big, but because it's

such a tangled jungle of of where there

isn't really language to disinfect.

>> Absolutely. Yeah. I don't think you need

to put it into language. And I think

people's strategies vary. Some people,

you know, some people think in words,

some people think in pictures, most

people are a mixture. And if you look at

different languages, you know, if you're

French or German speaking like me,

bilingual, we have different words for

different emotions. But you need some

sense of the concept which I think the

concepts for emotions are pretty much

universal across languages. Uh so you

know there there all these different

examples of emotion words from different

languages like shoden fo is one that

people know now you know joy at another

person's misfortune from the German uh

gigiel I think is often trumpeted as

another example. I forget what the

culture is but this is the emotion you

feel if something is just unbearably

cute. There's a great book uh Tiffany

Watts Smith has a book I think it's

called the book of human emotions which

is basically like a little uh dictionary

an entry from a toz of all the different

emotion words in different languages but

the fact that we don't have a word for

gig or for shaden for in English you

perfectly well have the concept I just

described it to you you have no problem

understanding what the emotion is and so

I think as long as you have some kind

some concept which need not be put into

words some way to think about and

differentiate the different emotions

that are going on in you that gives you

a purchase on your ability to to some

extent evaluate them and say this is an

emotion I want or this is an emotion

that I don't want and then to act on it

through various strategies cognitive

reappraisal for example or acceptance

depending on what your strategy is

>> yeah the psychologists seem to disagree

here because um many people some who've

been on this podcast all of whom are

experts will say you know if you don't

allow yourself to feel the emotion then

it grows and other people will say well

if you focus on something then it grows

and um and this is where I think

neuroscience can be of great help

because probably both things are true

and it depends on the context but

>> yeah that's exactly right

>> maybe this is a good opportunity to talk

about um sort of dynamic attractor

states which is and I don't throw out

that language to confuse people but but

there is this idea in neuroscience right

like if we if you and I both you know

talk about this cup and I slide it

forward and then we start looking at it

and you know more and more brain brain

circuits are going to be devoted to. We

could spend several hours. It's not a

very interesting conversation, but

>> we if we do that about an emotion we

feel because of something somebody said

to us at work or online. I think we're

all familiar with the idea that we can

go down these rabbit holes within our

own mind.

>> Absolutely.

>> And it's a very dangerous way to live

>> and just knowing that it exists perhaps

can be helpful but because it's almost

like if you go far enough down a path,

it's like a horror movie. If you go far

enough down a path, it's very hard to

extract yourself.

>> Absolutely. Absolutely. I think I mean

cognitive reappraisal or any other sort

of complex reappraisal strategy for

emotions it is a double-edged sword and

it it's trainable. It's as you say if I

really focus on okay now you know I'm

starting to feel sad. I really don't

want to feel sad. I really don't want to

feel sad. I really don't want to feel

sad. Well the more I think about it the

sadder I get. Right.

>> Um or same with anxiety. Some emotions

are probably more prone to going down

this rabbit hole than others. But again,

it's a trainable skill that there are

other ways of dealing with it where you

can kind of just stop that process from

going down at all. You want to stop it

at the earliest front end. I mean, one

quick answer to the question of what's

the most successful strategy is the

earlier you can stop that process, the

better. And so, in the first place,

don't get yourself into a situation

where you're going to be anxious or

guilty or sad or whatever emotion you

want to avoid. So situational avoidance

just in terms of structuring your

environment would be one strategy and

then once you're in it I think it's

idiosyncratic to a large extent. So you

would have to figure out what works for

you but it's definitely trainable. Two

parts are trainable. One is the specific

strategy so you can do cognitive

reappraisal without overthinking it and

going down the rabbit hole and actually

feeling the emotion even more. And the

other one is just the strength and

automaticity of control that you have.

Which brings me to the ice bath. So

briefly talk about the ice because this

is relevant actually. So I I started

doing these a while back. One of my

former colleagues Justin Feinstein who

now runs a a float clinic on Maui. Um I

forget how it came about, but we were

talking about floating ice baths and he

mentioned you and he mentioned Wimhof

and said, you know, take a look at these

guys. And I saw, you know, whims

swimming in some frozen lake. Looked

kind of interesting. Anyway, so I

started doing ice baths some time ago.

They weren't that popular yet back then.

And now my wife bought Amazon like a

horse watering trough or some big thing.

Insulated it, put on a lot safer than

being out on a lake, too.

>> Put on the talk about that.

>> And I get, you know, these

[clears throat] 40 lb ice bags every

week. They know me very well at at Joe's

Ice up there. Every time I go in, they

say, "Hey, boss. Having a good party

again tonight?" Yep. cuz I can eat a lot

of ice. But so this is the interesting

thing when I start first week it is

terrible super painful. You know you go

in it's like a whole body cold pressure

task right second week it's also you

know your breathing goes up your heart

rate goes up but gradually and kind of

with some automaticity to it. Now I go

into the ice bath immediately my heart

rate goes down my breathing goes down I

beget I get super relaxed. So this is

the interesting part that I propose of

emotion regulation. It generalizes for

me. This is an experiment of one, but

for me it generalizes. So previously

prior to the ice bath and driving around

Pasadena and I don't know in the last

year or two, this seems to have risen

somehow. I'm trying to park on the

street. There's a lane next to me. I

have my signal out. There's a parking

space. It's clear what I'm trying to do.

I see somebody come up behind me. They

can see I'm trying to park. They can

move over. No, they come right up behind

me, go on the horn, and you know, you

immediately feel just an immediate anger

response, right?

>> Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So,

there was an immediate automatic

downregulation of my autonomic emotional

response to a psychological stressor,

somebody honking at me,

>> that was trained and generalized from

the ice bath. It's an experiment of one.

And I'm not claiming this as a published

study, but so I think there's a there's

a direct autonomic training component as

well in terms of the strength and the

automaticity, the ease with which you

can regulate emotions that they can

become kind of automatically regulated.

You don't have to overthink it. It

becomes smooth and effortless to some

extent. And that's that's the place

where where you where you want to get.

I've known Whim a long time and um

although I sometimes in my opinion

unfairly get tacked to the the

deliberate cold exposure as we call it

thing a little too much because we talk

about many things on this podcast not

just that I do find it very useful and

years ago my lab had collaborations with

the special operations community and

they'll tell you that the one of the

reasons it's such a wonderful tool is

it's so reliable. You always get an

increase in adrenaline, norepinephrine

in the brain, and to some extent, and

this might surprise you, perhaps not,

you get often reductions in cortisol,

which is kind of paradoxical, but when

people practice, it's very reliable, and

provided it's not so cold or it's an

open lake where you [laughter]

>> reliable and super efficient and safe

unless you're doing it in a lake or

you're doing hyperventilation.

>> 5 minutes after a shower, it's extremely

efficient. So, I

>> was That's a lot. That's good.

>> Well, after 5 minutes, you can look at

my body mass index. After 5 minutes, I

get hypothermic. So I can't stay in

>> that's a good long while and even in a

cold shower and there are now evidence

of um improved resilience to subsequent

stressors of the sort that you described

there there's some okay papers I think

it's a wonderful tool um especially for

this uh buffering this immediate stress

or anger response very powerful

>> before we went on Mike we were talking

about a different type of stressor which

is the ultramarathons that you're

currently training for a 100 mile race

which is by the way super impressive

even to shoot for it. I know you've done

others.

>> Trying is the operative word here.

>> Well, I have I have confidence in you.

>> Talk to me in two months.

>> I will. I have confidence in you. You're

going to finish this 100 mile race. But

we were talking about something that I

think is relevant to bring up now, which

is uh you were describing how you know

at some points during the these races

you just feel like complete garbage, but

then you start to feel better. And so

then the next time you feel like

complete garbage, you have the cognitive

knowledge. Yeah. that you felt terrible

then better again and so you're starting

to integrate over longer periods of

time. So here's another example of

emotion regulation but over much longer

time scales. It's a little bit harder to

access for most people than a cold

shower.

>> No, but I think this is one thing one

one reason there many reasons but

there's one reasons that I that I love

these ultramarathons and sort of

identify as an as an ultra runner uh

even though I didn't do it for decades

and I'm just now getting back into it

because of that nonlinearity. You have

these major ups and downs and you know

sort of mantra that ultra running has

co-opted is you know relentless forward

momentum but the sort of psychological

equivalent is just relentless optimism

like optimism in the face of adversity.

