The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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!
Thu, 17 Apr 2025
What if your anxiety isn’t fear, and your trauma might not be real? Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett reveals how your brain creates emotional illusions. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a Professor of Psychology and one of the top 0.1% most cited scientists in the world for her groundbreaking research in psychology and neuroscience. She is also the author of bestselling books including ‘Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain’. She explains: Why anxiety is a predictive error, not a signal of fear The shocking truth about childhood trauma and memory distortion How trauma can be socially contagious and spread between people Why you do not actually have full free will over your decisions How your brain constantly builds your emotional reality 00:00 Intro 02:22 Lisa's Mission 04:14 Why Is It Important to Understand How the Brain Works? 10:48 Measuring Emotions 13:55 What Is the Predictive Brain? 16:08 Examples of the Brain Making Predictions 24:13 Is the Predictive Brain at the Root of Trauma? 31:27 Cultural Inheritance, Trauma, Anxiety, and Depression 36:29 How Reframing Past Events Can Change Identity 42:41 Meaning as a Consequence of Action 44:11 How to Overcome Fear by Taking Action 45:43 Prediction Error 47:37 Learning Through Exposure 49:47 Dangers of Social Contagion 54:06 Anxiety in the Context of Social Contagion 58:33 Is Social Media Programming Us to Be Sad? 1:02:08 Ads 1:03:03 First Step to Overcoming Mental Health Issues 1:05:18 Chronic Pain 1:08:23 What Is Depression? 1:09:17 Body Budgeting and Body Bankruptcy 1:12:26 How Stress Contributes to Weight Gain 1:15:00 Depression in Adolescents 1:17:02 Is Depression a Chemical Imbalance? 1:18:30 The Story of Lisa's Daughter 1:21:09 Oral Birth Control as a Risk Factor for Depression 1:24:07 How Lisa Helped Her Daughter Overcome Depression 1:29:11 Social Support 1:35:26 Lisa's Daughter's Recovery from Depression 1:39:12 Does Alcohol Affect the Body Budget and Increase Depression Risk? 1:42:45 Ads 1:44:00 Can People Change Emotions by Smiling? 1:45:49 Lisa's Perspective on ADHD 1:48:01 The Power of Words to Facilitate Emotion 1:52:26 Stress as a Burden to the Metabolic Budget 1:53:27 Lisa's View on God and Religion 1:54:25 What Is the Meaning of Life in Lisa's Opinion? 1:59:32 Question from the Previous Guest Follow Dr Lisa: X - https://g2ul0.app.link/JlkAHKXhCSb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/TWOO6vZhCSb You can purchase Dr Lisa’s book, ‘Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/35oJGs4hCSb The 1% Diary is back – limited time only: https://bit.ly/1-Diary-Megaphone-ad-r… The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Get email updates: https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt Think like a CEO – join the 100 CEOs newsletter: https://bit.ly/100-ceos-newsletter Follow Steven: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Independent research: lisafeldmanbarrett.tiiny.co Sponsors: Ekster - http://partner.ekster.com/DOAC and use code STEVEN to get an extra 10% off on top of their current Spring sale Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
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 it becomes really automatic. 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.
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.
How does this change how we should treat trauma?
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 D's 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.
And did she recover?
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.
So what is step one to being able to make a change? Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.
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Chapter 2: What is the predictive brain?
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.
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 those brains are wired, in a sense, finish wiring themselves in cultural and physical contexts that are so widely different.
When you just talked about your pursuit of understanding how a brain like ours creates the mind and the 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?
Oh, my God. It offers you the opportunity to have more agency in your life.
What does that mean?
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 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.
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Chapter 3: How does childhood trauma affect our perceptions?
Yes, exactly. And I think for me, I mean, I started my career studying the nature of emotion, but really it became a flashlight into understanding how a brain works. Why do we even have a brain? It's a very expensive organ. That piece of meat between your ears is the most expensive, metabolically the most expensive organ you have. So what's it good for? What's its most basic function?
How does it work in relation to the body? I think that certainly on your show, you've had a number of people who talk about the relationship between the brain and the body in some way, but I think scientists for a long time forgot or ignored the fact that the brain is attached to a body, right? Because we don't feel all the drama. Like right now, in you, in me, in all of our listeners, right?
We all have this like drama going on. It's really quite intense and there's a lot of going on and none of us are aware of it, I hope. If you are aware of it, I'm really sorry. It probably means that something is, you know...
You're not feeling well today, but it's a good thing that we're not aware of what's going on inside our own bodies most of the time, because we'd never pay attention to anything outside our own skin again, right? But the problem is that in science, it often begins with starting with your own subjective experience and then trying to formalize that.
And I mean, if you look at any science, physics is like that too. You just have to go back several hundred years or maybe a little longer to see it. And so it turns out that a lot of what you experience as properties of the world, of the way the world is, really is very rooted in your brain's regulation of your body. And so...
I guess I started with emotion, but it really became a much larger project to try to understand, well, what is a brain? How is it structured? How did it evolve? How does it work? What's its most basic function? And where do thoughts and feelings and actions, perceptions, what role do they play in that function? So it's a bit flipping the question, right?
