Top Neuroscientist: Anxiety Is A Predictive Error In The Brain! Heres The Proof Your Brain Is Faking Trauma! Your Whole Life Might Be A Prediction!

**Lisa Feldman Barrett** (0:00)
There are these experiments where they train people to experience anxiety, but as determination, because exactly the same physical state could be experienced completely different. And what they discovered is that at first it's really hard, but you practice, practice, practice, and then eventually becomes really automatic.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:16)
So the first thing to understand is that Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a world-leading neuroscientist. Her groundbreaking research reveals that emotions like anxiety and trauma are built by the brain. And we have the power to control them.

**Lisa Feldman Barrett** (0:28)
The story is that you're born with these innate emotion circuits, but you're not born with the ability to control them. That's false. Really what's happening is that your brain is not reacting, it's predicting. And every action you take, every emotion you have is a combination of the remembered past, including any trauma. And so you don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically faster than you can blink your eyes.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:53)
How does this change how we should treat trauma?

**Lisa Feldman Barrett** (0:56)
Sometimes in life, you are responsible for changing something, not because you're to blame, but because you're the only person who can. I mean, I had a daughter who was clinically depressed, was getting Ds in school, she wasn't sleeping, she was miserable. At first she was so resistant, but then she made the decision that she wanted to be helped.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:14)
And did she recover?

**Lisa Feldman Barrett** (1:16)
Yes, she did. So if you want to change who you are, you feel understanding these basic operating principles is the key to living a meaningful life.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:25)
So what is step one to being able to make that change?

**Lisa Feldman Barrett** (1:28)
So.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:34)
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, you have a really remarkable twisting career journey. It's almost quite difficult to encapsulate in a particular mission or a particular summary of the journey you've been on and the twists and turns you've taken. But if I were to ask you now what mission you're on with the work that you're currently doing, are you able to summarize that?

**Lisa Feldman Barrett** (2:01)
My goal is, as a science communicator, is to try to take really complicated science and present it in a way that people can use. You know, maybe they use it to entertain their friends at a dinner party. Maybe they use it to help their kid who's, you know, struggling with depression. That was certainly, in my case, something that I had to deal with. Maybe they're using it to improve their workplace or improve the productivity of their peeps or whatever.
The point being that that's ultimately, that's what science is for. It's for, you know, living a better life. And average, everyday people without PhDs can do that if they have the right information. I'm probably attempting to understand how it is that a brain like ours, that is attached to a body like ours, that is pickled in a world like ours produces a mind. What is it? What is happening that allows you to have thoughts and feelings and memories and actions, and somebody from another country, another culture also has a mental life which looks nothing like yours? How is it that the same kind of brain plan with the same general kind of body plan can produce such different types of minds when they are, when those brains are wired in a sense, finish wiring themselves in cultural and physical contexts that are so widely different?

**Steven Bartlett** (3:46)
When you just talked about your pursuit of understanding how a brain like ours creates the mind and reality that we have, if I'm able to understand all of that, as many people who read your book about the brain and emotions were able to understand, what is it that it offers me in my everyday life?

**Lisa Feldman Barrett** (4:04)
Oh, my God, it offers you the opportunity to have more agency in your life.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:08)
What does that mean?

**Lisa Feldman Barrett** (4:09)
It means you have more choice. It means you have more control. It means that you can architect your life. I mean, you can't control everything that happens to you. You can't control every moment of feeling. But you have more control than you probably think you do. Everybody has more control over what they feel and what they do than they think they do.
That control doesn't look the way we expect it to. It's much harder to harness than we would like it to be. Some people have more opportunities for that control than other people do. But everybody has the opportunity to have more control. And of course, the flip side is also more responsibility for the way they live their lives. And I think that's a really good thing. And I think it's a really good thing now when, you know, world events are swirling around you and you feel like, you know, you're just being buffeted around. Even within that craziness, there is, there are opportunities to, to be more of an architect of your own experience and your own life. I think a lot of people find that optimistic and helpful. I think a lot of people find that optimistic and helpful.