Introduction
Hello, and welcome back to the Negotiating Reality Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Hekler.
We've been on a three-part journey exploring the fundamental assumptions we make about the nature of reality—what philosophers call metaphysics. Today, we reach one that may initially feel disorienting, but as you grow into it, I hope you'll find it truly liberating and inspiring for navigating our current moment (and the need for it was perfectly set up in my discussion with colleagues, Mai Nguyen and Keith Pezzoli, check it out here).
In Episode 1, we explored the challenges of our present moment and discovered that different cultures undergo great transitions when one way of organizing breaks down and another emerges—and that during transitions, we must learn to be responsible, truly learning from our ancestors while attuning to where we are being drawn into becoming. I then asked my mentor, colleague, and friend, Dr. Donna Spruijt-Metz to do a bit a peer review on this where we explored the sort of process we’d need to navigate this moment wisdom-seeking and authentic cross-cultural dialogue. Donna aligned wit the general framing of this being a moment of transformation when the spiritual, civic, and natural infrastructure and processes that are tethering us to reality are breaking down. A large part of this involve how to navigate both honoring the relationships and communities one have while also looking to connect, learn, and grow into healthy relationships with others, without falling into the trap of appropriation.
In Episode 2, "Life Breathes," we discovered how we're embedded in a living, exchanging universe where cosmic, geologic, and biological processes breathe together across vast scales of spacetime. I then discussed this episode, first with a theologian and pastor, Dr. Christopher Carter and then with a geoscientist, Dr. Marcia Bjornerud.
In the discussion with Christopher, he emphasized that creation stories historically emerge during times of captivity and displacement—like the Genesis accounts written during Babylonian exile—to help communities make sense of their identity and provide direction for future generations. Carter identified how the destructive Babylonian myth of redemptive violence (where the male deity Marduk creates the world by violently dismembering the female deity Tiamat) has been incorporated into Western thinking, creating a "might makes right" logic that justifies conquest, capitalism, and ecological destruction through the false belief that violence can be salvific. With this in mind, his assessment of my offered "Life Breathes Together" creation story represents a necessary corrective to these harmful narratives, offering an alternative grounded in relationship and interconnectedness rather than dominance, which becomes especially critical as communities recognize that their current guiding stories have become disconnected from sacred truths and are leading toward collective harm.
In the discussion with Marcia, she provided generous scientific validation for the "Life Breathes" creation story, finding it both scientifically accurate and humanly compelling, while helping refine the breathing metaphor to acknowledge that lung-and-gill breathing represents only recent evolutionary development—that said, the exchange of matter and energy, with breathing being one type and, given we do it, a good metaphor to help us to feel this exchange, is a viable way of understanding that which could be seen has having animacy and, thus, a sort of life on its own terms. She contextualized this work within geology's remarkable intellectual achievement of mapping Earth's 4+ billion year history through diverse collaborative minds, and explained how the field has quietly evolved from its extractive origins toward embracing concepts that might once have seemed "new agey"—including the recognition that most geoscientists, if pressed, would acknowledge that Earth is alive in some meaningful sense on its own terms, not ours. The conversation explored the tension between Newtonian thinking (seeking timeless universal laws) and Darwinian thinking (embracing time and evolutionary complexity), with Bjornerud arguing that our culture's dysfunctional relationship with time and tendency toward "adolescent pugilistic" relationships with nature requires us to become "law-abiding biogeochemical citizens" who work within planetary rhythms rather than against them.
In Episode 3, "Islands Sculpt," we explored how every context shapes us while we shape it back—from the microbes in our gut to the cities we build, each relationship carving new possibilities.
In my conversation with urban planning colleagues Drs. Mai Nguyen and Keith Pezzoli from UC San Diego's Design Lab, we examined how the "Islands Sculpt" framework applies to the built environment—and discovered both its power and its limitations. Mai revealed the uncomfortable truth that American cities were designed from inception to segregate and exclude, with zoning laws originally created not just for health and safety but explicitly to concentrate wealth and power in white neighborhoods. Keith traced four decades of planning theory evolution, from rational comprehensive approaches through advocacy and feminist planning to today's bioregional frameworks that seek to bridge urban-rural divides. Their peer review highlighted a critical gap: while the ecological insights of islands sculpting each other capture important truths about how places shape people and vice versa, the framework remained largely apolitical in a field where, as Mai emphasized, "planning is inherently political." Every decision about infrastructure, housing, and land use emerges from networks of human relationships, irrational constituencies, and power dynamics that don't follow ecological patterns. Keith suggested the metaphor of "sculpting" itself might be limiting, evoking a chiseling away rather than the connective, relationship-building work actually needed. Both stressed that authentic community engagement requires moving from planning for people to planning with them—a shift that demands we grapple not just with how contexts shape us, but with who gets to construct stories and theories of change that determine which contexts are even possible.
