08/25/2025
Host Steven Nemerovski interviews guest and author Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett about her book “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain”.
Unlock the science behind feelings with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. In this eye-opening conversation on Come to Think of It, Barrett debunks “universal” facial expressions and the “lizard brain” myth, explaining how emotions are constructed by a predictive brain managing your body’s “budget.” Learn what this means for reading emotions, mental health and CBT, emotion-AI, and even education and literacy. Expect clear, real-world examples (wearables, machine learning, cross-cultural studies) plus practical takeaways for mood, self-control, and wellbeing.
You’ll learn:
Why emotions aren’t hardwired “fingerprints”
How prediction shapes experience and behavior
What “body budget” and mood mean for anxiety & depression
Ways these insights can improve therapy, daily life, and learning
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University with research appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).
For the past several years, Dr. Barrett has been among the top 1% most-cited scientists worldwide for her research in psychology and neuroscience, having published over 280 peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been cited more than 100K times.
She has received numerous awards, including a Director’s Pioneer Award for transformative research from the US National Institutes of Health, a Guggenheim Fellowship in neuroscience, Mentor Awards from the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Affect Science, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association and, last but not least, the William James Fellow Award for lifetime scientific contributions from the Association for Psychological Science.