You have to just keep that mindset and

everybody there is like that you know

you you come around like mile 40 mile 50

mile 60 you come around some curve and

you look and feel like crap people go

looking good looking nobody says looks

like you're not going to make it. No,

nobody says that, right? So, everybody

is super positive. You're hanging in

there and it is really hard and you

know, you've just been going downhill,

your knees are shot, you have blisters,

you've been vomiting, super tired, and

you extrapolate and you think this this

is not going to work. But if you refuse

to give up, doesn't always work, but

about half the time or so, it levels out

and it starts going back up again. You

keep going. I mean, you feel wrecked at

mile 50. I feel wrecked or earlier mile

30. So trying to think forward and say,

"Wow, I have to do this over again. This

is like not fathomable."

>> Uh so it's a really interesting exercise

in not giving up and being able to do

something that you think is impossible

to do. For that matter, all of your

listeners would think it's impos if any

any of your listeners went running with

me, they would conclude two things. One

is they're faster than I am. and two,

I'm not going to be able to do a 100

miles, which means if I actually

finished the 100 miles, all of you would

be able to do so as well, which I think

is true. I think anybody can do it.

Anybody who's basically healthy if they

only wanted to, which is the key, could

actually do it. So, it's just a really

interesting exercise. You know, it's

only 30 hours. Well, only, but it's only

30 hours. It's not like, you know,

years. How hard can it be? How bad?

Well, it's it's hard, but it's doable.

It's definitely doable. And so it's just

in that sweet spot of something that

seems impossible and is just

unbelievably hard but doable and that's

attractive somehow one if if you can do

it which of course doesn't happen all

the time.

>> Yeah. And I don't know if there are any

data on this, but there for people that

have lived through really hard things

and come out better or have pushed

themselves to deliberately do hard

things of the sort that you're

describing, I do think that the memory

of that

>> can recall our body and brain's ability

to lean into other hard things. I think

so. I mean, it must be the case. I don't

know of any good experiments on that,

but you know, was that post-traumatic

resilience, I guess they call it. You

know, I mean, some people come out of

very difficult circumstances. Maybe they

do quote unquote the work they need to

or not, and and they just say, "Okay,

like I'm better for life cuz I'm out of

it." Other people carry the wounds of

that forward in a way that they, you

know, their psychological and sometimes

their physical health is a downward

trajectory. It's a very interesting

thing about like how do how should we

conceptualize pain and pain ending? Like

some people seem to live in the

discomfort of the pain having even

happened.

>> Yeah, you can certainly persevere and

overcome you know severe adversity if

it's time limited and I think just your

own sort of belief in yourself and your

capability to overcome adversity as you

were saying is one important component.

Another one is something like gratitude

or awe

>> and you get to appreciate and just value

you know just the fact that I'm here

talking to you. I mean, I'm just I'm

actually grateful and feeling some sense

of awe right now at just existing.

>> And so, G getting to that point where

you're just every morning you wake up

and you have this sense of I guess

gratitude and awe or some combination of

those emotions, I think that's a really

valuable thing to carry out of all of

this. And, you know, it takes time to

kind of accumulate, but I like living

that way. I want to get back to the

emotion system, but I'll just I feel um

inclined to um mention we had Dhacker

Kelner on the podcast studies on awe and

he defined it so beautifully. He said

it's when we bring our attention from a

small spatial scale to a large spatial

scale or from large to small

>> but then during the course of our

discussion he added that this is also

true in the time domain. So when we live

our life dayto-day, we start to feel

kind of lost in time. Yeah. And awe

becomes less common. But when perhaps we

run a 100 mile race across 30 hours, we

realize how much can happen in 30 hours.

