The Most Romantic Gift Lisa Feldman Barrett Ever Got Was a Six-Way Plug

Lex Fridman opens by noting that, judging from comments on their last conversation, listeners will be disappointed to learn Barrett is married. She was divorced by twenty-six, in her first academic job at Penn State, four hours from anywhere, working sixteen-hour days and complaining to fellow assistant professors that she had not had sex in months. They got tired of listening and told her to do something. A sushi party meant to vacuum up every eligible bachelor within twenty miles produced new friends and no romance. Newspaper personals failed. A friend mentioned Net News.

It was 1992. There was no web and no pictures, only delayed ASCII posts, mostly from academics and government, with men outnumbering women about ten to one. Early replies included a man who said he worked for NASA and did not, a caller looking for a "dominant woman" in a sense her psychologist training completely missed, and a banker in Singapore who compared her to the woman raped in *The Fountainhead*. She posted her own ad, forgot to include her location and age, and got something like eighty responses in twenty-four hours. She printed them, invited friends, made a pot of gumbo, and drank through several bottles of wine. Most letters were earnest. A couple announced she was their soulmate and they wanted a third.

Dan wrote a week later. Across Thursday and Friday they sent a hundred emails, text only. He wanted to talk Sunday night; she had a date, so she called Saturday. A woman answered, then blurted that she was just a friend. Dan's first words were the same. Barrett cancelled the date. They talked eight hours that night and six the next. He flew from UMass Amherst to a tiny airport in a cornfield. Her secretary had mailed a bad pool-hall photograph that arrived an hour before his flight; something in his voice made her offer him an out, and he got on the plane anyway. The fifteen-minute drive home was completely dark, which felt familiar after twenty-odd hours of talking in the dark.

On her thirtieth birthday they hiked to a cliff overlook. She told him she had not known him long, but she felt she was falling in love, which could not be happening; it must be projection, even if it felt that way. He said he knew what she meant. For months they used that sentence as a hedge, then as a joke. The thing that settled it was a freezing weekend on a huge rock in winter Maine, looking at a blue-gray ocean she finds beautiful in its starkness. She cannot remember who said what. She remembers needing to stay with this person. For their twentieth anniversary, Dan printed the old emails into a leather-bound book.

Fridman presses her disbelief in love at first sight. Barrett does not deny the jolt. You can connect with someone in an instant, recognize a compatible mind, feel understood, or see something compelling. That click is real. What she denies is that the click is love. The brain is a predictive organ. It uses your past, not on purpose but because that is how it is wired, to fill every gap in what you know about the stranger in front of you. A lot of what you "see" is not about them.

Research on people in love finds a little positive illusion: when a behavior could be read two ways, they pick the kinder reading. Barrett's own standard is sharper. Love is not only admiring someone's wonderful traits. It is loving them despite their faults, or discovering that the faults they see in themselves are not faults to you at all. Fridman wonders whether love is just the skill of ignoring prediction error. She points to work on an "optimal margin of illusion": put a positive spin on the small things, and do not ignore the big ones.

When someone younger used to tell her "you're not who I thought you were," her reaction was: whose fault is that? In her experience, people do not lie to you about who they are. They lie to themselves in your presence. She and Dan had both been divorced; they were unusually direct. She has never found a characteristic in him that surprised her in a bad way. Five years of therapist training helped. An hour with a client meant an hour with a supervisor who had watched from behind a one-way mirror, using her own reactions as a probe. You cannot help learning a lot about yourself under that microscope.

Fridman asks whether a brain scientist who knows how the sausage is made loses the magic of love. Barrett says she can still lose herself in the moment, and that for her part of the magic *is* the process. In Central Park she looked at people with babies and realized that under every canopy was a tiny brain wiring itself. She has never looked at an infant the same way. Before studying development she found babies cute but dull until they could interact; now those "lumps" strike her as anything but boring. Knowing the mechanism, she says, is not backing away from the moment. It expands it.

In graduate school, while in therapy herself, she had a deal: she could call timeout and ask what the therapist was doing, as long as she was not using the pause to escape. Interrogating the process made the work more useful. Fridman describes two rooms he keeps apart. In the engineer room he thinks from first principles about how a behavior is built. In the romantic room he is a mess: songs, tears, angry texts, somehow Vegas. Bringing the engineer into the romantic room, he thinks, ruins it. Barrett is gentler. It may be age or experience. Western culture hands everyone an idealized romantic script. Then she offers a test.

