Lisa Barrett

I felt sadness in that moment because, having been raised in a certain culture, I learned long ago that “sadness” is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss.

Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. Forward-looking thinkers speculate that simulation is a common mechanism not only for perception but also for understanding language, feeling empathy, remembering, imagining, dreaming, and many other psychological phenomena. Our common sense might declare that thinking, perceiving, and dreaming are different mental events (at least to those of us in Western cultures), yet one general process describes them all. Simulation is the default mode for all mental activity. It also holds a key to unlocking the mystery of how the brain creates emotions.

Your concepts are a primary tool for your brain to guess the meaning of incoming sensory inputs. For example, concepts give meaning to changes in sound pressure so you hear them as words or music instead of random noise. In Western culture, most music is based on an octave divided into twelve equally spaced pitches: the equal-tempered scale codified by Johann Sebastian Bach in the seventeenth century. All people of Western culture with normal hearing have a concept for this ubiquitous scale, even if they can’t explicitly describe it. Not all music uses this scale, however. When Westerners hear Indonesian gamelan music for the first time, which is based on seven pitches per octave with varied tunings, it’s more likely to sound like noise. A brain that’s been wired by listening to twelve-tone scales doesn’t have a concept for that music. Personally, I am experientially blind to dubstep, although my teenage daughter clearly has that concept.