Here is how you create your reality and how your body and mind are interwoven. It is so fascinating to me how the brain works and is a prediction machine. This is a dive into How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. 

“Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.”

“People like to say that seeing is believing, but affective realism demonstrates that believing is seeing. The world often takes a backseat to your predictions.”

“The bottom line is this: the human brain is anatomically structured so that no decision or action can be free of interoception and affect, no matter what fiction people tell themselves about how rational they are. Your bodily feeling right now will project forward to influence what you will feel and do in the future. It is an elegantly orchestrated, self-fulfilling prophecy, embodied within the architecture of your brain.

“Scientists have known for some time that knowledge from the past, wired into brain connections, creates simulated experiences of the future, such as imagination. Other scientists focus on how this knowledge creates experiences of the present moment. The Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman called your experiences “the remembered present.” Today, thanks to advances in neuroscience, we can see that Edelman was correct. An instance of a concept, as an entire brain state, is an anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and what your sensations mean.”