One Valentine's Day, Dan bought her a six-way plug. Is that romantic or not? It depends on the look in his eyes, the conversation that led there, and how well he knows her. She will sit and suffer and complain about plugging and unplugging until the cows come home, and it would never occur to her to go buy a six-way plug. He bought it, plugged it in, taped the wires, and made the mess usable. After they moved to a one-car garage she told him to park inside because she is Canadian and snow does not bother her. Every snowy morning he goes out and cleans her car without being asked, because her mornings are timed to the second. Fridman laughs that the six-way plug may be the richest display of romance in her life. Romance, she says, is not all chocolates and flowers. Those are nice too. Sometimes it is this.

If you think a book will take a year, Barrett says, it will take three. Almost nobody writes an outline and then sticks to it. Topics take on a life of their own, and you want to let them; you follow leads until you have dealt with the subject. Foraging for information is the fun part, provided you are not also running a lab and a family. The most important thing she learned is also the hardest: knowing what to leave out. In academic writing you should not leave things out. She has written or helped write more than two hundred peer-reviewed papers. A storyteller has to cut without harming the validity of the argument.

*How Emotions Are Made* ran three drafts. The last one started around 150,000 words and had to come down to about 110,000, plus a thousand notes, each tied to a long web note. Brevity is not her strong suit; she tells people that as a warning. *Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain* was the self-assigned opposite: a little book of big ideas, short enough for a beach, a bathtub, or a subway stop. Dan calls it the first neuroscience beach read. The model was Anne Fadiman's *At Large and at Small*, familiar essays on mail, coffee, chocolate, that weave history, philosophy, science, and personal reflection until you feel you are eavesdropping on a train of thought. Barrett sent Fadiman a fan email years ago and got a reading list.

Dan is the better writer of the two, a computer-science PhD who built one of the first knowledge-management systems and now does engineering education at Google. For the first book, every chapter began as Barrett talking the argument out loud to him, then writing, then watching him mark what could be excised. They barely argue except about directions in the car: she navigates egocentrically, "walk to the church and turn left"; he uses north, south, east, west. To her, she jokes, the earth is the center of the solar system; to him, she is. The real fights were about audience. He would ask who a passage was for, "the one percent," meaning academics versus civilians, and he spoke for the civilians. After one stretch of anger that started to damage the marriage, he made two little signs, *Writing* and *Science*. Pulling a sign meant the other person won and the fight stopped. They used the signs a few times on the first book and only once on the short one.

One essay in the new book asks whether the human brain evolved to think. Barrett's caveat is that "why" questions are teleological, and scientists generally should avoid them because they do not know. What they can challenge is the old picture of evolution as a progressive upward scale, simple organisms becoming more complex, simple brains becoming human rationality. That phylogenetic scale is embedded in a lot of evolutionary thinking, including Darwin's, and modern evolutionary biology has seriously challenged it. The textbook brain story is sedimentary rock: a lizard layer for instincts, a limbic layer for emotions (limbic meaning border), and a neocortex on top where reason lives. She sometimes compares cortex to icing on an already baked cake, the cake being the inner beast of boiling instincts. Both images, she says, are fiction, a myth you can trace to stories about morality in ancient Greece.

Look instead at animals with brains and animals without. Some creatures live in a niche that has barely changed in 400 million years; their biology has barely changed either, which you can check in the genes that lurk deep in cells. Looking at embryos rather than adults, you can piece together another story: brains evolved under the selection pressure of hunting. In the Cambrian, animals began to eat one another on purpose. Before that they had no brains and barely any senses. The animal she writes about is amphioxus, the lancelet. It has no eyes, ears, or nose, only a few cells for light and dark, a vestibular cell to stay upright, a rudimentary sense of touch, and a tube instead of a gut. It wriggles to a spot, plants itself in the sand, filters food, then ejects and wriggles somewhere that might have more. It is, she says, basically a little stomach on a stick.

Once animals hunt, you need to know whether the blob ahead is going to eat you or you it. Distant senses become useful: in water, vision, some hearing, olfaction, and touch, because vibration travels. Animals developed heads, then jaws, then brains. Some scientists think theory of mind, the ability to infer another creature's inner life, also evolved under predation because it makes you a better hunter. Fridman asks whether we are just clever predators. Barrett treats that as a zeitgeist question. After World War I the inner-beast story dominated Western thought: we are violent animals contained by culture and neocortex. By the late 1990s the literature on our social nature took over. Neither slogan is complete. Humans can be violent and helpful. Other animals regulate one another's nervous systems and show generosity, but usually along a physical relationship. Humans can draw the circle with an abstract idea, and then prefer that circle even to family.