One could say, "Oh, well then you finish

the race and the rest of life seems

trivial." But it seems the opposite is

true that we realize that time is this

very elastic thing, at least in our

minds, and all of a sudden we have awe

for the fact that we have so many days

of life to live forward. It's very

interesting and it almost speaks to the

ice bath again like you have this very

compressed stressful experience that

gives you that gap that gap between

stimulus and response that seems very

hard to access unless we subject

ourselves to these kinds of

>> no and I think that capability the I

mean people think you know chimpanzees

maybe can feel awe but I think it it I

think it's a uniquely at least as we

have it it's uniquely human emotion and

it's based on a broad sort of

metacognitive ability we have which is

to detach our conscious experience from

the here and now and do like mental time

travel. It's pretty derivative to the

need to understand other people. So I

could put myself into your shoes right

now. I I can I can do that. I could

imagine sitting where you're sitting and

I'm seeing Ralph Adolf's here. You know,

I could imagine zooming around and

adopting another person's perspective in

space. We certainly zoom around in time

and reminisce, you know, stuff from the

past, imagine things in the future. And

I think a is like that too. We adopt a

different perspective that's not just

tied to the here and now, which I think

is probably a crucial ability that

distinguishes the nature of conscious

experience in humans, which is that we

have some control over it. I can

simulate what it's like to be you. I can

imagine being in the past or in the

future. I can zoom out broadly when I'm

feeling awe. And I think animals are

more just stuck with whatever the senses

are delivering to them right now. That's

the content of their conscious

experience. We can use it flexibly. And

that's I think why we can plan and write

novels and fiction and think about most

of the time, right? When what if I ask

you what's in your consciousness? What

are you thinking about? It's not stuff

that's in front of you. You're

daydreaming. You're like all all kinds

of places. And that really gives the

human mind the power that distinguishes

it from any other animals and is is is

the reason we have everything that we

have that makes us so so different. So

awe I think is an example of a uniquely

human emotion that deres from that that

ability to adopt a vast point of view or

a point of view that's not tied to just

whatever the senses are delivering to

you.

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subscription. As long as we're talking

about assessing the emotions or the

perspective of another, what are some

favorite experiments either yours or

others in the field about perception and

assessment of emotions? You know, I've

seen a number of studies like, oh, you

know, people with lesions here or there

see scary faces as not that scary.

What's what's the sort of general

conclusions about those studies now in

2026? Because I have a feeling a lot of

what was in the textbooks when I was a

graduate student may may not still hold

up. When I started as a posttock in the

early 90s with Damasio, I started my

career on that topic by studying this uh

this famous patient SM who had selective

bilateral amydala lesions and the

finding was that she's unable to

perceive fear in emotional facial

expressions and

>> perceive fear. Could she feel fear?

>> Subsequently, we also did that. It took

for some reason because it's just harder

to do. It took some years. Um Justin

Feinstein who has the float uh clinic in

Maui was the first author on that paper.

So some years later we took that same

patient to haunted houses. We took her

to an exotic pet store where there were

snakes and spiders. We showed her horror

movies, a whole bunch of things and

found also she doesn't seem to

consciously experience fear either. So

there seem to be this very specific

deficit for fear tied to the amydala

from one patient. So that's a big

caveat. Does this generalize? Well, yes.

The amiga is important for fear, but

just saying it's a center for fear is

overly simplistic. It's it's embedded in

a big network of structures. There's

individual differences and so on and so

forth. The perception of emotions has

been has been studied a lot and probably

has been the topic of the most

acrimonious debates to some extent. So

Paul Ecman back in the 70s uh famous by

the way I dedicate my forthcoming book

to him because he probably had the

biggest impact on modern emotion science

of any single person. But his claim to

fame was he went to New Guinea and you

know these non-western cultures and

claimed that universally across all

cultures people recognize these

so-called basic emotions from facial

expressions. If you Google this now, you

know, emotional facial expressions, you

will find pictures of emotional facial

expressions. Lots of AI companies and

computer algorithms are predicated on

the idea that you can read out the

emotion from somebody's facial

expression. He had six of them.

Happiness, surprise, fear, anger,

disgust, and sadness. Sometimes contempt

um added in there. Well, it turns out

it's more complicated than that. And

actually Lisa Felman Barrett of all

people co-authored a paper with me and

three other people a couple of years

back that uh the title was something

like emotional facial expressions

reconsidered. We took stock of the whole

literature and asked is this really

true? Is Ecman's claim really true? Can

you tell how someone feels from their

facial expression? And the answer is

well not nearly as well as you would

think and in general not. And the

reasons are methodological and once you

think about it, they make a lot of

sense, which is that the emotional

facial expressions that Ecman pioneered,

I used them in the first 1994 nature

paper with his amydala leion patient,

>> those aren't actually what you normally

see walking around the world. People

don't have those facial expressions.

