In Part One of this series (How to Talk about Your Feelings), we looked at how our brain is continuously producing multi-sensory simulations of the world, overriding much of the incoming sensory information available to it. As counterintuitive as that may sound, this is how our brain keeps us healthy and alive because it couldn’t process all the available information fast enough to keep us out of trouble.

As we move through our day, we usually think that things happen “out there” in the external world, and then we experience a reaction “in here,” within our body and mind. But in fact, this is the opposite of what happens. How we feel is what determines the reality we experience, not the other way around. 

Neuroscientists call this phenomenon affective realism.

Sound baffling? Then read on… 

• Our brain relies mainly on prediction rather than perception to construct our reality.

• Based on these predictions, our brain moves energy resources around our body to prepare us to act.

• We experience these movements as feelings, and our reality adapts to how we feel.

• If we feel anxious, the world looks dangerous; if we feel depressed, the world looks bleak.

• But we don’t have to stay stuck in a bad dream. With practice, we can learn to break the spell.

A Useful Illusion

Let’s say you are out for a walk in the woods to gather some kindling, and because you know in the back of your mind that there might be bears in the area, part of your brain is looking for bears (your brain has 100 billion neurons, so there’s a lot going on under the hood). Then suddenly you see a bear out of the corner of your eye, about 20 yards away. Brown fur, black eyes, white teeth. You get a jolt of adrenaline and cortisol that shocks you into survival mode, preparing you to run.

But when you snap your head around to get a better look, there is no bear. All you see is a tree stump in the shadows. Your heart is pounding, your breathing is rapid, and your muscles are tingling with energy, but the bear was only a simulation. And a very useful one – it’s better for your survival to mistakenly see an imaginary bear than to not see a real one.

Usually, when we experience these kinds of simulations, we don’t give them a second thought. And if we happen to tell someone about it later, we will probably say only that we thought we saw a bear. Or we thought we saw our friend on the subway platform, even though they moved to another city. Or we thought we saw our cat at our feet, even though we were in a hotel on a business trip.

But if we check our actual experience closely, we will see that we didn’t just think we saw a bear: a bear actually appeared in our visual field. This is because of the way our brain constructs these simulations. When our brain produces a simulation, it routes its prediction up through our sensory systems so that for us it is no different than seeing a real bear because it appears directly to our sense awareness. Therefore, a simulation is much more than a thought, it is a virtual reality. 

“The world that appears to our conscious awareness is largely simulated based on how we feel and what our brain cares most about at that moment.”

Our Inner Virtual Reality – A Blessing and a Curse

This is different from the way we usually think about our experience, isn’t it? We usually think that the world exists out there, with no involvement from our mind. But in fact, the world that appears to our conscious awareness is largely simulated based on how we feel and what our brain cares most about at that moment.

But our brain is not just simulating our sensory world, it is also continuously simulating our conceptual world. This is why we’re able to communicate with other people about all the things that exist beyond our sensory awareness. Things like why a $100 bill is worth more than the paper it is printed on or what a democracy is. Or a marriage. Or God. You really can’t point to these things directly, but they exist in our collective imagination and they function by consensus.

It’s no exaggeration to say that if our brains couldn’t simulate the world, not only would our physical survival be in jeopardy, but our collective human experience would cease to exist because we would have no way to perceive it. Our ability to perceive these collective simulations is essential to our survival as a species.

That’s the blessing.

The curse is that our brain can also simulate some very inaccurate versions of the world that can persist even in the presence of disconfirming information. For example, to someone who has anxiety, the world is a dangerous place. To someone with depression, the world is bleak and hopeless.

To their friends and family, however, none of that may be true. But if you’ve ever tried to convince a person with anxiety or depression that their view is inaccurate, you know how hard it is. Their simulation feels so real that they can’t help believing in it.

“Our ability to generate and maintain faulty simulations can lead us to misread situations, misjudge people, and even completely mistake a fantasy for reality.” 

This is like continuing to see a bear even after we’ve looked at the tree stump. Our conceptual simulations are less accommodating of corrective information than our sensory simulations. As a result, our ability to generate and maintain faulty simulations can lead us to misread situations, misjudge people, and even completely mistake fantasy for reality. 

This is how conspiracy theories take hold in the mind. If it feels true, it becomes true (especially if it explains something scary or confusing) no matter how poorly it fits the facts. But the funny thing is that there is usually nothing wrong with people who hold even the most bizarre conspiracy theories. Our brain is built to work that way.