Fridman has been reading Stalin and Hitler and wants a neuroscience take on evil. Barrett takes off the lab coat. She does not think neuroscientists know enough to speak as neuroscientists here. Her long-standing view, from before she knew any neuroscience, is that not just anyone could become Hitler, but the majority of people are capable of very bad things. The real question is how much encouragement the environment has to supply. Looking at Hitler's life, she sees fork after fork where something could have intervened: rejection from art school, the years in Vienna, countless small interactions. Millions of other people might have been moldable in the same way. This particular charismatic leader grew in this particular moment.

Western causal reasoning looks for a single simple cause, an essence in the genes or forged very early that explains a whole horrible landscape. Biology, she says, looks more like complexity in the technical sense: more than the sum of the parts, many weak, nonlinear, interacting causes. Little things we might not even notice can shift a developmental trajectory from this path to that. It is not random, and it is not clockwork determinism. It is closer to nudging someone from one set of possibilities to another. The other side of the coin is also true. Watching the new *Borat* film, she was struck less by the mockery than by ordinary generosity: two Trump-supporting pickup drivers who took a stranger into their house during a pandemic, two old Jewish women who were sweethearts, a kind babysitter, a stoic professional just doing his job.

Everyone is capable of kindness; the question is the threshold and the circumstances. Are we cultivating an environment for the next generation that offers chances to go toward caring? She is not being Pollyannaish. There is room for competition and debate. She has never seen Hitler as an anomaly, and neuroscience now gives her language for why. Nature versus nurture is the wrong question. "We have the kind of nature that requires nurture." Infants are born with unfinished brains, wired across about twenty-five years with instructions from the world built for them. Hitler is fully responsible for his actions. The environment is also partly responsible for creating the evil in the world. Love, Fridman suggests, looks like a more useful collective tool than hate. Barrett agrees, with a caveat the research keeps returning: great kindness is easiest toward the ingroup, and humans are tribal.

You do not have one identity. Sometimes you are a man, a scientist, a sibling, a friend; you can keep zooming out to living organism on Earth. Some people believe help should follow a clear hierarchy: family before neighbors, neighbors before strangers, countrymen before outsiders, humans before other animals. Other people live in a more inclusive niche. Anthropology, Barrett notes, looks at what a culture is organized to prevent. Some cultures are hierarchical, some egalitarian; some prioritize getting ahead, some getting along; some put the individual over the group, some the reverse. None of these is "right" for the species. They are different solutions humans invented for living in groups, which is a major adaptive advantage. What is better for the survivability of the species is variation, because if the environment changes drastically, some of those solutions will work better than others.

Covid is a worked example. In the movies, aliens arrive and squabbling countries become one species. A virus from outside is that creature, and that is not what you see. Exposure is not destiny. In controlled studies from about ten years ago, including one that used a coronavirus, not Covid, researchers placed a consistent dose of virus in people's noses, sequestered them in hotel rooms, and measured their food. Only 20 to 40 percent developed a respiratory illness. You can be a carrier and spread the virus while your immune system makes enough antibodies to keep you from showing symptoms. Ask people whether a virus causes a cold and most will say yes. Clearly it is a necessary cause. It is not a sufficient one. There are other interacting influences.

Individuals vary in susceptibility, and cultures vary in the norms that slow or speed spread. Barrett's colleague Michele Gelfand studies tight cultures, with strict rules, and loose cultures, more individualistic, where personal freedom is prized. For pandemic circumstances, Gelfand's research suggests, people in tight cultures survive better. Individualistic cultures like the United States may do better under other selection pressures. At species scale, Barrett insists, difference itself is the adaptive advantage. If Covid had been far more lethal, taking 20 percent of the population, variation would have been the difference between some people living and none.

Fridman wants a direction. If you zoom out, does evolution walk toward greater complexity and intelligence, photons to Teslas? Barrett says no, echoing people she considers smarter on this subject, and then clarifies: she did not say there is no smarter, she said there is no direction. There is variation, but not unbounded variation. There are selectors and pressures. Not anything is possible, because we live on a planet with particular physical regularities. Genes, bodies, and life on Earth constrain the possibilities. Some things will never happen. Birds have complex brains without a cerebral cortex; they have the same neurons that in a human become cortex, they just do not form them that way. Crows can do many things humans can. Octopuses have complex brains of another design. Every supposedly unique human trick exists in some other animal. What is special is putting them all together.

She corrects a mistake from her last appearance. In enthusiasm she had said human brains are not larger relative to our bodies than other primates'. That is false: the ratio is somewhat larger, a rough measure of how much you can shove in. The cerebral cortex, though, is not larger than you would expect for a brain of this size. Compare a gorilla, a chimp, a dolphin, an elephant: our cortex is the size it should be. Walk into a house with a huge kitchen and you might think these people are gourmets. You know nothing until you see the rest of the house. A big kitchen in a big house tells you nothing special; a big kitchen in a small house might. Size is not everything. Other animals grow back limbs and lift many times their body weight. We cannot.

