Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. So if any

of you have been feeling depressed, sad, angry, it's been a tough year, 2020, right? Although

maybe some of you have been doing well in your own personal ventures, so maybe you're happy,

maybe you're joyful, maybe you're cautiously optimistic. What we're talking about here

are emotions. We all have them. Emotions are very important for who we are, how we live

our lives. But in the study of neuroscience or in how we think about psychology, it's possible

to argue that emotions get a little bit of short shrift, right? We talk about consciousness,

we talk about neurons, we talk about cognition and so forth. But emotions are clearly very

important. But they have something of a wishy-washy connotation, right? To mean that they sort

of float over what is important about the brain, which is how we think and reason and so

forth. Today's guest, Lisa Feldman-Barrard, wants to push back against that a little bit.

He's a psychologist at Northeastern University and the developer of something called the

theory of constructed emotion. If I can put into my own words, you'll hear Lisa's words

during the podcast. But in previous episodes of Minescape, we've talked a lot about neuroscience

and the brain and two things have become clear to me anyway. One is the fact that the

brain is part of the body, right? The fact that our sensory inputs and how we feel in

our physical form is crucially important to what we think of as thinking, not just the neurons

that are locked in our brain. And the other thing is that our brain constructs models of

the world and tries to predict what will happen next so we know what to do. We know how to make

choices, how to live in the world. So Lisa Feldman-Barrard wants to make the case that emotions

play a crucial role in both of these aspects, so what it means to be thinking. That emotions

are not fundamental, actually. In fact, she doesn't put it this way, but I would say

...