Robert Ornstein, PhD; David Sobel, MD, MPH; and Sally Mallam
Contributing Writers

The content of this section, unless indicated, represents Robert Ornstein’s award-winning Psychology of Evolution Trilogy and Multimind. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the Estate of Robert Ornstein.

Try to recall an experience void of emotion. It’s almost impossible. Human beings are constantly in a state of expressing, recognizing, and interpreting emotions in ourselves and others – even in complete strangers. Throughout our human journey, emotions play a vital role, influencing our thoughts, decisions and actions.

Researchers, philosophers, and psychologists have proposed various theories of emotion to explain the how and why behind our complex feelings.  Over the last two decades, thanks to developments in neuroscience, our understanding of the complex functions of the brain’s structures is increasing, including their role in our emotional life.

Our emotions provide an important illustration of how our brains evolved to be both similar and different from our animal ancestors. In order to survive millions of years ago mammals had to feed, they had to fight adversaries, flee from danger, and they had to reproduce. For this to happen, core emotional reactions in animals evolved long, long before we Homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

An area of the mammalian brain evolved to handle these basic survival skills. Called the limbic system, it is one of the oldest areas of our human brain. One of its four main components is a small almond-shaped paired structure called the amygdala. The amygdala is understood to be a major processing center for our emotions – recent research indicates that it responds not only to fear, with a flight-or-flight response, but to any intense emotion, whether positive or negative.  

For years, the brain was understood to be a passive receiver, and emotion purely the physiological response to incoming stimuli. But, although the limbic system continues to play a fundamental role in keeping us safe, it’s clearly not the entire story. At some point in our evolution, a more sophisticated emotional processing developed in the cortex of the brain. This eventually included an ability to modify emotional responses by exercising higher level decision-making, self-control and empathy.

It’s important to understand that at the social level our emotions may not really be “reactions” but rather creations based on our brain’s predictions of the most probable cause in the moment. The same sensation may have different meanings and emotions attached to it. For example, say your heart is beating fast, if you know it’s because you’ve just come back from a run, your emotional response will be very different than it would if you knew of no obvious reason for the increase. You might think “What if I’m having a heart attack?”and feel afraid or anxious as a result.

As psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues in her book How Emotions Are Made, that emotions are not really “reactions” but rather creations of your brain’s predictions in the moment. The same sensation may have different meanings and emotions attached. Let’s say you feel your face flush. Is it because a driver cuts you off in traffic and you then feel anger? Is it because you just stepped out in the warm sun and you are happy? Perhaps it is that you are just inches away from a first kiss and you are aroused.

Your brain predicts differently for each context, and then creates an emotion.

Of course, your brain may not always guess correctly. In fact, your brain may create a slew of predictions to anticipate what might come next. Is that twisted shape on the ground a fallen branch, a root, or a snake? If you know there are no snakes in Ireland, then a twisted shape on an Irish hiking trail is very unlikely to be a snake. However, if you are hiking in a Brazilian rainforest, your brain is primed to anticipate snakes, experience fear, and jump back.

Although your emotions are constructed unconsciously from your current situation and predictions from experience, it’s still possible to have some control over how you feel. In his book entitled The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, Andy Clark, explains this further:

“… the way our bodily states feel to us likewise reflects a complex mixture of what our brains predict and what the current bodily signals suggest. This means that we can, at times, change how we feel by changing what we (consciously or unconsciously) predict. This does not mean we can simply ‘predict ourselves better,’ nor does it mean we can alter our own experiences of pain or hunger in any way we choose. But it does suggest some principled and perhaps unexpected wiggle room—room that, with care and training, we might turn to our advantage. Handled carefully, a better appreciation of the power of prediction could improve the way we think about our own medical symptoms and suggest new ways of understanding mental health, mental illness, and neurodiversity.”

Your brain is always tweaking and remodeling its internal predictions based on new experiences or learning from errors in prediction. While it is not possible to change the past, you can change how your brain will predict the future by feeding it new experiences, new ideas, new activities. For example, before taking a test most of us experience a nervous feeling, but for some panic sets in—racing heartbeat, sweating, shaky hands. Based on previous experiences, the person may label these sensations as paralyzing anxiety. The good news is that experiments have shown that students can learn to reframe these sensations as “energized determination.” Their brains then predict differently, and test performance improves.

