The brain's job is allostasis
Barrett argues the brain evolved primarily to regulate the body's energy budget by anticipating its needs, a process called allostasis. Thinking and feeling are secondary services in support of that budgeting.
Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain
6 ideas
You have one brain, not three
She debunks the 'triune brain' idea of separate reptilian, emotional, and rational layers. The brain is a single, continuously evolving network, not a stack of older and newer animals.
The brain predicts, it does not react
The brain constantly generates predictions from past experience and corrects them against sensory input. Perception is largely a construction the brain builds and then adjusts.
Brains wire to their world
An infant's brain is pruned and tuned by its physical and social environment, and humans co-regulate one another's nervous systems. We literally shape each other's brains through interaction.
We build our social reality
Because brains construct social reality through shared concepts like money and citizenship, humans bear responsibility for the worlds they create. Reality is partly authored, so we are accountable for it.
Barrett mistakes the flu for attraction
As a psychology graduate student, Barrett reluctantly agreed to a coffee date with a man from her department she didn't find attractive. During the date she felt her face flush, her stomach knot and her concentration waver, and concluded she was falling for him, even agreeing to see him again. Back home she vomited and spent the next week in bed with the flu: her brain had read the bodily signals of illness as romantic attraction.