They are posed facial expressions by

actors. Yeah, they're very extreme. And

then the task is like, well, here's a

list of emotion words, happiness, fear,

anger, disgust, etc. Pick the one that

matches the face. That's the typical

task.

>> So, it's multiple choice.

>> Look, if I gave you a bunch of emoticons

and a bunch of emotion words and ask you

to match them, you could do that very

easily. Wouldn't show you anything about

emotions. It shows you that there's by

convention there's some association

between these things and these things.

That's it. So when you actually see real

world facial expressions and when

instead of giving a list you just ask

people just generate freely a word that

describes that you get something that's

much has much more variation much more

heterogeneity which then was part of the

ingredient for Lisa's whole claim that

variation is the norm and that in fact

emotions are in some sense constructed

rather than packages to be found in

nature which I disagree with that part

but emotional facial expression for the

perception of emotions in others and in

animals. Um, I was just talking before

coming in here to one of your colleagues

about your cute dog and they've done

studies, there's several studies now

where dog owners, if you ask them, can

you tell if your dog feels guilty when

you come home because it did something

bad? Dog owners are pretty convinced

they can tell. Well, if you do a control

experiment, they're a chance. They think

they can tell. So our conviction that we

can tell something about people or

animals, their their emotion states just

from looking at the facial expressions,

our conviction vastly outstrips our

accuracy. We're pretty convinced we can

do it. We're mostly not so accurate,

which makes sense because ordinarily

it's not the it's not just some facial,

you know, if I see you now and you look

sad, I wouldn't stop there and I but I

would say Andrew Huberman is sad. I

would ask you how are you feeling?

What's going on? I would probe you and

get a lot more information. Maybe you

would say, "Oh, no. I'm just this drink

I had tasted bad or something, you know,

that caused me to make a certain facial

expression." So, in general, these

artificial lab situations where all you

see is a picture of a face and asked for

the emotion. We don't do that in the

real world anyway. We would probe

further. We would take into account the

whole circumstances. We would ask the

person and then you can disambiguate

these emotions. So it's not that we

cannot tell what emotions people or

animals feel, but we don't do so

normally just from a single slice like a

facial expression. I feel like at least

in the context of romantic partnership,

so much more of our assessment of

another person and their assessment of

us is actually a mathematical

integration of noticing when frequency

of speech

>> or frequency of text is heading in a

negative direction relative to the mean,

right, at a particular time of day. And

I think the brain is really good at

saying like like normally somebody's

pretty communicative in the morning but

less at night for sake of example. But

suddenly they're like a little more tur

with us in the morning but maybe not

even harshness. There's fewer words

exchange and then the the the brain

doesn't think oh like they they looked

angry or they looked frustrated. They

you go oh like they were like a little

little quieter this morning than than

usual. And then if it's a very quiet

person you have you have fewer data

points to work from. But we become

exquisitely tuned to this.

>> Absolutely. much more than like, oh,

they're they're carrying their shoulders

differently. At the extremes, I think we

see this. Somebody walks in the door and

you can tell like they're sad.

>> We're looking for change like it's a

time series. The number of times or even

just like if you've probably had this

experience like in an email with a

colleague, let's move it to a different

domain. There's a certain kind of

language that's used in an email that's

different than the usual language. Like

they've never really used these words

before. You don't even identify which

words those are.

>> Yeah. years ago there was this chart

that some graduate student or postoc put

out that if the director of a lab signs

off with their name it means one thing

if they punctuate their email it means

like let's meet you know like you're in

trouble you know if there's [laughter]

just a dash with a first initial you

know there's all this and you kind I

laugh too and then you realize you go

wow like they're really paying attention

to all these subtle cues but those seem

like the kind of cues that we rely on

much more than than like do they look

sad do they sound happy And I think we

vastly underestimate this. I don't know

if there are any good studies of this,

but this feels like the

>> more bunch of Yeah, we just finished a

study like this where people texted.

That's all they had. But it's dynamic.

