Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett review

Your brain doesn’t ‘light up’ or store memories like computer files, personality tests don’t work and our brains are no more ‘evolved’ than any other animal. Katie Law enjoys a new book about the brain that is small in size but big on ideas
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Mark Karlsberg, Studio Eleven
Katie Law @jkatielaw3 March 2021

With its snappy copycat title alluding to astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli’s bestselling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, along with its slimline pert physique, this little book promises to ‘demystify that big grey blob that lies between your ears’ as opposed to the universe. No small task. 

But then Canadian social psychologist Feldman Barrett we are told at the outset, is ‘among the one per cent most-cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience’. Bring it on Prof Barrett.

Showing her Darwinian credentials at the start, the question as to why our brains evolved, she writes, “is not answerable because evolution does not act with a purpose - there is no ‘why’”. Nor are our brains primarily for thinking, contrary to popular belief. Their main purpose is to act as a command centre - Feldman Barrett likes to debunk too. 

She begins by citing amphioxi, tiny little ‘stomachs on sticks’ that populated the oceans 550 million years ago and didn’t need to do anything other than perch on the seabed and wait for food to pass by. Amphioxi didn’t need brains. 

Gradually ‘newer’ creatures, who could do more sophisticated things like move, hunt prey and escape predators evolved and thus needed a centralised command centre to organise and control these complex activities. 

Fast forward to now, and the human brain supervises six hundred muscles in motion, balances dozens of hormones, pumps two thousand gallons of blood around the body daily, regulates the energy of billions of brain cells, oversees food digestion and waste excretion, fights illness and keeping the body operating efficiently, she writes. This process is called allostasis, and to operate efficiently, it must predict the body’s needs and budget its resources accordingly.

This is not to say the brain doesn’t think, feel, imagine and create hundreds of other experiences, but, “all of these mental capacities are consequences of a central mission to keep you alive and well by managing your body budget. Everything your body creates, from memories to hallucinations, from ecstasy to shame, is part of the mission.”

The next myth Feldman Barrett debunks is the concept of the ‘triune brain’, first championed in the mid-20th century by Paul MacLean and Carl Sagan. They theorised that the human brain consists of a ‘lizard’ brain that controls base instincts such as hunger and sex drive, a limbic system that regulates emotions and feelings, and then the neocortex that reins in the other two by providing rational thought. “It’s one of the most successful and widespread errors in all science,” she writes, and it’s true, many a self-help book still suggests that there are competing, separate areas in your brain, even if the triune brain theory has now lost traction in mainstream neuroscience. 

Thanks to recent research in molecular genetics, we also know that reptiles and nonhuman mammals have the same kind of neurons as humans, she says. “Human brains did not emerge from reptile brains by evolving extra parts for emotion and rationality”. Instead, brains of all mammals are built from “a single manufacturing plan”, which begins shortly after conception. The manufacturing process runs in stages, and in different animals these stages last for shorter or longer durations. The stage that produces neurons for the cerebral cortex in humans for example, runs for longer than in rodents and much longer than in lizards. 

She’s interesting about why we have an ‘unusually large’ cerebral cortex: yes we are more rational than most animals, but if you think of the cerebral cortex as the kitchen in a house, having a large kitchen in a small house suggests an aptitude for cooking, whereas having a large kitchen in a large house suggests nothing more than proportionality.

Pointing out that other animals can do things we can’t, such as fly, lift fifty times their own weight, regrow body bits that have been amputated and even survive in harsh conditions like the moon - as some bacteria can, amply demonstrate that we are not more but differently evolved. 

Other debunked myths include the idea that your brain ‘lights up’ with activity or stores ‘memories like computer files’. These are simply metaphors. Indeed, but they are useful ones, especially as she goes on to tell us that the brain is a network of 128 billion neurons connected “as a single, massive, and flexible structure.” That’s hard to comprehend, but a lot easier when likened to an airport hub, with smaller airports, interconnecting flights, delays, fuel, pilots, runway holdups and so on. 

She has an interesting chapter on the development of baby brains and why distinguishing between nature and nurture is unhelpful: “the two are like lovers in a fiery tango”, she writes, perhaps a little over-enthusiastically. Still, neglect of the extreme kind suffered by Romanian orphans in the 1990s unquestionably leads to a smaller than average brain size and intellectual impairment for life. 

Another chapter deals with the importance of the predictive brain, using memory and the environment to help it launch the next action, even if it sometimes gets it wrong, such as the case of the soldier in the jungle who was about to shoot a man with a gun, but was stopped by his colleague who pointed out that the man was in fact a boy and his gun was a stick.

Favouring self-protection over accuracy, “your brain is wired to initiate your actions before you’re aware of them. That is kind of a big deal,” she writes. And clearly this has wider implications about free will and responsibility, which she also touches on.  

The importance of socialising, using language to communicate, the need for creativity, why personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are “pretty dubious’ (we are the worst judges when it comes to answering questions about ourselves), and how different cultures think differently about almost everything, from concepts such as hate-speech to whether smiling at someone means being about to initiate a greeting for example, are just a few of the other topics Feldman Barrett covers.

It’s absorbing, thought-provoking stuff, mainly because rather than attempting to simplify the science of the brain - an almost impossible task - what she is really interested in is the concept of social reality - and “social reality is a uniquely human ability”. 

It’s what allows us to make up abstract concepts, from democracy to the idolisation of celebrities, from conquering different environments to using the pronoun they to refer to single person. Social reality is what makes us behave well or badly, what makes us behave differently from other animals and what makes us human.

In the end, that’s a lot more interesting than trying to grapple with the concept of how billions of neurons really work.

Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Picador, £14.99) 

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