You can expose yourself to people who think and act differently than you do. Actors and people in the public arena recognize the benefits of emotions that others might find paralyzing. Cillian Murphy, the actor who played the lead in the film “Oppenheimer” describes playing the part as “terrifying and exciting,” a situation he felt brought the best out of him. The new experiences that you cultivate will become raw material for your future experiences.

The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett offers examples in her book Seven and a Half Lesson about the Brain:

“It’s also possible to change predictions to cultivate empathy for other people and act differently in the future. An organization called Seeds of Peace tries to change predictions by bringing together young people from cultures that are in serious conflict, like Palestinians and Israelis, and Indians and Pakistanis. The teens participate in activities like soccer, canoeing, and leadership training, and they can talk about the animosity between their cultures in a supportive environment. By creating new experiences, these teens are changing their future predictions in the hopes of building bridges between the cultures and, ultimately, creating a more peaceful world.

“You can try something similar on a smaller scale. Today, many of us feel like we live in a highly polarized world, where people with opposing opinions cannot even be civil to each other. If you want things to be different, I offer you a challenge. Pick a controversial political issue that you feel strongly about. In the United States, that might be abortion, guns, religion, the police, climate change, reparations for slavery, or perhaps a local issue that’s important to you. Spend five minutes per day deliberately considering the issue from the perspective of those you disagree with, not to have an argument with them in your head, but to understand how someone who’s just as smart as you can believe the opposite of what you do.”

Since our reality is, as the author Will Storr wrote, “an act of creation by the storytelling brain,” the stories we tell ourselves and those we expose ourselves to have the ability not only to heal and transform our worldview, but also — as we show in our section devoted to storytelling — are explicitly designed to expand our consciousness, ensuring a more comprehensive worldview beyond the narrow doors of our normal perception.

The Experience of Awe

Awe is a feeling of wonder we experience when faced with something unfathomably vast or incomprehensively marvelous — such as panoramic vistas, the incredibleness of nature, childbirth, and great works of art.

It involves a sense of perceptual vastness and a jump outside our usual frame of reference: beyond “me first” normal consciousness. So it, too, provides a taste of what is possible. Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt in their paper “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion” propose that we feel awe in the presence of vastness in nature — mountains, vistas, storms. They point out that “…nature-produced awe involves a diminished self, the giving way of previous conceptual distinctions (e.g., between master and servant) and the sensed presence of a higher power. …Natural objects that are vast in relation to the self…are more likely to produce awe.”

Experiencing awe slows our personal sense of time. As a result, it increases our perception of how much time is available, a step in the direction of believing in eternity. And this results not only in a diminishment of the individual self and its concerns, but also in an increase in prosocial behaviors such as patience, generosity and compassion. Both selflessness and the practice of virtues are involved in the activation of an alternate consciousness, latent in everyone and vital for our future on this planet. We will talk about this further in the final article of this section.

In his book Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, Dacher Keltner notes that we can experience awe every day and the more we do so, the richer the experience gets. He points out that “awe is an antidote to our overstressed times. It’s been shown to be a pathway for avoiding chronic inflammation and the diseases of the twenty-first century such inflammation is associated with, including depression, chronic anxiety, heart disease, autoimmune problems, and despair.”

He notes that awe can be found not only in nature, but in acts of moral beauty, in “collective effervescence” – a term coined by Émile Durkheim, the great French sociologist, to describe that shared feeling we have when we move in unison with others. Awe can be found in music, visual designs, such as in seen in Islamic architecture, in the Pyramids, in Mayan temples, in cathedrals and skyscrapers; in creative acts, in birth, in death; and in insights and epiphanies.

Awe — from the caves of the Paleolithic Era to today’s churches and mosques, from lightning to waterfalls to the vastness of the sky — always seems to raise us up, the higher the better. And what could be more awe-some than experiencing the vastness of outer space? Russian cosmonauts have noted the rush of an unusual, positive energy, “a sense of the soul’s freedom as never before, also an exceptional awareness of their second ‘Ego,’ a connection to all peoples and a feeling of love for mankind in general.” They noted that “It is remarkable that, in space, people recall the past, and realize that inner freedom is life’s essence.”