It's a conversation. There's like a

whole transcript. And then the question

is, what can you tell about a person

both in terms of their stable

personality and their current mood just

from that text? It turns out you can

tell a lot. So people did the study

recently where people generated I think

it's about a page or so of sort of diary

type written text and asked just large

language models like GPT or Claude to

analyze that text without knowing

anything else and just tell me the the

personality profile and it's as good as

the ground truth or as another person or

a clinician would be

>> as good as a clinician. It gets close to

the ground truth and it's as good as

like a a a good friend or a person who

knows the person. So if you score the

big five, which is what they did in that

study, extraversion, conscientiousness,

neuroticism, etc.,

>> you can tell that AI can tell that just

from a transcript of text quite well. So

the information is there clearly in what

we say, what we write and the order in

which that progresses that tells a lot

about a person enough that AI can

basically diagnose your personality from

just text. It's almost like our brain is

very attuned to when we don't get what

we were expecting to get in terms of the

amount of interaction. Like I have some

people that clean up the graffiti on the

street where I live and there's always

an exchange of hello or like a hi if one

of us is on a call or busy

>> and I can say with certainty because

this happened the other day that if I

looked over and the person saw me and

then turned away even though we we I

don't know their name. Well maybe I do

now but that there's very little

familiarity except with we always

acknowledge the other's presence. Yeah.

>> If they were to do that I would think

gosh like this person's like maybe

upset. One of the key ingredients of

Lisa Feldman Barrett's thinking

certainly in recent years which is

prediction that the most of the

information comes from the when there's

a mismatch between what you're

predicting about a circumstance and

something that's just different because

that carries information something

changed right like what you were saying

um and and Lisa's work Lisa's thinking

on emotions incorporates prediction in a

big way these days that there's

something that you're predicting about

the world but suddenly you know there's

a tiger or something unexpected and you

need to incorporate that and that

carries important information but

absolutely we're always predicting and

there's we're taking into account things

that change like the facial expressions

you know the original studies like the

ones I started doing as a postoc where

you just show these static Paul Ecman

pictures of facial affect well we never

see that in people it's always dynamic

the face is changing and so Philip Shins

Rachel Jack colleagues in Scotland for

instance have studied this in great

detail and used dynamic actual videos of

people making faces and asked at what

point does the brain start to represent

different emotions depending on not how

the face looks but how the face is

changing.

dynamics are everywhere. It's super

important

>> because when we look at babies and they

start to smile for the first time or

they express what we think is, you know,

humor or something like that, we are so

tuned to faces because they they can't

really do much. And whether or not

they're interacting with us or not is

really dependent on our behavior.

There's a lot of control there. We're

putting them in front of us. As they

develop more autonomy, then these sorts

of dynamics really emerge. Right. The

face I mean the face is visible and the

face the human face has way more muscles

and control than other animals do. Great

apes have similar sets of muscles but

monkeys or your dog. You can't make

those kinds of faces. It just side every

once in a [laughter] while and I project

onto him what that's about. But he's a

real sweetie. I had another bulldog mut.

They're both mutza who is much much more

coarse, less affectionate. This one is

like pure butter. But of course I don't

know what's going on in his head. He

could be thinking like this guy's the

biggest jerk in the world, you know,

like I we should be walking right now.

This patient SM who had bilateral

amydala lesions, could she experience

autonomic arousal? Could she experience

stress? Could she experience anxiety

under any conditions?

>> She could. Um, and that and that's

really important. So, it's you might

think that, you know, it's just like the

whole emotion system is gone. You just

sort of denerated the entire autonomic

nervous system and that's why you don't

have emotions. But it's much more

specific than that and fits with

thinking about emotions as evolved

functional modules for dealing with

particular types of statistically

recurring environmental challenges that

share some some challenging feature in

common. So she doesn't have fear to

external stressors like we went with her

into a haunted house. She poked the

monsters and wanted to touch things.

Same with the u the snakes and the

spiders in the pet store. But we did a

study again Justin Feinstein uh I think

was the first author on this one as well

with her and with a couple two maybe or

three patients who had similar lesions

in collaboration with Renee um Hurleman

from Germany where we put a mask on them

and in have had them inhale carbon

dioxide. If you do that you get a panic

attack in about half the population

because it makes you feel like you're

suffocating. So as soon as you get that

carbon dioxide in, it changes the pH in

your blood that's detected by the brain

and it you get this massive air hunger

like you suddenly can't breathe. That's

what your so your brain goes into this

alarm mode of some suffocation like a

panic and she and the other amydala

patients had a full-blown panic attack

when they inhaled the carbon dioxide. So

this intraceptive signal seems not to

depend on the amydala and to depend on

other brain stem circuits. Uh so we had

a a very important association between

different types of fear which is I think

a bottom line story for the way that the

science is informing our folk psychology

which is these categories we have like

anger or fear or disgust there many

varieties. It's much more finely

differentiated than that once you look

at the science. And once you look at the

brain systems, they're distinct brain

systems in this instance for fear to

something out there in the world versus

panic of something happening inside you

like having a heart attack or not

getting enough air.