All of this was critical set up for today’s episode.
Today, in "Beings Adapt," we dive into perhaps the most humbling and liberating insight of all: We don't perceive reality as it is. We construct it together. And that construction is both our greatest superpower and our most delicate responsibility.
This episode draws extensively from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's revolutionary work. Dr. Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist, Professor at Northeastern University, and one of the most highly cited scientists in the world. Her research fundamentally shifts our understanding of human nature toward something far more dynamic and relational than our cultural inheritance might suggest.
This episode is based on Barrett’s work, including my understanding of her work based on reading the original scientific papers but, even more so, the way she frames her work in her popular press books, Seven and a Half Lessons About your Brain and How Emotions are Made.
The aphorism guiding today's exploration: "Beings Adapt."
Ready to have your reality gently transformed? Let's begin.
Part 1: The Humbling Truth About Your Brain
Let me start with a story that will become our touchstone today—one Dr. Barrett shares in Seven and a Half Lessons About Your Brain.
A Vietnam veteran was on patrol in the jungle when he saw a line of men in military fatigues carrying rifles, lurking around a corner. His heart raced, his body prepared for combat. He raised his weapon, finger on the trigger, ready to fire—when his comrade said, "Wait, those are just children."
In that instant, the guerilla fighters transformed into children walking in line, playing together.
Same visual input. Completely different reality.
You might think: "Obviously, he made a mistake. His brain corrected itself." But here's Barrett's revolutionary insight: There was no mistake. His brain was doing exactly what brains always do—constructing reality from incomplete information, guided by past experience and current context, all in service of keeping him alive.
Your Brain: A Magnificent Predictor in Service of Life
Barrett's and other neuroscientists’ decades of research reveal something that challenges our deepest assumptions: Your brain isn't primarily set up for thinking and reason. It's set up for body budgeting through prediction-guided action.
Your brain's primary job isn't to represent the world accurately—it's primary job seems to be to keep you alive by predicting what's going to happen next and preparing your body to respond. It's running a constant predictive simulation of reality, asking: Based on everything I've learned, what's most likely happening right now, and what should I do about it?
Think about our veteran again. His brain had cycled through countless experiences where certain visual patterns preceded life-threatening situations. When similar patterns appeared, his prediction system activated responses that had proven adaptive in previous cycles. This isn't just individual learning—it's the brain honoring accumulated wisdom of past experiences that stretch back across his life and culture.
This process is so fundamental that we are wired to act first and sense second. Your brain initiates actions before the sensory information needed to correct prediction errors arrives. By the time our veteran "saw" the guerrilla fighter, his nervous system had already begun preparing for combat.
This isn't poor design. It's both a survival feature and an elegant solution to massive metabolic constraints. In a world where the difference between predator and prey can be milliseconds, the brain that hesitates doesn't make it to the next cycle. And, in the bodies we have, if we were constantly sensing, and, from that sensory information fully constructing a complete pictures of reality (like a video recording capturing every last bit of details), and then responding to this full picture of reality, then our brains would require more energy than, metabolically speaking, is possible in the bodies we have.
The Dark Skull Challenge
Barrett's vivid way of understanding the challenge is this: Your brain is trapped in a dark skull, trying to figure out what's happening in the world based on electrical signals. It never directly experiences light, sound, touch, or smell—only patterns of electrical activity from your sensory and other organs. From this limited information, it must construct your entire experienced reality.
So how does your brain transform this barrage of meaningless electrical patterns into meaningful experience? Through prediction and concept-making.
Concepts: Your Reality Construction Toolkit
Barrett reveals that without concepts, you are experientially blind. Concepts aren't just mental categories—they're the tools your brain uses to transform meaningless sensory input into coherent, actionable experience.
When our veteran's brain encountered those visual patterns, it didn't passively register "figures in the distance." It actively constructed his experience based on which concept won the prediction competition. Enemy soldiers? Playing children? The concept that got selected shaped not just what he "saw" but how his entire body-mind system prepared to respond.
