Emotional Realities

How feelings shape our perceptions, beliefs, and relationships

Photo by Nik 

In this five-part series, we’re going to look under the hood of our emotional lives—where feelings come from, how they shape what we perceive, and how to talk about them in a way that brings us closer.

Whether we’re navigating a long-term relationship, recovering from a breakup, or simply trying to make sense of our emotions, this series offers a practical and psychologically grounded guide to help us communicate more clearly, respond to conflict with more insight, and deepen our connection with others.

Part 1: Emotion is Constructed

How the brain builds our emotional reality, and why it matters

You can’t fix what you don’t understand.

One of the most common things I hear in a first couples session is, “We have communication problems.”

It makes sense. When we’re stuck in the same unresolved conflicts, it’s easy to assume the problem is how we talk. But from my side of the couch, it’s rarely just a communication problem.

What I usually see is this: feelings are driving the conversation but they’re not being named. And when that happens, people end up arguing about the wrong thing: the content of the conversations (the dishes, say) rather than the feelings (resentment about division of labor).

Decades of neuroscience have shown us that feelings arise faster than thoughts, often within milliseconds.1 2 If you see something that looks like a snake, your amygdala fires almost instantly, triggering a surge of sensations before your intellect has time to assess what’s happening. It might take a few seconds or longer to decide whether there’s real danger. But by then, your emotional response is already shaping how you see it.

This isn’t just interesting brain science. It also shapes the way we connect.

Here’s our thesis:

·         If you don’t know what you’re feeling, you can’t name it.

·         If you can’t name it, your partner can’t understand you.

·         And if your partner can’t understand you, even the best communication tools won’t help.

So let’s start with feelings—what they are, where they come from, and how they shape what we say and do.

We use the word feeling to describe all kinds of internal experiences—sensations in the body (“I feel sick to my stomach”), affective states (“I feel jittery”), emotions (“I feel sad”), or even thoughts (“I feel like this isn’t going to work”). But each of these represents a different type of experience based on a different set of processes in the brain.

Let’s look at how it’s all put together.

You Don’t Have a Skeleton Inside You – You’re Inside a Skeleton

Although it feels like we have a skeleton inside us, from a neuroscience perspective it’s really the opposite—we’re inside a skeleton. If all our experiences are produced within the brain, and that brain is encased in our skull, then from that point of view, our common-sense experience is inside-out. Although we feel as though the outside world is external to us and our brain and skeleton are internal, from the brain’s perspective, everything from the skull outward—including our entire body—is an external object.

Because it’s locked inside a skull, with no connection to the external world other than data from the senses, what we call experience is merely the brain’s best guess about what’s happening outside, drawn from those limited sense data and our past experience, all processed internally.

That internal experience is governed by something called our body budget—the brain’s ongoing effort to manage the body’s energy resources. Whether we’re resting, walking, working, or talking, the brain is constantly adjusting our physiological systems, preparing the body to act on whatever it expects to happen next.

Why does this matter?

Because as the brain does all this, it generates a continuous stream of internal sensations that determine how we feel, what we notice, and what we believe to be true.

Here’s how.

Sensation: The Raw Data of Experience

In addition to the five familiar senses that detect the outside world, we also have a finely tuned internal sensory system called interoception. This system monitors the state of our organs and tissues: how fast our heart is beating, how tight our stomach feels, how shallowly or deeply we’re breathing. We can feel these signals individually if we pause and pay attention.

In any given moment, we’re always feeling something. And taken together, these sensations form the basis of our affect: our basic sense of feeling good or bad, energized or drained. As we move through this series, we’ll see how our baseline affective experience shapes our emotional life and our sense of what’s true. Next, we’ll cover some of the basics.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

This is an old philosophical question, and at first the answer might seem obvious: of course it makes a sound. Whether someone is there or not doesn’t matter.

But strangely enough, the answer is no.

That’s because the question isn’t about trees in the forest. It’s about us. It’s about the difference between what exists in the world and what we experience.

When a tree falls, what happens in the external world is a change in air pressure—waves moving outward in every direction through the medium of air. But changes in air pressure aren’t sound.

Sound, as we experience it, doesn’t happen until those waves reach the eardrum, vibrate through the bones of the middle ear, get translated into electrical and chemical signals in the cochlea, and are finally represented by the auditory cortex as “sound” in our mental awareness.

By the time we hear it, the original stimulus has been transformed many times and its origin in the external world has dissolved into a fully internalized experience that bears almost no similarity to its cause.3 Just ask yourself if you’ve ever described a piece of music in terms of air pressure. 

The same is true for color. When we look out the window, every part of us insists the tree outside is green. But it isn’t. Wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation are measurable in amplitude and frequency, not in greenness.

The same is true for every sense. Our sensory systems are remarkably consistent—bananas almost always smell like bananas. And they have social validity—we can all (usually) agree on what we experience with our senses. But that doesn’t make our experiences objectively real.

Depending on how we frame it, this might seem like a profound insight about the nature of reality, or just a basic fact about how perception works.