But it still can cause trouble. Let’s look at a concrete example of how things can go awry.

Is My Husband Cheating on Me?

That was the sole reason a new client came to see me. (Note: I always change a client’s name, age, gender, race, profession, or years in relationship to protect their privacy whenever I use them in an example). For the past six months, she had been waking up several times per week in the middle of the night, convinced her husband was having an affair. She would become flooded with graphic visualizations of his sexual encounters with other women, sometimes escalating into a full-blown panic attack. 

Because he was a light sleeper, her husband would often wake up as she tossed and turned and ask her what’s wrong. She would then launch into a desperate interrogation, searching for a solution to the puzzle of his life that didn’t involve infidelity. But no matter how much he explained and reassured her, she never felt satisfied, which led to a recurring pattern of tearful 3 AM conversations. 

Ironically, it was her husband who had encouraged her to schedule an appointment with me. They had been married for almost 40 years, and he seemed baffled. He didn’t know what to do about this new problem, other than sleeping on the couch.

External Problems Versus Internal Problems

In our first session, I wanted to get a clear idea of the problem, so I began by asking her about any direct evidence she might have of his cheating, such as incriminating or unexplainable phone calls, text messages, social media interactions, credit card charges, or gossip. Nothing like that, so I asked about indirect indicators, like a history of emotional involvement with female friends or colleagues. No again. What about any history of cheating in his prior relationships, or in their families growing up? All negative. 

Finally, I said, “So, what makes you think he’s cheating?” 

She replied, “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.” 

Now, I wasn’t about to dismiss a client’s major marital concern as only a feeling, but I also knew that when people get a bad feeling they usually think there is a problem outside of themselves, not inside. She had a bad feeling about her husband, assumed it had an external cause and tried to solve it externally, by excessively questioning her husband, hoping to feel better. 

So, I pushed further for an external solution and asked her if she would consider hiring a private investigator to get to the bottom of it? 

“No,” she said. “I think it’s me.”

Now we were getting somewhere. But distinguishing our feelings from external objects is easier if we know a bit more about how our feelings develop.

Interoception: The Sensations inside Your Body

Feelings start as sensations in our interoceptive sensory system, how we feel sensations in our organs, tissues, glands, and immune system. The interoceptive system is just like our other senses in that it is continuously producing sensory experiences, and you can easily become conscious of it by shifting your attention. 

Right now, for example – if you move the spotlight of your attention around your body, what do you sense? Can you sense your legs or feet, your belly or chest, your neck or shoulders? That’s interoception, and the more you look the more you will find.

The source of interoception is the continuous movement of energy resources around our body. For example, if you’re about to stand up, your brain increases your blood pressure, so you don’t faint. If you need to run, it releases cortisol, which floods your bloodstream with glucose, so your muscles have enough energy. If you get injured, it releases cytokines from the immune system to help repair the tissue. 

Interoception is simply the way all of this continuous activity feels inside our body. When you add up all those sensations in any given moment, they combine to form our affect or our most basic level of feeling.

Affect: How Interoception Feels

Affect is defined by two concepts: valence and activation. Valence is whether you are feeling good, bad, or neutral, and activation is whether you have low or high energy. At any time, you can stop and check where you are on each of these dimensions. 

If you are feeling relaxed and chill, that’s positive valence with low activation. If you are elated, that’s positive valence with high activation. If you are feeling gloomy, that’s negative valence with low activation. And if you are enraged or terrified, that’s negative valence with high activation. 

Neuroscientists describe affect in terms of a circumplex (see image), a circular representation with four quadrants defined by a valance axis and an activation axis. Notice that very different emotions can occupy similar positions on the circumplex. That’s because affect isn’t emotion. Emotions are more conceptual, based on their meaning in the context of a life situation, whereas affect is just how your interoception feels.

Whenever you turn your attention inward to examine your affect, you can always find it. It’s right there under the surface. All I have to do is ask you how you are doing, and you would report your affect to me. “Pretty good,” you might say, “but a little tired.” Valence and activation.

And if you look a little deeper, you can also find the underlying interoception. Because your interoception can vary widely throughout the day (depending on what your brain thinks is about to happen) so can your affect. 

This is also true when what’s about to happen is entirely imaginary. For example, research shows that people watching videos of skiers have the same interoceptive experiences that people have when they are actually skiing. 

You can notice the same thing when you watch a really gripping movie. Your interoception will respond to what’s happening in the movie, and your affect will move around the circumplex, and you will report a variety of emotions that make sense in the context of the plot.

