Understanding others through neuroscience

Making Sense of Other People's Weirdness, Part 4

A few years ago I was watching a Mind Valley video by Vishen Lakhiani. In the video he mentioned a book by Lisa Feldman Barrett entitled How Emotions are Made. When he showed a graph that demonstrated this approach to understanding emotions, I literally paused the video to examine it, and then bought the book in that very moment. 

To this day, it is one of my favorite books. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a neuroscientist. She takes a constructionist view of emotions. In other words, she argues that your brain interprets signals from the body about how the body feels, then it interprets those feelings through the lens of language and culture to create an emotion. 

I firmly believe that if you start to use this model as a lens through which to view human behavior, it can revolutionize the way you see the world.