For example, in US schools bullying is accepted as a way of life. Something I have a particular interest in is that in the United States there's a problem with the casual brutality of social interactions. I can make your heart rate speed up or slow down, just by my choice of words. The theory I've introduced makes it clear that we’re a social species, which means we regulate each others' nervous systems. This could be very powerful, if we take the big science and apply it to individuals.Īre you taking your research in any new directions? Let’s say I could do that with 1,000 people: now that technology has made the data so easy I could discover what generalises across people, and what doesn't. I’d learn how to predict your behaviour in context. If I studied you over time, I’d learn about the vocabulary of your facial movements when you're angry, or happy, or sad. Well, one thing we’ve never really been able to do is observe a person across multiple contexts over time. If there's no one-to-one correspondence between an emotion and a set of facial movements, then unless you're capturing the context and what’s going on in the brain, you really can't know what a person is feeling. You can definitely read facial movements - but the question is what those motions mean.

I think that’s going to be a complete waste of time. I just read that there are companies spending literally billions of dollars and millions of person hours developing technology that will read emotions off a face. Read more: The WIRED guide to the brain in 2016 I think the way emotions are made is not special: your brain makes an emotion by using prior experiences of emotion to predict and explain incoming sensory inputs, and guide action. It works this way for vision, hearing, taste-for every sense. Then it uses the incoming input to either confirm its prediction, or change it. The idea is that your brain is constantly predicting what sensory inputs to expect and what action to take, based on past experience.

So how does it do this? There’s one other thing it can use, and that’s past experience. It only has the effects, and it has to figure out what caused them. If you think about it from a brain's standpoint, it's trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull, and has no access to the causes of the sensations it receives. What does this reveal about how emotions are made? I think a better approach is to start with the structure of the brain and nervous system, and try to understand, what kind of emotions could a nervous system like this produce - and how would it do that? I came to the general conclusion that part of the problem is scientists begin with common sense categories, and then they search for that distinctiveness in biology - in the brain, the body, genes.

What made you believe the classical view was flawed?

How emotions are created