How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

When you’re a baby, you can’t choose the concepts that other people put into your head. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts that ultimately drive your actions, whether they feel willful or not. So “responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change your concepts.

At the same time that your brain is modeling your world, the outside world helps to wire your brain.

Social reality is a driving force behind human culture. It’s perfectly plausible for emotion concepts, as elements of social reality, to be learned from others during infancy, or even much later when someone moves from one culture to another (more on this shortly). Social reality is therefore one conduit for transmitting behaviors, preferences, and meanings from ancestors to descendants via natural selection. Concepts are not merely a social veneer on top of biology. They are a biological reality that is wired into your brain by culture. People who live in cultures with certain concepts, or more diverse concepts, may be more fit to reproduce.