Lisa Feldman Barrett

That's what psychotherapy is.

That's what, you know, heartfelt conversations at two o'clock in the morning are with your friends or whatever.

That's really hard shit.

Doesn't always work so well.

The other thing that you can do, though, is if you realize that whatever you experience now becomes the seeds for predictions later, then you can invest in creating new experiences quite deliberately for yourself now.

You can expose yourself to new ideas.

You can...

Expose yourself to people who are different than you.

You can practice cultivating particular experiences like you would practice any skill.

And that will... Any new...

Concepts you learn, new experiences you have in the moment, if you practice them, they become automatic predictions in the future.

Exactly.

Right, and remember, it's actually, the thinking comes after the action, right?

So what will happen is the next time that you are approaching a table where a silver cup might be, your brain will already be starting to prepare the actions to go get the flowers.

And then you will think, oh, right, I can use this as a, oh, look, there's a great vase, right?

So in your brain, it's action.

First, your brain is controlling, it's preparing things

the actions of the viscera, what we call visceromotor.

So does your heart rate need to change?

Do your blood vessels need to dilate?