Ryan Gate > Ryan's Quotes

“What you aim at determines what you see.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“You are continually cultivating your past as a means of controlling your future”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett

“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.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“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.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“variation is the norm. Emotion fingerprints are a myth.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Perceptions of emotion are guesses, and they’re “correct” only when they match the other person’s experience; that is, both people agree on which concept to apply. Anytime you think you know how someone else feels, your confidence has nothing to do with actual knowledge. You’re just having a moment of affective realism.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Our words allow us to enter each other’s affective niches, even at extremely long distances. You can regulate your friend’s body budget (and he yours) even if you are an ocean apart—by phone or email or even just by thinking about one another.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, tells a story that doesn’t match your daily life—your brain invisibly constructs everything you experience, including emotions.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“When you categorize something as “Not About Me,” it exits your affective niche and has less impact on your body budget. Similarly, when you are successful and feel proud, honored, or gratified, take a step back and remember that these pleasant emotions are entirely the result of social reality, reinforcing your fictional self. Celebrate your achievements but don’t let them become golden handcuffs. A little composure goes a long way.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Western culture has some common wisdom associated with these ideas. Don’t be materialistic. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Sticks and stones. But I am asking you to take this one step further. When you are suffering from some ill or insult that has befallen you, ask yourself: Are you really in jeopardy here? Or is this so-called injury merely threatening the social reality of your self ? The answer will help you recategorize your pounding heartbeat, the knot in the pit of your stomach, and your sweaty brow as purely physical sensations, leaving your worry, anger, and dejection to dissolve like an antacid tablet in water.40”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Some scientists refer to the control network as an “emotion regulation” network. They assume that emotion regulation is a cognitive process that exists separately from emotion itself, say, when you’re pissed off at your boss but refrain from punching him. From the brain’s perspective, however, regulation is just categorization. When you have an experience that feels like your so-called rational side is tempering your emotional side—a mythical arrangement that you’ve learned is not respected by brain wiring—you are constructing an instance of the concept “Emotion Regulation.”19”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“But evolution has provided the human mind with the ability to create another kind of real, one that is completely dependent on human observers. From changes in air pressure, we construct sounds. From wavelengths of light, we construct colors. From baked goods, we construct cupcakes and muffins that are indistinguishable except by name (chapter 2). Just get a couple of people to agree that something is real and give it a name, and they create reality. All humans with a normally functioning brain have the potential for this little bit of magic, and we use it all the time.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“growing number of cognitive neuroscientists, social psychologists, and neurologists speculate that the default mode network has a general function: it allows you to simulate how the world might be different from the way it is right now.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Today, many of us feel like we live in a highly polarized world, where people with opposing opinions cannot even be civil to each other. If you want things to be different, I offer you a challenge. Pick a controversial political issue that you feel strongly about. […] Spend five minutes per day deliberately considering the issue from the perspective of those you disagree with, not to have an argument with them in your head, but to understand how someone who’s just as smart as you can believe the opposite of what you do.

I’m not asking you to change your mind. I’m also not saying this challenge is easy. It requires a withdrawal from your body budget, and it might feel pretty unpleasant or even pointless. But when you try, really try, to embody someone else’s point of view, you can change your future predictions about the people who hold those different views. If you can honestly say, “I absolutely disagree with those people, but I can understand why they believe what they do”, you’re one step closer to a less polarized world. That is not magical liberal academic rubbish. It’s a strategy that comes from basic science about your predicting brain.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain

“Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“But one thing is certain: every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view. To believe otherwise is a fiction that is not supported by the architecture of the brain.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Instead think, “We have a disagreement,” and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don't load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Your body-budgeting regions can therefore trick your brain into believing that there is tissue damage, regardless of what is happening in your body. So, when you’re feeling unpleasant, your joints and muscles might hurt more, or you could develop a stomachache. When your body budget’s not in shape, meaning your interoceptive predictions are miscalibrated, your back might hurt more, or your headache might pound harder—not because you have tissue damage but because your nerves are talking back and forth. This is not imaginary pain. It is real.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Sometimes we're responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain

“Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It’s a huge, ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“This is another basis for my frequent claim, “You are an architect of your experience.” You are indeed partly responsible for your actions, even so-called emotional reactions that you experience as out of your control. It is your responsibility to learn concepts that, through prediction, steer you away from harmful actions. You also bear some responsibility for others, because your actions shape other people’s concepts and behaviors, creating the environment that turns genes on and off to wire their brains, including the brains of the next generation. Social reality implies that we are all partly responsible for one another’s behavior, not in a fluffy, let’s-all-blame-society sort of way, but a very real brain-wiring way.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“You can challenge the beliefs that you were swaddled in as a child. You can change your own niche. Your actions today become your brain’s predictions for tomorrow, and those predictions automatically drive your future actions. Therefore, you have some freedom to hone your predictions in new directions, and you have some responsibility for the results.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain

“Brains of higher complexity can remember more. A brain doesn’t store memories like files in a computer​—​it reconstructs them on demand with electricity and swirling chemicals. We call this process remembering but it’s really assembling.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain