Emotions can be intentionally influenced and perhaps mastered over time.

Your affect in the present moment is not evidence of the validity of an event.

It’s not your fault, but it’s your responsibility.

“Sometimes, responsibility means that you’re the only one who can change things.”.

“Construction cannot make a solid wall unsolid (unless you have mutant superpowers), but you can redraw countries, redefine marriage, and decide who’s worthwhile and who isn’t.”.

Our predictions are bounded/tuned by physical stimuli.

We can influence how we influence the world to a large degree but not to an infinite degree.

Perhaps we will come to understand that chaos is the bottleneck preventing us from being able to predict the behaviour of the system.Studying the mathematics and science of other complex systems may provide some insight into the functioning of the brain.Its story features unfamiliar characters like simulation and concepts and degeneracy, and it takes place throughout the whole brain at once.” The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, tells a story that doesn’t match your daily life-your brain invisibly constructs everything you experience, including emotions. Its story features familiar characters like thoughts and feelings that live in distinct brain areas. The classical view is intuitive-events in the world trigger emotional reactions inside of us. “The theory of constructed emotion and the classical view of emotion tell vastly different stories of how we experience the world.There is a gap between how we experience the mind and how the mind actually works.Buddha was limited but managed to get a ton of insight through introspection.

They are all statistical summaries of populations of instances.

We downregulate the variation within categories and upregulate the variation between categories.

Models, concepts, words, and perceptions are all examples of our brain’s way to discretize the continuous world.

Reality is messy and rarely fits into neat little boxes.“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”.Let natural selection of models and ideas take place. Responding to prediction errors like a scientist is crucial.Learning new words, journaling, meditation, healthy social interactions, and therapy can help us calibrate our models.Precise words allow us to more efficiently match our concepts to the incoming data.The best models are not always the most accurate ones but the most useful ones in an evolutionary sense.

Better mental models lead to a better life.

Lisa barrett how emotions are made