Lisa Feldman Barrett : You aren't at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them

Lisa Feldman Barrett at TED@IBM 2017
You aren't at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them  (transcript)
Summary
What are emotions?
The answer of the speaker is that emotions are just guesses. Our brain doesn't contain emotion circuits. It means that emotions are not built into our brain at birth.

Emotions are guesses that our brain constructs in the moment where billions of brain cells are working together and we have more control over those guesses than we might imagine that we do.
Using past experience, our brain predicts and constructs our experience of the world, thus our brain does not react to the world.

The actions and the experiences that we make today become our brain's predictions for tomorrow.
I think that this is why our emotions are always swaying. It can go better sides but it can also go wrong sides easily. Then those are our responsibility, the speaker said that it's very hard to swallow, though.

However, the speaker said that we don't have to choke on that idea but we must embrace it.

I think that it means that we have to have responsibility for our everyday actions. It leads us to having strong emotions naturally.

Words in this story
mercy /noun/  compassion, grace, pity, charity
exhaustive /adj/ examining, including, or considering all elements or aspects; fully comprehensive.
preposterous /noun/ dumb, inept, silly, mad
wretchedness /noun/ miserableness, misery