Episode
Are You Reading the Room, or an Old Wound?
- Podcast
- The Buoyant Leader
- Published
- Mar 18, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 410
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://howiejacobson.india-explore.in/captivate-podcast/are-you-reading-the-room-or-an-old-wound
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Summary
Are You Reading the Room, or an Old Wound? In her book How Emotions Are Made , neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett tells a story of going on a date with a guy from her lab that she wasn’t really into. As the date progressed, however, she found herself increasingly more attracted to him. Her face flushed, her heart rate increased, and she started feeling butterflies in her stomach. After agreeing to a second date, Barrett went home, got into bed, and had the flu for a week. In other words, those bodily sensations were an incipient illness, not signs of sexual attraction. But when her brain had to interpret those sensations, it did so through the context of a dinner date. So it predicted, “You’ve got the hots for this dude.” She wasn’t lying to herself. She was simply doing what all of us do, all the time: constructing reality from incomplete data. This is the predictive brain at work. The Predictive Brain You don’t experience the world raw, without filters. (You’d be bombarded with so much data, you’d be completely unable to function.) Instead, you experience a model of the world that your brain constructs on the fly, assembled in about half a second from sensory data, memory, and your brain’s best guess about what’s happening, what it means, and what you need to do about it. Most of the time, the model is close enough for you to function successfully. You bring your fork to your mouth instead of your eye, you don’t walk in front of traffic, and you laugh at the punch line of the joke. And that model does get things wrong — a lot. Most of the time, that’s not a problem. Your brain compares incoming sensory data with its prediction and updates its model. Prediction, comparison, prediction error, updated prediction. That loop is your brain at its best — learning in real t…