If you reran Earth like a video game, would you always get something like us, then AGI, then colonies? Barrett refuses a yes or no. It is a probability distribution, and this is not science. Carbon-based life, probably high. Animals starting in the ocean and crawling onto land, probably high. The same complement of creatures, including humans: not zero, not 100 percent, she would not even bet 50. Too many degrees of freedom. Replay the Big Bang and she guesses you would not get the same galaxies. We are not here by accident, because there are constraints. We are not here by necessity. The tension in the book is that humans are not special — bacteria occupy more of the planet, they just do not have podcasts — and that our niche is huge: we do not only adapt, we add to the environment, make something up, name it, and it becomes real. No single remarkable capacity is ours alone. Combined in a brain souped up in particular ways, they interact, and the result is pretty remarkable. Once you see multiple interacting causes instead of one essence, you start asking different questions about what kind of human you want to be.

"Words have power over your biology," Barrett has written. She can text "I love you" from the United States to a close friend in Belgium, and even though her friend cannot hear her voice or see her face, the message will change heart rate, breathing, and metabolism. Someone could text something ambiguous like "Is your door locked?" and odds are it would affect the nervous system unpleasantly. The reason is anatomical. The systems important for processing language also help control major organ systems: the autonomic nervous system that runs cardiovascular and respiratory function, the endocrine system, the immune system. In birds, the neurons for birdsong also control the body, and some scientists think that anatomy is homologous with the human language system. Language regions are not specialized for language alone. One of the other jobs they do is run your organs.

Fridman asks a question he says he gets pushback on constantly: can you fall in love based on words alone? People have been doing it for centuries, Barrett says. They wrote letters. That is how she and Dan met. Touch, smell, and bodily presence help. She does not think they are necessary. A lifelong monogamous romance with an AI that only texts is an empirical question she would not bet on for herself. Fridman brings up Tom Hanks and Wilson the volleyball in *Cast Away*. If you had to make that work, could simulation and past experience sustain you the way another human could? Your life would probably be shorter, Barrett says, because you would not get the body-budgeting benefits. The brain's most important job is controlling the body, which she describes as running a budget with metaphorical deposits and withdrawals. You also make deposits and withdrawals in other people's budgets. A volleyball cannot pay you back that way.

Fridman's intuition is that scarcity catalyzes deep connection, with humans and with objects, and that the sex with a volleyball is not great but the rest might be. Barrett treats it as empirical and points to children and their blankets: tactile, olfactory, very comforting, and true of puppies too. Cats she is less sure about. "Cats are cold-hearted." Some cats, Fridman offers, are very dog-like. "They're species fluid," she says.

When it comes to human minds, Barrett writes, variation is the norm, and what we call human nature is really many human natures. Fridman asks whether "be yourself" is possible, worth striving for, or even meaningful. It is a very Western question, she says. Which self? There is no self that is an essence of you. You have multiple selves. She quotes social psychologist Hazel Markus: you cannot be yourself by yourself. Different contexts pull different features forward. That returns her to Hitler: you have multiple selves you can be, and you can choose, to some extent, the situations you put yourself in. Not everyone has complete choice. Everyone has a little. The advice she and Dan gave their daughter Sophia leaving for college was to choose relationships that allow you to be your best self. They should have said best selves.

The risk in "just be yourself" is that it becomes an excuse: this is just the way I am. That, Barrett thinks, should be tremendously resisted. Fridman is often self-critical and full of doubt, and people tell him not to worry, just be himself. It does not feel like actionable advice. One morning he is giddy and nothing can bother him; the night before he was grumpy about small things. Tweet both states and they look like two different people. Which is more him? He has a vision of an ultimate human he is trying to become, and a lot of minds seem to be fighting over the microphone. Barrett offers a more Buddhist frame. It is not that you have multiple personalities. Your brain stores a population of experiences it can regenerate, reconstitute, and recombine into something new. It does this to predict and plan, and the same mechanism is mind-wandering.

The slogan that thinking differently will make you feel differently leaves out the other half of the conversation. The brain is trying to control the body; the body sends information back; that information, like the world, launches the next volley of predictions. Affective feeling, the mood that comes from body-budgeting sensations, influences thought as much as thought influences feeling, maybe more. The whole thing is a nonlinear dynamical system. She is writing a paper with engineers about it. The hard part is not getting a motor movement out of that system. It is getting a mental feature: a feeling of being loved, of being worthwhile, of feeling like shit. You are not one person and not many people. You are the sum of your experiences. Who you are in a given moment is influenced by the state of your body and the state of the world you have put yourself in, and you can change either, one more easily than the other.

