36 min
#3 Lisa Feldman Barrett - The Irrational Human 52 Insights Podcast
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- Samhälle och kultur
You get a hunch when moving through the world, that we’re an incredibly irrational species. You only have to look around us to see that almost everything around us is made up. However, It's nice to see this irrationalty laid out in such empirical terms through Lisa Feldman Barrett's ingenious work. A rigorous explorer of the brain, she is a distinguished professor at Northeastern University, among the top one per cent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience.
Two books have brought her widespread acclaim, her 2017 book, How Emotions Are Made which laid out the theory that emotions have no more intrinsic value than say a nation-state or the currency you possess printed on paper. That emotions are merely just another fabricated narrative that we as humans hang onto so potently.
In 2020, she followed this up with another, challenging assertion in her masterful small but insightful guidebook, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. She challenged us to overturn centuries of assumptions about the brain's evolution, one that postulated its sole evolutionary function was to think. This, she asserts is not the case, much the very opposite, rather its function to this very day is to calculate and manage the energy tradeoffs that our bodies are making day in and day out, makes sense, right?
If only we could really listen to the counter-intuitive wisdom found in Feldman Barrett’s profoundly important work, then we might not be walking around the Savannah holding ourselves to such high regard. This is a profoundly important discussion which again reminds us of our earnest place in the world
You get a hunch when moving through the world, that we’re an incredibly irrational species. You only have to look around us to see that almost everything around us is made up. However, It's nice to see this irrationalty laid out in such empirical terms through Lisa Feldman Barrett's ingenious work. A rigorous explorer of the brain, she is a distinguished professor at Northeastern University, among the top one per cent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience.
Two books have brought her widespread acclaim, her 2017 book, How Emotions Are Made which laid out the theory that emotions have no more intrinsic value than say a nation-state or the currency you possess printed on paper. That emotions are merely just another fabricated narrative that we as humans hang onto so potently.
In 2020, she followed this up with another, challenging assertion in her masterful small but insightful guidebook, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. She challenged us to overturn centuries of assumptions about the brain's evolution, one that postulated its sole evolutionary function was to think. This, she asserts is not the case, much the very opposite, rather its function to this very day is to calculate and manage the energy tradeoffs that our bodies are making day in and day out, makes sense, right?
If only we could really listen to the counter-intuitive wisdom found in Feldman Barrett’s profoundly important work, then we might not be walking around the Savannah holding ourselves to such high regard. This is a profoundly important discussion which again reminds us of our earnest place in the world
36 min