This process honors cycles of learning that span far beyond individual experience. The concepts available to our veteran came from his military training, his cultural background, his personal history—accumulated wisdom from countless cycles of human learning about survival, threat recognition, and appropriate response.
But concepts aren't fixed. They can evolve and transform as we move through new cycles of experience. The moment his comrade offered a different concept—"children"—new neural patterns activated, and his brain constructed an entirely different reality from the same sensory input.
Where do these concepts come from? Our cultural inheritance. The emotions you can feel, the distinctions you can make, even the colors you can perceive—all depend on the concepts your culture has developed through its own cycles of collective learning.
Consider the Dutch emotion concept "gezellig"—a particular kind of warm, cozy comfort experienced with friends that has no direct English translation. Dutch speakers don't just have a word for this feeling; they can literally experience something that English speakers might not fully notice because our culture's learning cycles haven't crystallized this concept in the same way.
The Architecture of Experience
Barrett emphasizes that we are architects of our own experience—not because we control what happens to us, but because we participate actively in constructing what we experience from what happens to us.
Our veteran couldn't control the visual input he received, but his brain's conceptual toolkit shaped how that input became experience. When new concepts became available through his comrade's words, new experiences became possible from the same situation.
This leads to an important point. Responsibility here doesn't mean fault for past experiences. We inherit our initial conceptual toolkits through cultural cycles we didn't choose. But responsibility does mean recognizing that we are the only ones who can influence what we do next—how we might expand our concepts, refineour predictions, and participate more consciously in the ongoing cycles of experience construction, aligned towards our collective intentions.
Think about how this applies to our current challenges described in episode 1. If we're constructing reality based on predictions drawn from past cycles, but our current challenges are unprecedented, we might be trying to navigate 21st-century problems with prediction software developed during earlier cultural cycles. Our concepts may need conscious evolution to meet present realities.
This new view doesn’t just have implications for how you understand yourself and your experience of reality, it also has implications for how we create reality together.
Part 2: The Magic and Responsibility of Social Reality Creation
If individual reality construction seems remarkable, human social reality creation is truly amazing. Barrett identifies what she calls the "5 C's" that make human social reality possible: Creativity, Communication, Copying, Collaboration, and Compression.
From Individual to Collective Construction
Our veteran's experience wasn't purely individual. The concepts that shaped his perception—"enemy," "threat," "children," "safety"—were social realities created through cycles of collective human agreement. These concepts exist because communities of people, across generations of cultural evolution, developed shared understandings about what different patterns mean and how to respond to them.
"Enemy" isn't just a personal concept—it's a socially constructed category that emerges from collective agreements about group identity, territorial boundaries, and appropriate defensive responses. These agreements develop through cultural cycles of conflict, cooperation, learning, and adaptation.
Let's examine money, as another example, to understand how social realities work. A twenty-dollar bill is just paper and ink—that's its physical reality. You could analyze its chemical composition or burn it for warmth. These properties exist regardless of human thoughts.
But money's real power comes from social reality. When communities collectively agree that this piece of paper represents $20 of value, that paper transforms into something that can buy lunch. The paper didn't change physically, but shared belief gave it an entirely new function.
Social realities emerge when groups assign new meanings to things through collective intentionality. They exist only because people communicate, participate, and maintain agreement. But notice something deeper: Money as a social reality enables cycles of exchange that would be impossible through physical reality alone.
Barrett's 5 C's: Building Social Reality
These 5 C's work together to create and maintain social realities like money:
Creativity is our capacity to imagine new functions for existing things. When humans first looked at metal or paper and imagined it could represent value beyond its physical properties, they used creativity to invent function independent of form.
Communication allows sharing these invented meanings. For social reality to exist, multiple people must understand and agree to new functions.
Copying enables invented functions to spread. When people observe others treating paper money as valuable and begin doing the same, they're copying social behavior that maintains this reality.
Collaboration transforms individual acceptance into collective reality. Money works only because millions of people collaborate in treating it as valuable.
Compression allows us to recognize shared functions despite physical differences. You understand that paper bills, credit cards, digital transfers, and cryptocurrency can all serve the same function—representing value—despite being completely different physically.
Other species demonstrate some capacity for most, if not all of these C's, but humans may be unique in our ability to use all five together, particularly in our sophisticated compression abilities that create abstract functional linkages spanning physical and social domains.