>> I see. Yeah.

>> Maybe we could talk a little bit about

the bodily representation of these

things we're calling emotions. Uh years

ago, I posted on social media a picture

of a figure from your paper with uh from

your book, excuse me, with David

Anderson, which was describing a study

where people self-described, so it's

purely subjective record reporting as I

recall,

>> where in their body they felt different

emotions. So, it's kind of like a heat

map in the forehead for certain um

emotions and in the whole body for

others. And and there were wide range of

emotions. And admittedly, it's

subjective report, but does this hold

up? Like I think to myself like where do

I feel sadness like heartache? Well I

tend to feel it around my heart but

maybe that's because it's called

heartache. Where do I feel anger? Well

extreme anger I'm going to feel as a

whole body experience. Same thing with

awe. So what if anything is important

about the regularity

andor the variation in kind of where in

our body we feel emotions. Some people

would say this is like their whole

experience of life. They feel things in

their body all the time. Some people

feel I think are more cerebral. They

they kind of think things more than they

feel things.

>> You know, I think it's a great it's a

great question. I mean that figure that

you're alluding to came from a paper I

think in PNAS by Lowry Newman and

colleagues in Finland and he and his

colleague Haney Serimaki. They've done

some of the great uh great recent

studies also on uh experience of

emotions in humans using functional MRI.

But what you mentioned so the experiment

is I just give you a word right I'm not

actually making you feel the emotion I'm

asking you sadness draw you know where

on the body you think you would feel

that emotion [clears throat] so if you

think about it it's certainly not about

actual physiological changes in the body

nothing's measured in the body they

don't have electrodes on the body or

whatever there's people just drawing on

a little mannequin where they think they

would feel the emotion it's also not

about conscious experiences of emotion

I'm not making I'm not showing you sad

movie clips or anything like that. I'm

giving you a word, a single word. So,

it's about concepts. It's about where in

the body, people's concept of sadness or

happiness or fear where that corresponds

to changes in the body. Now, that's an

interesting question, but you have to

narrow it down to that which is a

fundamental problem with most emotion,

including that one. I think the title, I

forget what the title is, but it's

something like bodily maps of emotions

or bodily maps of subjective experience.

Maybe even it should be something like

people's concept of where in the body

emotion words are associated with

changes or something like that. What's

interesting about that study is that

Lowry has gone on to look at it in

different cultures. He's looked at it

developmentally across children and

asked how these concepts and where in

the body you would feel emotion develop.

So, it's super interesting work, but

it's ultimately about people's concepts

of how emotions correspond to changes in

the body, not the real actual changes in

the body. But then, as you were saying,

of course, there are real changes in the

body when you really feel an emotion as

well. And that's harder to study, but

people have studied it quite a bit with

a focus on the part of the brain that

gets a lot of input from the body, which

is a part of cortex called the insula.

And so there's lots and lots of work on

the insula. It gets input from all the

organs in your body, everywhere in your

body. So you know, from your heart, from

your liver, from your kidney. I had a

kidney stone not too long ago. We should

talk about the kid. Have you had a

kidney stone?

>> Don't. It's really interesting. You have

to pass it.

>> Eventually, it's passed. But it's uh it

evokes very interesting adaptive

behaviors. Well, just as an aside uh

before I forget it. So normally for

pain, extra receptive pain, like we were

talking about the hot plate before, you

know, you pull your hand away or there's

some kind of reflex.

>> For the kidney stone, that's not

adaptive. There's nothing to pull away.