Either way, our connection to objective reality is about to stretch even thinner.

Our Perceptions Are Based on Prediction and Simulation

The external world contains far more sensory input than we could ever process. For example, each retina alone can transmit about 10 million bits of information per second. To keep us alive, the brain must represent enough of that input to spot something important, like a predator, without getting lost in the noise.

So how does the brain decide what to process?

First, it has to determine what’s relevant in a given moment and then narrow its focus, tuning into some inputs while filtering out the rest. Affective neuroscientists call this our affective niche, and it shifts constantly as our goals and contexts change.

For example, if you and I are sitting in a restaurant having a conversation, my affective niche includes your voice, but not the voices at the other tables. But if we’re waiting for our name to be called, that same niche expands to monitor the background voices as well.

But how does the brain decide what to care about?

To make that decision it has to do something remarkably complex. I has to continuously predict what’s most likely to happen next, based on everything it knows about similar situations in the past. Although this seems like it would take a tremendous amount of processing power, it actually much more efficient than trying to sort through every bit of incoming data.

In terms of our own experience as the conscious person at the (apparent) center of all this prediction, it isn’t a conscious choice. Before we even realize we’re perceiving something, the brain has already guessed what it’s most likely to be, using stored experience to shape what we notice and how we respond.

For example, when I was a kid, I used to bring in firewood from the wood pile around the side of the house. And because I’d seen plenty of spiders there before, when it was dark my brain was always on high alert. And here’s where prediction kicked in: sometimes I’d see spiders that weren’t even there.

Not just think I saw them. I really did see them. They were briefly represented in the external world by my brain, and then they’d vanish and turn out to be a twist of wood, a leaf or a shadow—or nothing at all.

We’ve all experienced this. Maybe you thought you saw a friend in a crowd, but it wasn’t them. Or saw a person in the shadows that turned out to be a pile of boxes.

These momentary illusions are very common, and they’re not mistakes. They’re more like shortcuts: the brain produces what we’re most likely to see (or hear, or feel, or smell) so we have more time to react.

And here’s the really strange part.

The brain isn’t just predicting what might happen and giving it to us as a thought (although that can happen too)—it’s feeding those predictions directly into our sensory system. In other words, we don’t experience them as guesses or ideas, but as sights, sounds, and sensations indistinguishable from the data coming in the outside world.

They feel like perceptions, but they’re simulations. As new input arrives, the brain updates the simulation in real time, continuously blending its internal model with external data, all of which we experience as one seamless reality.

From Simulated Sensations to Simulated Feelings

It’s not just what we see and hear that gets simulated. It’s what we feel. Our interoceptions (those subtle, bodily feelings) and our affect (our overall sense pleasure or discomfort, energy or fatigue) aren’t just a reaction to what’s happening. They are also part of the simulation. 4

When the brain generates a prediction, it doesn’t just guess what’s out external. It moves energy resources around the body to prepare us to act. And those feelings—originating in our heartbeat, breath, posture, and tone—color everything: what we notice, what we care about, and what we believe to be true.

Of course, we’re not totally unmoored from reality. The brain doesn’t just make things up. It constantly checks its predictions against incoming sensory data to reduce error. That’s why the world usually feels stable, and why our perceptions function so well.

In a Nutshell

We don’t perceive the world as it is. We perceive what our brain filters, transforms, and predicts. By the time something feels real to us, it’s already been shaped by our past experiences, our bodily state, and the affective tone that underlies our awareness.

Emotion is the final layer. Emotion results from our brain assigning meaning to our interoceptive and affective experiences. It adds context, draws on memory, weaves in language. That’s how a flutter in the chest becomes anxiety, or excitement, or dread.

So if we don’t always know what we’re feeling, or struggle to communicate it clearly, it’s not necessarily a failure of insight. It’s a reflection of the system’s complexity, and of the fact that emotions aren’t fixed entities.

Emotions are constructed, built from sensation, shaped by prediction, and interpreted through context. The same feeling might mean something different to someone else, or even to us on a different day. And if we can’t name our feelings with clarity, it becomes that much harder to share them with someone else.

That’s where we’ll go next. In Part Two, we’ll explore how emotions shape perception—how what we feel can shape what we see, and why this matters so deeply in the way we relate to the people we love.

If You Want to Go Deeper

·         Notice the moments when you feel certain about what’s happening—and consider that your brain may be predicting more than it’s perceiving.

·         Pay attention to how you and your partner relate to your shared sensory environment—differences in comfort, preference, or sensitivity may be more about perception than about who’s right.

·         If you’d like to explore your inner sensory landscape more directly, try a Body Scan Meditation.

1 Berkley, K. J. (2013). Pain and emotions: A biopsychosocial review of recent research. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(3), 203–217.

2 Biederman, I., & Vessel, E. A. (2006). Perception and conceptualization: A computational analysis of the early visual processing of objects. Vision Research, 46(12), 1828–1847.

3 Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Psychological Science, 28(11), 1–19.

4 Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.