“We all have a movie playing in our head all day long.”

But here’s the most important part. We all have a movie playing in our head all day long.

Our brain is producing a continuous series of simulations, in the form of daydreams, ruminations, worries, fantasies, and reveries – all of which generate a continuous stream of interoceptive sensations that result in affect and emotion. 

When your brain produces these simulations, your reality changes. You see the world through the simulation, and as your brain generates interoception and affect, the world you see out there changes to match how you feel. 

Neuroscientists call this phenomenon affective realism: when we fully believe in the simulation our brain is showing us, without considering how that belief arises.

Feeling Is Believing

When I meet someone, if my brain is predicting a negative outcome, the internal movement of energy resources makes me edgy and uncomfortable, and I get a bad feeling about them. At the same time, without really thinking about it, I begin scanning this person’s qualities, and because I have a bad feeling I’m mostly looking for negative qualities, ignoring the positives. 

This processing bias causes me to simulate a negative person, and I inherently believe this simulation because it matches my bad feeling. In evolutionary terms, this is adaptive. To our paleolithic brain, because strangers can be dangerous, searching for that danger has always been the safer bet. 

Of course, the problem is that the bad person we are simulating and the external person in front of us are two completely different objects. But we collapse the simulation and the external object into one thing.

Affective Realism Pervades our Experience 

This is going on all the time. How we feel about people places and things determines what we perceive, and as a result, we walk around thinking that the good, bad, and neutral qualities we perceive are aspects of the objects themselves rather than how we feel about them. 

As a result, our favorite foods are delicious and the foods we hate are disgusting. The art we like is beautiful and the art we dislike is ugly. People we agree with are correct and people we disagree with are must be uninformed, irrational, or biased. 

There is a fallacy known in psychology as naïve realism: that the world exists exactly as we perceive it, and the objects we see are the real objects. Affective realism, by extension, tells us that if we have a bad feeling, there must be an unpleasant object.

The truth, of course, is that having a bad feeling doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong. It just means that our brain is moving energy resources around, causing unpleasant interoception, resulting in a bad feeling. Sometimes having a bad feeling does mean something bad is happening (like a real bear), but there are also lots of ways to develop a bad feeling that have nothing to do with external objects.

For example, a study of judges in Israel showed that they were more likely to deny parole before lunch because they interpreted the negative affect associated with their hunger as a “gut” feeling that the person would be a danger if released. In another study, people perceived neutral faces as more smiling when they were first induced to experience positive affect and as more frowning when they were first induced to experience negative affect. 

“Affective realism is part of our brain’s core processes, there is no way to stop it from happening. But we can stop believing so blindly in our simulations by learning to see through our own experience the extent to which our reality is constructed from our feelings.” 

Because affective realism is part of our brain’s core processes, there is no way to stop it from happening. But we can stop believing so blindly in our simulations by learning to see through our own experience the extent to which our reality is constructed from our feelings. 

My Husband Is My Best Friend

In the example of my client above, the man she saw when she woke up in the middle of the night was a womanizer, but the man she saw during the day was her best friend. Over the next couple of weeks, I asked her to record her interoception and affect whenever she thought about her husband in that way.

What we discovered was when she thought about it during the day it felt negative, a slight burning in her stomach, but not terribly activating. At night, however, she would wake up feeling nauseous and panicky, which set off an escalating series of contemplations and visualizations about her husband. This increased her bad affect, which in turn reified her view of her husband until she was in tears and on the verge of a panic attack.

After a few weeks of tracking her affect, she’d had enough. She decided that there was no external problem – there was only the appearance of one projected by her mind. A faulty simulation fueled by intense negative affect.

Over the next several weeks she implemented a strategy for use in the middle of the night to dissolve the faulty simulation and deal with the negative affect more directly. 

Dissolving a Faulty Simulation

The amazing thing about the brain is that it can produce these kinds of simulations in the first place. But because they are presented to our consciousness as faithful representations of the external world it can be very difficult to see that they are not reality.

The good news is that once we realize that this is what our brain is doing, there are some simple and effective ways to dissolve these simulations when they occur, decreasing their believability and reducing the negative affect. 

I will give a full example of how to do this in the next post, and then we will look at how to apply it directly to our marriage communication. 

Meanwhile, If you want to read more about the theory of affective realism and constructed emotion I’ve used in this article, check out Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made.

Learn more about breaking the spell of affective realism. Schedule a Free Consultation to discuss how to do it.