Conceptualize This

In a previous post on the predictive brain, we started to look at the work of neuroscientist and psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the ways she has been shifting our understanding of the brain and emotions.

As we looked at in the previous post, one of the ideas Dr. Barrett writes about is how our brain is not reactive to the world, but is actually predictive. Our brain uses our past experience to anticipate the world, constructing our experience predictively and then using incoming information from our body and senses to correct its predictions.

Another mind-blowing idea from Dr. Barrett’s writing, and one that is extremely relevant to me as a therapist, is the way that our brain uses concepts in its predictions.

Concepts

What is a concept? A concept is a mental representation of a category. In other words, it’s the way we mentally slice up the pie of experience.

Dr. Barrett uses a very concrete example to help us understand the role of concepts in how our brain perceives the world: a rainbow.

Imagine a rainbow. What comes to mind? Being an American, I think of the stripes of color I learned to remember in school: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple.

Take a look at an actual rainbow. Do you see stripes of color? Consider the fact that a rainbow has no actual stripes. It’s just a continuous band of light, a spectrum of light waves that we are capable of seeing.

How we divide up this uninterrupted, borderless continuum into distinct, separate colors is a matter of the concepts of color that we have learned. Different cultures divide up the rainbow into different colors. And the colors you perceive in a rainbow depend on what culture you come from, and what color concepts that culture has given names to.

When your brain has a concept to work with, it overlooks differences between instances within the same category, and exaggerates differences between instances in different categories. So for example, it overlooks differences in color between various objects that have all been categorized under the concept “red”, but exaggerates the differences in color between an object categorized as “red” and one categorized as “orange”.

What all of this tells us is that our very perception of the world is not only predictive based on past experience, but predictive based on our culturally learned concepts. The concepts we learn from our culture shape how we literally perceive reality.

Words and Concepts

Dr. Barrett explains that we initially start to learn concepts as infants when our brain starts to notice patterns in our sensory experience. Certain sensory experiences tend to happen together, or tend to happen in certain sequences, and our brain learns to use these patterns in its predictions.

Eventually, however, we start to learn language. We learn to apply words to some of the patterns we have been recognizing in our senses. So that cluster of experiences “warmth-held-nutrition-voice-face” is eventually labeled with the word “mom”.

Words are a nice short-hand for experiences, and so useful for our brain in its categorizing of predictions, but it also allows for an additional superpower. Words allow our brain to create concepts that have nothing to do with patterns in sensory experience.

For example, think of the concept “transportation”. Think of all the things that could go in this category: cars, boats, trains, skateboards, paddleboards, motorcycles, etc. These things do not have anything in common as far as sensory experience goes. What they have in common is a goal, in this case getting from one place to another quickly and easily.

A word invites our brain to recognize the common goal that everything under that word shares. This is what Dr. Barrett refers to as a “goal-based concept”.

An example Dr. Barrett uses to illustrate this is a dandelion. What concept does our brain use to predict what this dandelion thing is and what to do about it? Do we categorize it as “flower” and use it for decoration? Do we categorize it as “weed” and destroy it? Do we categorize it as “food” and put it on a salad? Do we categorize it as “medicine” and eat it for our health?

It all depends. Our brain compares the situation to past experience, determines the best fit, and constructs a prediction based on what goal in this situation will be best for our body, using a learned goal-based concept in its prediction. 

Goal-Based Concepts in Therapy

So, let’s get out of the weeds for a minute (pun-intended), and consider what all this means for psychotherapy.

Life in and of itself is prior to our concepts. A dandelion is not in itself a flower, a weed, food, or medicine. We bring that to it. We categorize it that way according to our goals, and the concepts we have learned. 

In a way, the more concepts the better. If the only way your brain has learned to categorize a dandelion is with the concept “weed”, you may be missing out on so many uses for this plant by which your body can care for itself.

Similarly, I see part of my job as a therapist as helping my clients recognize the concepts they have learned from past experience, and how these concepts shape the predictions they are making in the world, and so the way they construct and navigate their world.

If the only way we have learned to categorize a stranger is with the concept “threat”, we may be missing out on many more options, ways that we can navigate the world and meet our needs.

If we learn that we can categorize a stranger several different ways depending on context, such as “potential friend”, “neighbor”, “fellow human”, “helper”, “source of information”, or “threat”, we have a lot more options.

So far, then, we have learned from Dr. Barrett that our brain predicts rather than reacts, and that our brain’s predictions are shaped by the concepts we have learned - the ways we have learned to use words to organize our world according to our goals, and so navigate our world.

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