Most people start with, what is an emotion? What is a thought? What is a memory? They define it and then they go looking for its physical basis in the brain or in the body. That's a pretty bankrupt perspective. I mean, after a hundred years, there weren't really good answers. So we flipped it around and we said, okay, well, given that we have the kind of brain we do, what can it do?
What does it do? And in its normal functioning, how does it produce mental events? That in our culture, our thoughts and feelings and perceptions and actions, in other cultures, they're different conglomerations of features, right? So for us, a thought and a feeling are super distinct. We experience them as very separate. In fact,
Really since the time of Plato, we've had this kind of narrative where, you know, the mind or the brain is a battleground between your thoughts and your feelings, right? In for control of your action. If your thoughts win, you are a rational creature. You are a healthy creature. You are a moral creature.
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Chapter 4: Can we change our identity through reframing past events?
Chapter 5: What role does cultural inheritance play in trauma?
What does it do? And in its normal functioning, how does it produce mental events? That in our culture, our thoughts and feelings and perceptions and actions, in other cultures, they're different conglomerations of features, right? So for us, a thought and a feeling are super distinct. We experience them as very separate. In fact,
Really since the time of Plato, we've had this kind of narrative where, you know, the mind or the brain is a battleground between your thoughts and your feelings, right? In for control of your action. If your thoughts win, you are a rational creature. You are a healthy creature. You are a moral creature.
If your instincts and your emotions win, you know, your inner beast, then you are irresponsible. You are childish. You are immoral. You are mentally ill. That's the narrative that we work in. In some cultures, thoughts and feelings are not separate. They are really one. It's not that you have them at the same time. It's that they are one thing. They are features of the same mental event.
In some cultures, your body and your mind are not separate. There are no separate experiences for a physical sensation versus a mental feeling. They're really one thing. So our minds are not the human nature. It's just one human nature. And there are other human natures too. And we have to figure out how...
general brain plan, a general body plan for a neurotypical human produces such wide variation depending on the cultural context in which it grows.
As it relates to neuroscience and understanding the brain and the way that we create reality, was there a eureka moment for you where you realized that most of us have it wrong or that there's an underlying misconception about the way that our brain creates our reality?
I would say, yeah, sure, there was a eureka moment, but it was a long, slow burn. When I was a graduate student, I wasn't studying emotion. I was studying the self. How do you think about yourself? What is your self-esteem like? How do you conceive of yourself, right? This is an important topic in psychology. And I was measuring emotion. as an outcome variable.
And the measurements weren't, the measures weren't working. And I thought, well, I need to be able to just literally objectively measure when someone is angry or when they're sad or when they're happy. I don't want to have to ask them because they could be wrong. And
In that phrasing of the question, there's a presumption, right, that there is an objective state called anger, that generally most instances of anger will look the same regardless of person and context. And I very quickly realized that There are no essences that anybody's been able to discover, right?
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Chapter 6: How can we overcome fear and anxiety?
that is occurring in your body is related to your brain's preparation for particular behaviors.
So let's start with that then. So the predictive brain is this idea that I only pretty much know from you. I'd never heard it before. When we say the predictive brain, what does that mean? And what does it not mean?
So when you are living your everyday life.
Yeah. Like right now.
Like right now. So right now I'm guessing that I'm saying things to you and you're perceiving what I'm saying and then you're reacting to it. That's how it feels to you, right? Yes. Okay. And that's how it feels to me too. So we sense and then we react. That's the way most people experience themselves in the world. That's not actually what's happening under the hood.
Really what's happening is that your brain is not reacting, it's predicting. And what that means is if we were to stop time right now, just freeze time, your brain would be in a state and it would be remembering past experiences that are similar to this state as a way of predicting what to do next, like literally in the next moment. Should your eyes move? Should your heart rate go up?
Should your breathing change? Should your blood vessels dilate or should they constrict? Should you prepare to stand? Right? Movements. And these movements, the preparation for movement, literal copies of those Signals become predictions for what you will see and hear and smell and taste and think and feel.
So under the hood, your brain is predicting what movements it should engage in next and as a consequence, what you will experience because of those movements. So you act first and then you sense. You don't sense and then react. You predict action and then you sense.
So give me an example which brings this to light of how my brain is predicting and then taking action.
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Chapter 7: Is depression a chemical imbalance?
Chapter 8: How does social media influence our emotions?
I think it was in your book, but it might have been elsewhere, about the example of being thirsty.
Yes, so when you drink, so say you're super thirsty and you drink a big glass of water, when do you stop being thirsty? Almost immediately. But actually it takes 20 minutes for that water to be absorbed into your bloodstream and make its way to the brain to tell the brain that you are no longer in need of fluid.
Because across millions of opportunities, you have learned that certain movements now and certain sensory signals now will result in that mental state. Or here's another example. So right now, keep your eyes on me. You're looking right at me. And in your mind's eye, I want you to imagine a Macintosh apple, like not a computer, but like an actual piece of fruit. Okay. Can you do it?
Yeah. Can you see it?
Yeah. What color is it?
Green.
Okay. Does it have any red?
No.
Okay. So it's a Granny Smith apple.
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