Top 40 Lisa Feldman Barrett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

2. “Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

3. “Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

4. “The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human. This situation leads us to a fundamental dilemma of the human condition.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

5. “It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

6. “Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

7. “Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It’s a huge, ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

8. “The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, tells a story that doesn’t match your daily life – your brain invisibly constructs everything you experience, including emotions.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

9. “Think of the last time you were thirsty and drank a glass of water. Within seconds after draining the last drops, you probably felt less thirsty. This event might seem ordinary, but water actually takes about twenty minutes to reach your bloodstream. Water can’t possibly quench your thirst in a few seconds. So what relieved your thirst? Prediction.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

10. “Perceptions of emotion are guesses, and they’re “correct” only when they match the other person’s experience; that is, both people agree on which concept to apply. Anytime you think you know how someone else feels, your confidence has nothing to do with actual knowledge. You’re just having a moment of affective realism.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

11. “When you categorize something as “Not About Me,” it exits your affective niche and has less impact on your body budget. Similarly, when you are successful and feel proud, honored, or gratified, take a step back and remember that these pleasant emotions are entirely the result of social reality, reinforcing your fictional self. Celebrate your achievements but don’t let them become golden handcuffs. A little composure goes a long way.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

12. “Affect is your brain’s best guess about the state of your body budget.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

13. “Sometimes we’re responsible for things not because they’re our fault, but because we’re the only ones who can change them.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

14. “The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don’t load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

15. “The concept of “Emotion” itself is an invention of the seventeenth century. Before that, scholars wrote about passions, sentiments, and other concepts that had somewhat different meanings.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

16. “When I say responsibility, I’m not saying that people are to blame for the tragedies in their lives or the hardships they experience as a result. I’m also not saying that people with depression, anxiety, or other serious illnesses are to blame for their suffering. I’m saying something else: Sometimes we’re responsible for things not because they’re our fault, but because we’re the only ones who can change them.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

17. “You are continually cultivating your past as a means of controlling your future.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

18. “Instead think, “We have a disagreement,” and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

19. “It is actually a policy issue relevant to the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to free speech. The First Amendment was founded on the notion that free speech produces a war of ideas, allowing truth to prevail. However, its authors did not know that culture wires the brain. Ideas get under your skin, simply by sticking around for long enough. Once an idea is hardwired, you might not be in a position to easily reject it.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

20. “One illusory stripe of a rainbow contains an infinite number of frequencies, but your concepts for “Red,” “Blue,” and other colors cause your brain to ignore the variability.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

21. “I’ve said several times that the brain acts like a scientist. It forms hypotheses through prediction and tests them against the “data” of sensory input. It corrects its predictions by way of prediction error, like a scientist adjusts his or her hypotheses in the face of contrary evidence. When the brain’s predictions match the sensory input, this constitutes a model of the world in that instant, just like a scientist judges that a correct hypothesis is the path to scientific certainty.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

22. “But one thing is certain: every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view. To believe otherwise is a fiction that is not supported by the architecture of the brain.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

23. “A superpower works best when you know you have it.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

24. “Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

25. “You can challenge the beliefs that you were swaddled in as a child. You can change your own niche. Your actions today become your brain’s predictions for tomorrow, and those predictions automatically drive your future actions. Therefore, you have some freedom to hone your predictions in new directions, and you have some responsibility for the results.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

26. “The Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman called your experiences “the remembered present.” Today, thanks to advances in neuroscience, we can see that Edelman was correct. An instance of a concept, as an entire brain state, is an anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and what your sensations mean.12.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

27. “Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis – the simulation – and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

28. “Social reality is not just about words – it gets under your skin. If you perceive the same baked good as a decadent “cupcake” or a healthful “muffin,” research suggests that your body metabolizes it differently. Likewise, the words and concepts of your culture help to shape your brain wiring and your physical changes during emotion.24.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

29. “We have more control over reality than we might think. We also have more responsibility for reality than we might realize.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

30. “Just get a couple of people to agree that something is real and give it a name, and they create reality.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

31. “But when you try, really try, to embody someone else’s point of view, you can change your future predictions about the people who hold those different views.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

32. “If you want to gain mastery at perceiving other people’s emotional experiences, you must let go of this essentialist assumption.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

33. “Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

34. “Your brain is not more evolved than a rat or lizard brain, just differently evolved.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

35. “In short, your brain’s most important job is not thinking. It’s running a little worm body that has become very, very complicated.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

36. “A brain network is not a metaphor, as I mentioned earlier; it’s the best scientific description of a brain today.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

37. “Due process was about avoiding procedural errors in rendering a decision of guilt or innocence, not about the validity of the decision itself.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

38. “The triune brain idea is one of the most successful and widespread errors in all of science.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

39. “Social reality is an incredible gift. You can simply make stuff up, like a meme or a tradition or a law, and if other people treat it as real, it becomes real. Our social world is a buffer we build around the physical world. The author Lynda Barry writes, “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

40. “Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

41. “As our society makes decisions about health care, the law, public policy, and education, we can ignore our socially dependent nervous systems, or we can take them seriously. These discussions may be difficult, but avoiding them is worse. Our biology won’t just go away.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett

42. “By the 1990s, experts had completely rejected the idea of a three-layered brain. It simply didn’t hold up when they analyzed neurons with more sophisticated tools.”

— Lisa Feldman Barrett