So my wife, this was in Switzerland,

we're in a remote little town in the

middle of the night. My wife sees me

curled up into a ball right on the floor

just kind of breathing loudly and kind

of curled up and making rocking motions

and goes, "What's wrong?" And I tell

her, "Well, I have a kidney stone." And

then she asked me, "Can't you just stop

that behavior? You know, can we get on a

plane and fly to the US so you can get

ultrasound, maybe get treated for the

kidney stone? Can you stop curling up

into a ball and, you know, making

rocking motions?" And I was kind of

thinking about that through my haze of

pain and said, "Well,

>> no, it's kind of like the hot plate and

pulling away. It's a really strongly

motivated behavior to just kind of

withdraw basically." So it was a very

interesting adaptive behavior. and she

called, you know, the equivalent of 911.

And in the middle of the guy of the

night, some guy came down and uh, you

know, put a bunch of opiates into me and

he kept having the scale of, you know,

on a scale from 0 to 10, how painful is

it? I would sort of go from 10 to 9.5

and it was extremely painful. But

eventually they got me to a clinic

there. I passed the stone and it was an

interesting experience. I mean, it's

pain, but just like what we were talking

about for emotions, pain is not pain. If

you have a pain in your eye or you have

a pain from a hot stove, this is a very

different type of pain and one that's I

would say worse than the hot stove. It's

like because you can't escape

>> when you can't rub it,

>> you can't do anything. Just curl up into

a ball and pray. I mean, it it was

horrible. At any rate, so at that

moment, had I been in an MRI study, my

insula would have been strongly

activated. So this you know this is a

region of the brain that according to

theorists but Craig was the first

Antonio Damasio has theories in a

similar vein this would be the substrate

for the conscious experience of the

emotion or of pain in your body. So it's

getting all this input from your body

and representing the changes in your

body as a conscious experience. This was

the original theory that William James

had back in 1884. He wrote this paper in

mind. what is an emotion? And his theory

was that you see the bear, you run away,

your heart rate goes up, and then you

feel the emotion which is a consequence

of you perceiving all the changes in

your body that happened first. Now,

that's I think the conscious experience

of emotion. Yes. And a lot of that

depends on representing perceiving

everything that changes in in our body.

But to my mind, that leaves the question

of what the emotion is. That's still

antecedent to that. You first have to

trigger all the changes in your body and

run away. What's doing that? Right?

>> That's the emotion. The conscious

experience may well come later and

unfold over some time. But the emotion

state separate from the conscious

experience as I've emphasized would be

the one that actually motivates all the

behaviors and all the different changes

in your body. So long answer to your

question. There's there's two different

ways of talking about the role of the

body. The one that you alluded to in

this figure from Loi Newman and

colleagues that we reproduced in her

book is about people's concepts of

emotions and they're certainly tied to

changes in the body. Whether or not

those are accurate, I think we just

don't know. So, is it the case that

those drawings that they have uh in in

in the figure that we were speaking

about, if you put electrodes on, you

measured blood flow changes, that's

actually where things change when you

have awe or anger. I think we just don't

know. I think that's a set of studies

that remains to be done.

>> But then in addition there is the fact

that all of the changes in your body are

represented in your brain in the insula

and that seems to be a big part of the

substrate for feeling the emotion for

the conscious experience of the emotion

and other things nausea pain kidney

stones. So it's not limited to emotions

but the strong feelings that we have

like you know you have a tightness in

your chest uh if you're feeling really

sad for example that would be

represented in your insula

>> because in eastern medicine there's

strong beliefs about different organs

being associated with different

emotional states even like gall you know

someone has a lot of gallbladder you

know but then again I I I always have to

remind people that a key feature of

schizophrenia and psychosis of other

kinds is clang associations. Two words

sound alike and some and people link

them. And so we also are subject to this

in a much milder way in the world of of

health and science and especially in the

public discourse. People will say, "Oh,

you know, a a walnut looks like a brain.

Walnuts are good for your brain." Well,

they have some fatty acids that are

probably good for for neurons, but it

has absolutely nothing to do with the

shape of the walnut. It's amazing how

these ideas can kind of perpetuate.

>> Well, and I think there is some truth to

them. I think it just has the honest

answer is it has not been tested. Mhm.

>> So if you ask someone like Lisa Feldman

Barrett has has has made this point

repeatedly that there really is no

systematic association between specific

emotions and specific changes in your

body. Well, if you look at those

studies, people put a few electrodes on

and they measure, you know, heart rate