Lisa Feldman Barrett

That's called cultural inheritance.

Many things that we think of as hardwired into the brain are actually culturally inherited across generations.

That's how people survive in a particular environment.

You know, so like in the 1800s and 1900s when explorers would go off and they would go off to Antarctica or here or there and they would very quickly die.

The Inuit lived there.

They lived perfectly fine.

Well, because they had culturally inherited knowledge.

We're always transmitting knowledge to each other.

And that knowledge becomes fodder for our own predictions.

So your predictions don't just come from your personal experience.

They also come from you watching television, you talking to guests, you reading books, watching movies.

Also, your brain, like most human brains, can do something really fantastic, which is

You can take bits and pieces of past experience and put them together in a brand new way so that you can use the past to experience something new that you've never experienced before.

It completely makes sense.

Yes.

I would say it slightly differently, but the message is the same.

I think, um,

there are, in the sensory present, right?

There are sights, there are sounds, there are smells, some stuff's going on inside your own body, right?

And these signals are going to your brain.