Your Brain Doesn't Have Departments. It Collaborates.

What Lisa Feldman Barrett's research can teach us about emotion, stress, and the way we experience the world

We often talk about the brain as though it were a building full of departments.

The amygdala handles fear.

The prefrontal cortex handles rational thought.

The hippocampus handles memory.

The insula handles bodily sensations.

And somewhere in the middle, we imagine these departments occasionally send each other emails.

It is a convenient story.

It is also increasingly difficult to reconcile with what neuroscience tells us about how the brain actually works.

Research by neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett and her colleagues points toward a very different picture.

The brain is less like a collection of specialized departments and more like a distributed, constantly communicating system.

Different networks contribute different kinds of processing, but psychological experiences emerge from their interactions.

And this changes how we should think about emotion, stress, decision-making, and even the feeling that we are simply "reacting" to the world.

Your brain isn't waiting for something to happen

One of the most important ideas in Barrett's work is that the brain is not primarily a passive receiver of information. It is a prediction system. Before sensory information fully arrives, the brain is already generating predictions about what is likely to happen next based on previous experience. Incoming information then helps the brain refine those predictions.

Barrett and W. Kyle Simmons described this framework in their 2015 paper Interoceptive Predictions in the Brain, proposing that the brain continually generates predictions about the body's internal state as well as the external world. Sensory information constrains those predictions rather than simply creating perception from scratch.

In other words, your brain isn't simply asking:

"What is happening?"

It is also asking:

"Given everything I already know, what is probably happening?"

That distinction is enormous.

Because your previous experiences don't simply live in the past. They influence what your brain expects to encounter in the present.

The brain doesn't process the world one piece at a time

This is where Barrett's research on large-scale brain networks becomes particularly interesting.

In a 2013 review with Ajay Satpute, Barrett argued that emotional, social, and cognitive experiences are not best understood as functions belonging to isolated brain regions.

Instead, they emerge from interactions among distributed, domain-general networks.

The same neural systems can participate in many different kinds of psychological experiences.

Fear doesn't have one dedicated address. Neither does anger. Neither does memory, cognition, or perception. The brain is using overlapping systems in different combinations and contexts.

Think of it less like a piano with one key assigned to each song and more like an orchestra. The instruments matter. But the music comes from how they are coordinated.

Emotion isn't simply something that happens to you

This is one of the most recognizable implications of Barrett's theory of constructed emotion.

The traditional view of emotion often assumes that an event happens, a specific emotional system activates, and you experience the corresponding emotion. Barrett's theory proposes something more dynamic. Your brain is integrating information about:

• what's happening around you

• what's happening inside your body

• what you've experienced before

• what you expect to happen

• what concepts you've learned

• what action might be useful

From that activity, an emotional experience is constructed in context.

In her 2017 paper The Theory of Constructed Emotion, Barrett describes emotion as an instance of active inference involving interoception, categorization, and prediction.

That doesn't mean emotions are imaginary.

Quite the opposite.

The experience is real.

But the experience isn't necessarily the output of a single, pre-programmed "fear circuit" or "anger circuit."

It is the result of the brain making sense of incoming information using everything it has available.

And your body is part of the conversation

This is where the theory becomes especially relevant to stress.

Your brain isn't only predicting what is happening in the outside world.

It is also continually predicting what is happening inside your body.

Heart rate.

Breathing.

Temperature.

Energy availability.

Hormonal signals.

Immune activity.

Blood glucose.

And countless other physiological processes.

Barrett's work on interoception and allostasis proposes that the brain uses predictions to regulate the body's internal environment before problems arise.

This is called allostasis: anticipating the body's needs and preparing to meet them.

In a 2022 paper, Barrett and colleagues described interoception as modeling the body's changing internal state and allostasis as the process of regulating that state.

This means your brain is doing something remarkable all day long:

It is trying to keep you alive while simultaneously helping you navigate the world.

Those two jobs aren't separate. They're deeply interconnected.

Your brain has to decide what matters

There is another piece of Barrett's research that I think deserves much more attention.

The brain doesn't simply record everything that happens.

It categorizes.

And categorization isn't necessarily something that happens after perception.

In a 2026 Nature Reviews Neuroscience perspective with Earl Miller, Barrett argues that categorization is occurring throughout signal processing, from very early in the process. Predictive feedback helps organize incoming information into meaningful categories.

This is important because the world contains far more information than your brain could possibly process equally.

So your brain has to make decisions about relevance.

