Understanding the Predictive Brain: Perspective of neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Every once in a while a video pops up on YouTube that changes your way of thinking. The conversation between Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO is one of those rare dialogues where a world-class scientist translates decades of research into a language that reshapes how we think about emotions, trauma, identity, and agency. Over the course of their two-hour discussion, Barrett dismantles cultural myths about how the brain works and replaces them with a radical yet empowering account: our brains are not reactive machines responding to an objective reality, but predictive organs that constantly construct our experiences, emotions, and even our sense of self.

What emerges from the exchange is both scientifically rigorous and deeply practical. We are encourage to reconsider the meaning of anxiety, to rethink trauma not as something that happens to us but as something we interpret and construct, and to embrace the possibility that by altering our predictions and experiences, we can change who we become. Barrett’s message is not naïve optimism; it is grounded in the neuroscience of prediction, metabolism, and cultural inheritance. Her story, especially the personal account of helping her daughter recover from depression, illustrates how these scientific insights can change lives.

Here I have attempted to summarise this wide-ranging discussion and how it is relevant to the work I do. Like me, Lisa sees herself above all as a science communicator:

“My goal as a science communicator is to try to take really complicated science and present it in a way that people can use… ultimately that’s what science is for: living a better life”.

This grounding principle threads through the entire conversation. Barrett is not interested in abstract philosophy of the brain for its own sake; she is interested in how understanding the brain’s operating principles allows ordinary people to gain agency, even when the world feels overwhelming. I couldn't agree more.

The Predictive Brain: Turning the Story Upside Down

One of Barrett’s most radical contributions is the idea that the brain is not primarily reactive but predictive. Most people experience themselves as sensing the world and then responding to it. As Steven put it, “Life can feel like we are a puppet… If it rains outside then we’re sad, if a person sends us a message then we’re annoyed, and we’re just reactive creatures.” Barrett gently but firmly corrects this. “That’s not actually what’s happening under the hood. Really what’s happening is that your brain is not reacting, it’s predicting.”

She explains that at any given moment, the brain is using past experiences to prepare for what comes next. If you drink coffee every morning at 8 a.m., by 7:55 your brain has already dilated your blood vessels in anticipation of caffeine’s constrictive effects. If you imagine biting into an apple, your mouth waters because your brain has rehearsed that action thousands of times. Even something as basic as stopping thirst after drinking water happens long before the water reaches the bloodstream: the brain is relying on prediction, not immediate reaction.

As Barrett puts it: “You act first and then you sense. You don’t sense and then react. You predict action and then you sense.” This reversal is not a semantic trick; it’s a profound reconfiguration of how we understand the mind. It means that emotions, perceptions, and even memories are not direct readouts of reality but constructed events, shaped by the remembered past and the sensory present. It is a phrase she repeats often.

Emotions Are Built, Not Triggered

The predictive model undermines one of psychology’s oldest assumptions: that emotions are innate circuits hardwired into the brain (Darwin indeed mapped their facial expressions). Barrett describes how, early in her career, she sought objective measures of anger—heart rate increases, scowls, blood pressure changes. But the data never matched. “When someone is angry, people scowl about 35% of the time. That means 65% of the time they’re doing something else. And half the time when people scowl, they’re not angry. They could just be concentrating or have gas.”

From this she drew the conclusion that there are no universal signatures of emotions. Anger, sadness, fear—these are not objective circuits but categories our brains construct by predicting what sensations mean in the context in which they occur. This explains why emotions vary so much across cultures: in some societies, thought and feeling are not even considered separate categories; they are aspects of a single mental event.

Thus, emotions are not reactions but constructions, and this has enormous implications. If emotions are built, then they can also be rebuilt. They are not immutable states imposed upon us but dynamic interpretations open to change.

Trauma and the Power of Meaning

This predictive framework radically changes how we understand trauma. A common example: would be a child who is beaten by a father may grow up to fear men, because the brain predicts danger whenever a man enters the room. Barrett added an important caveat to this common understanding of trauma: “Trauma is not something that happens in the world to you. Everything you experience is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present.”

In my work I come across examples of people whose bodies remember experiences that their conscious mind has repressed (as protection). These memories only comes up when triggered by experiences in the sensory present. Like the lady who came to me for a massage and my touch on the back of her neck suddenly triggered memories of being touched inappropriately by an older relative when she was 3!! Sometimes these may be full blown 'flashbacks' where you suddenly are in the memory, or more commonly it triggers a seemingly unrelated symptom or reaction like my recent client who inexplicably found herself unable to stop her compulsive eating where she had been successfully dieting before. The memory was of being told she would never amount to anything by her headmistress which disappointed her mother (to whom she was very closely attached emotionally). When her mother died that's when the problems began. She had begun to interpret her own past through this lens of being 'not enough' (shame), and only then did she develop anxiety, weight gain and depression.

This example unsettles the Western assumption that trauma is a fixed event lodged in memory. Instead, trauma emerges in the meaning we make of experiences. “Sometimes in life, you are responsible for changing something. Not because you’re to blame, but because you’re the only person who can.”

Barrett is careful here. She does not deny the reality of suffering nor suggest victims are culpable. Rather, she emphasizes the difference between blame and responsibility: we cannot control what happened, but we can sometimes reshape its meaning. This is why therapy often involves reframing memories, helping people construct new interpretations so that the same past experience no longer exerts the same predictive grip on the present.

Next time I'll consider Cultural Inheritance and the Contagion of Meaning