An interesting example of this is actually the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Here’s the first Amendment, with each section labeled with some facet of the 5 C’s:
“Congress shall make no law (Compression) respecting an establishment of religion (Creativity and Compression), or prohibiting the free exercise thereof (Copying & Collaboration); or abridging the freedom of speech (Communication), or of the press (Communication and Compression); or the right of the people peaceably to assemble (Communication, Copying, & Collaboration), and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances (Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, & Compression).”
How Social Realities Build Through Cycles
Social realities don't exist in isolation—they build upon each other through ongoing evolutionary cycles guided by the 5 C's.
Let me trace this using group identity concepts:
Family Identity: Most cultures develop concepts distinguishing family from non-family. This proves valuable for early development, helping people understand who is committed to supporting their safety and belonging.
Community Identity: From family orientation, broader categories emerge distinguishing "our community" from others. This enables collections of families to coordinate as larger groups.
Ethnic Identity: When communities with different languages and customs encounter each other, higher-order concepts like "ethnic groups" can form.
National Identity: When ethnic groups commit to sharing geographic regions and governance structures, yet another layer emerges—"nations." This modern concept enables millions of strangers to coordinate under shared identity.
Each layer creates new subcategories. The nation concept enables distinctions like "citizens," "foreigners," "legal immigrants," "undocumented migrants." These categories, maintained through cycles of communication, copying, and collaboration, can profoundly impact lives by determining who has rights to influence policies and who receives different social treatments.
Emotional Concepts as Cultural Cycles
Here's where Barrett's work becomes truly revolutionary, and is discussed in her book, How Emotions are Made: The emotions you can feel aren't hardwired—they're cultural concepts learned through social interaction, particularly through language. This is central to Barrett's Theory of Constructed Emotions.
As a grad student, Barrett conducted multiple studies trying to find replicate prior work that treated anxiety and depression and “fingerprints in the brain” that people should be able to distinguish because conventional scientific wisdom said she should be able to find them. The problem was that her research wasn't producing expected findings. Through deeper investigations, she began debunking the seeming universality of emotions (see the full length text only or read her books for the details).
Here's one example: traditional research gave people choices to identify facial expressions, and when those choices were provided, people across cultures could identify them. But when Barrett showed those same pictures without offering options—just asking an open-ended question—this universality disappeared.
Her systematic line of work, which is a master class of being a robust scientist in my view, led Barrett to construct the Theory of Constructed Emotions. The bottom line: Barrett systematically disproved the classical theory that emotions are universal "fingerprints in the brain."
The emotions your culture provides literally shape what you can experience through cycles of learning and reinforcement, giving you cultural inheritance that provides emotional concepts as starting points for body budgeting in your ecological and social contexts. If your culture has rich vocabulary for different types of love, you can feel distinctions invisible to someone whose language has only one word for love.
Barrett offers the notion of emotional granularity—precision in distinguishing different emotional experiences - as a scientifically observable phenomenon that, based on the theory of constructed emotions, should be valuable for helping people to adapt more effectively to their contexts. And, lo and behold, that is what she and others have found. People with higher emotional granularity tend to be more resilient, have better relationships, and make better decisions. Why? More precise concepts provide more response options for understanding and adapting to experience.
Our veteran's emotional experience was shaped by conceptual tools his culture provided through military training, combat preparation, and post-service support (or lack thereof). The concepts available to him for categorizing his internal states—hypervigilance, combat stress, survival mode—influenced what experiences were possible and what responses seemed available.
When Social Reality Becomes Destructive
The power of social reality creation can become dangerous when we construct concepts misaligned with the contexts we are in, healthy adaptation, and mutual flourishing.
Consider race. There's no biological basis for racial categories humans have created. Based on the systematic work of Dr. Dorothy Roberts, race was socially and politically constructed through specific historical cycles of colonization, slavery, and economic exploitation. But because people collectively agreed these categories were real, they became real in their effects, shaping laws, opportunities, wealth distribution, and health outcomes across generations. A point that my colleague Mai brought up in our discussions about the history of urban planning.
This points toward something both humbling and hopeful: If we created these realities through cycles of collective agreement, we can create different ones through conscious cycles of cultural evolution.
Part 3: Understanding Cultural Adaptation—Healthy and Otherwise
We've seen that we construct reality together through prediction and social agreement. The crucial question becomes: Are we constructing wisely? Are our cultural cycles supporting healthy adaptation?