Is this important?

Have I seen this before?

Is this dangerous?

Is this familiar?

What does this mean?

What should I do next?

And it makes those decisions using context and prior experience.

Which means that two people can encounter the same event and experience very different realities—not necessarily because one person is irrational, but because their brains are working from different histories and predictions.

This is why familiarity can feel like confidence

This idea has enormous implications for how we understand performance. Imagine two people walking into the same interview. They have comparable knowledge. Comparable intelligence.

Comparable professional experience. But one has practiced this kind of conversation repeatedly.

The other has not. The second person's brain is dealing with more uncertainty. It has fewer established predictions about what comes next. The result may feel like:

"Why can't I think?"

"Why did I suddenly forget everything?"

"Why do I feel like I'm bad at this?"

But a more useful interpretation might be: Your brain is working harder to predict the environment.

That doesn't mean anxiety is always caused by unfamiliarity.It doesn't mean familiarity eliminates stress. And it certainly doesn't mean performance differences can be reduced to one neuroscience explanation. But Barrett's predictive framework gives us a useful way to understand why familiarity can change the cognitive landscape. The brain has more information about what to expect. There are fewer surprises to model. More processing can potentially be devoted to the task itself.

This is one reason I am skeptical when people are told that they simply need to "be more confident." Confidence may not be the starting point.

Familiarity can be.

And this changes how we think about stress

When you're chronically stressed, your brain isn't merely experiencing an unpleasant emotion.

It is operating within a demanding regulatory environment.

The brain is continuously predicting and regulating the body's internal state while also responding to everything happening around you.

That is an enormous computational and metabolic job.

This doesn't mean that every experience of brain fog, exhaustion, anxiety, or poor concentration is caused by "your nervous system."

That would be another oversimplification.

But it does mean we should be cautious about interpreting cognitive difficulty as a character flaw.

Sometimes "I can't think clearly." is a much more useful observation than "I'm becoming incompetent."

Sometimes "This situation feels threatening."is more accurate than"Something is objectively wrong."

And sometimes"I need more practice in this environment."is more useful than"I need more confidence."

Your brain is trying to help you make sense of things

Perhaps the most interesting implication of Barrett's work is that your brain is not simply reacting to reality. It is continuously constructing a usable model of reality.

That model is shaped by your body. Your environment. Your memories. Your learned concepts.

Your previous experiences. Your expectations. And the information arriving in the present moment.

Your brain is constantly asking:

What is happening?

What does this mean?

What will probably happen next?

What does my body need?

What should I do?

And it doesn't answer those questions using one isolated brain region. It collaborates.

That means changing how you experience the world isn't necessarily about forcing yourself to think positive." Sometimes the more powerful intervention is changing the information the brain has vailable to make its predictions.

More experience.

More context.

More accurate feedback.

More opportunities to discover that the thing you predicted would happen… didn't.

More opportunities to discover that you can handle what happens when it does.

That is one reason practice can be so powerful.

Practice isn't simply about becoming better at a task.

It gives the brain a better model of the task.

And sometimes what we call confidence is simply the felt experience of having a brain that has enough information to say:

"I know something about what happens next."

The brain doesn't need you to control every part of it.

It needs information. It needs feedback. It needs resources.

And it needs opportunities to update its predictions. That is a very different model of change from simply telling yourself to try harder. And, in my experience, it is a much more compassionate one.

If you are interested in exploring how neuroscience, stress physiology, and practical tools can help you build resilience without burning yourself out Learn more about Pulse Steady or schedule a consultation.

For the people who hold everything together and need a place to fall apart.— Coaching with Casey Becker

Sources

Barrett, L. F., & Satpute, A. B. (2013). Large-scale brain networks in affective and social neuroscience: Towards an integrative functional architecture of the brain. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 23(3), 361–372.

Barrett, L. F., & Simmons, W. K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16, 419–429.

Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23.

Sennesh, E., Theriault, J. E., Brooks, D., van de Meent, J.-W., Barrett, L. F., & Quigley, K. S. (2022). Interoception as modeling, allostasis as control. Biological Psychology, 167, 108242.

Zhang, J., et al. (2025). Cortical and subcortical mapping of the human allostatic–interoceptive system using 7 Tesla fMRI. Nature Neuroscience, 28, 2380–2391.

Barrett, L. F., & Miller, E. K. (2026). Categorization is 'baked' into the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 27, 435–456.

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Barrett, L. F. (2020). Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.