Marshall Sylver quoted, “When you control your thoughts and emotions, you control everything.”
You all will agree to the fact that it is easier said than done. Emotions are something, which makes us feel helpless. It feels almost impossible to have control over our emotions. We all are at the mercy of our emotional circuits.
However, here is someone who stands against this notion. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a University distinguished professor at the Northeastern University says, “You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits. You have more control over your emotions than you think you do.”
Lisa said those words while standing on a red circular stage to a rapt audience in San Fransisco. The message delivered by Barrett intrigued the audience and left them in high spirits. The audience appreciated her presentation by giving a big round of applause to her. Also, an additional 3.3 million people tuned in online to hear her words of wisdom. This made her video to make up into the 25 most popular TED talks of 2018.
“I was certainly hopeful that the talk would be popular but I was surprised that it did so well, and delighted that people found it so useful. I think people found it useful because it had solid, scientifically based advice for how to take more responsibility cultivating your own emotional life,” Barrett said.
The most exciting part of her talk was her acceptance of experiencing anxiety while talking on the stage which she said might have factored into the success of the video. Barrett has dedicated a quarter century to studying emotions as a part of her research in the Northeastern University. She has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analysed hundreds of physiology studies to understand how the brain controls emotions. Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is one such expression. She returned to his stone-faced stare repeatedly throughout her talk. She illustrated that jurors are incapable of detecting remorse or any other emotion. According to her, emotions are not universally expressed or recognised, and also, the emotions we detect in other people comes from what is actually in our head. She concluded by stating that emotions are built not in-built.
This makes her TED talk, a must watch. I would like to suggest every one of you go through her TED talk and learn the art of controlling your emotions.
Priyanka Rawat
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