You can change the environment by getting up and moving, or by shifting attention so other features come forward. Looking around Fridman's place, she notices there are no green plants. Plants mean a home, and he wants the room to feel temporary. Not everyone controls noise or temperature, but everyone has a little control: photographs, plants, anything meaningful, used as a switch. You can also change the body. Daily exercise is unpleasant and costly, but if you replenish what you spend you are investing in making it easier for the brain to control the body later. Drink water; tap water is fine in most of the developed world. Try to get enough sleep. Not everyone has that luxury, but everyone can do something to make the body budget a little more solvent, which makes it more likely that certain thoughts will emerge from the prediction machine. That, she says, is the control you actually have.

Fridman rolls into consciousness and Barrett rolls her eyes. He had sent questions in advance; she made notes for every one except this. She is not a philosopher of consciousness and not a neuroscientist who focuses on it, except that she studies affect and mood, and that, she says, is the hard question. The brain is modeling the sensory conditions of the body. The model is updated continuously by data from the body, for a whole life. You do not feel those sensations directly. You feel a general sense of pleasantness or unpleasantness, comfort or discomfort, being worked up or calm. Psychologists call that affect. Most people call it mood.

How does the brain give you that low-dimensional feeling when it is receiving a high-dimensional array of sensory data, and when the model of the body has to be high-dimensional because there is a lot going on in there? Even sitting still, there is a whole drama inside you that you are largely unaware of. The brain gives you a status report as mental features: pleasant, unpleasant, energetic, tired. When you feel like shit, what are you supposed to do next? What caused it? Not one thing. Posture, the gut, what you ate five minutes ago and what you ate two days ago, all on different timescales. The status report is simple. The causes are not. That, she thinks, is the hardest question.

Will we ever understand it? As a scientist she thinks we will understand it about as well as we understand the birth of the universe, and she is willing to spend her time on Earth trying, if she can do it her way. Scientists carry ontological commitments, sometimes blindly, about how nature is. Those commitments shape what they ask and what they measure. Her approach would cost more, take longer, and fit poorly into the current incentive structure. Doing science the way science is currently done, with the budget and incentives it currently has, will we have an answer? "Absolutely not."

Every student who graduates with a PhD from her lab gets a small library. First on the list is Richard Lewontin's *The Triple Helix* (2000), a short introduction to complexity and to population thinking versus essentialism: the idea that each person has an essence, a soul or a set of genes, versus the idea that we have the kind of nature that requires nurture, a dance in which the environment turns genes on and off. She has read it six or seven times. The title plays on the double helix: biology is bigger than the double helix can hold. Lewontin's *Biology as Ideology* (1991) is about the ontological commitments of scientific practice, still relevant, she thinks, because they are like water to a fish.

Mid-recommendation she veers into a fact she learned recently and cannot leave alone. Humans have no water receptors on the skin. How do you feel a raindrop? Temperature plus touch, a complex sense computed only in the brain. Of course there is no dedicated organ, she thought immediately: we evolved in water. Snow, cold rain, and warm rain feel different because the brain is inferring from temperature and droplet size. You will never see rain the same way again, which is the point. The brain is a prediction machine combining lots of information. Kurt Danziger's *Naming the Mind*, which everyone in her lab reads, asks where we got the theory that the mind is populated by distinct thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, categories that do not exist in all cultures. The opening chapter, she says, is as mind-blowing as the raindrop.

From Stephen King's *On Writing* she took the rule that you write for a specific person. Hers is Dan. If she had to pick one model of science writing it would be *The Beak of the Finch*, a Pulitzer winner whose author's name she blanks on, with two storylines: Darwin in the Galápagos and Princeton researchers still studying Darwin's finches. All good popular science, she says, is storytelling constrained by evidence. For fiction she wants love stories. Helen Simonson's *Major Pettigrew's Last Stand* is about two people you would not expect to fall in love, and about everyone around them overcoming prejudice. *The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry* is a curmudgeonly bookseller who finds a baby left in his failing store and a whole life, and a whole community, growing from that one decision. Fridman asks whether the greatest stories need a happy ending or a heartbreak. That, Barrett says, is such a Russian question. Half her family is Russian, "the good half." There has to be heartbreak, and she does not like heartbreak. She wants a happy ending, or at least a hopeful one. Then she names *Doctor Zhivago* and *The English Patient*, and Fridman protests.