This brings us to a foundational issue that neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett addresses—and that I want to extend: the widespread belief that reason represents the apex of human evolution. This notion is not only unsupported by evidence, but actively undermines our capacity for healthy cultural evolution.
The Evidence Against the Triune Brain Myth
For decades, we've been told we have three brains in conflict: the "reptilian brain" (survival), "mammalian brain" (emotion), and "human brain" (reason). This "triune brain" hypothesis suggests that reason and emotion are at war, with our "higher" rational brain needing to control our "lower" emotional impulses.
Barrett's and others research demolishes this myth. When we examine vertebrate genetics, all brains use the same basic instructions for building the same core structures. Physical differences come from variations in development timing, not fundamentally different evolutionary components. Instead of separate warring systems, the brain operates through "degeneracy"—multiple neural pathways producing the same outcomes, via individual neurons capable of performing multiple functions.
This means rational and emotional concepts emerge from the same integrated neural networks. Our veteran's rapid threat assessment wasn't "emotion overriding reason"—it was his whole system integrating body signals, memory patterns, social training, and environmental cues into a unified adaptive response.
The Deeper Cultural Pattern
The "reason over emotion" myth reflects a much larger pattern in Western culture: material essentialism—the belief that things have fixed, unchanging essences with hierarchical value.
Let me acknowledge what this cultural inheritance gave us: Essentialist thinking drove our ancestors toward scientific reductionism, enabling us to perceive ever-smaller aspects of reality—from atoms to quantum mechanics, and this enabled a range of technologies, from machines, to smartphones, to today's generative AI. This quest produced remarkably predictive theories and transformative technologies.
But essentialism also created a maladaptive teleological pattern—a deep story about reality that shapes our sense of purpose and meaning. Specifically: humans + rationality + technology = the objective of life. We've been taught to see ourselves as evolution's peak achievement, the ultimate goal toward which everything builds.
This story provided cosmic significance for our ancestors, much like a child needs to feel they matter to their parents. But everything we've explored—physics, geology, ecology, neuroscience—reveals this story is not true.
We are not the apex of evolution. This point has been reinforced throughout all prior episodes but to try and unpack why this is not true, consider this. In Dr. Rob Dunn's recent book, The Call of the Honeyguide, he highlights an interesting pattern that betrays essentialist thinking in how we’ve crafted narratives such as the one Harrari offered in Sapiens and later Homo Deus. In brief, iid you construct a story by going backward from the present to discover its origins, you can create a straight linear story structure, like a classic hero’s journey. BUT, if you pick any point in history - the Big Bang, the formation of Earth, the first homo species - and try and tell a story describing time moving forward, that straight line disappears and is replaced with branches. The story structure becomes like branches on an expanding and contracting river, each with countless forms exploring countless ways of being, becoming, and doing. When the full picture of those branches can be seen, the notion that we are the apex of anything, and the justification for telling a linear story that puts us as an apex, disappears.
Image generated by Google Gemini.
Our Cultural Reality Bubble
If a more accurate story structure is, metaphorically speaking, like an ever shifting expanding and contracting network of branches of flowing water, why is a linear, beginning, middle, and end, structure so common in our culture? To understand how we got here, let's examine key narratives that created Western culture's "social reality bubble":
Foundational Stories
* Genesis Creation: Positioned humans as having "dominion" over Earth, suggesting we rule rather than participate
* Plato's Allegory of the Cave: Elevated abstract thinking as humanity's highest achievement—the further from embodied reality, the closer to truth
* Anthropomorphizing Time: Western culture has strong individualistic orientation which, temporally speaking, sets us up towards assuming the way we experience time, from birth through life and ending in death, is true for everything else. With this, a linear story structure may be a subtle form of anthropomorphism deeply baked into Western culture. Critically, this narrative structure is not universal across cultures; there are many examples of cultures that orient around other ways of relating to time, particularly relating to time as, first and foremost, cyclical.
Modern Reinforcements
* The Triune Brain hypothesis: Suggested we evolved by building reason atop "primitive" emotions (now thoroughly debunked)
* Survival of the Fittest: Spencer's phrase (not Darwin's) that reduced evolution to competitive struggle, ignoring cooperation and mutualism, which are increasingly seen as more central drivers of evolution. Critically, this is an important role in life for competition that cannot be denied. But that competition needs to occur within a broader structure of relationship and mutualism. For example, while individuals predators and prey are clearly competing against one another for survival, they are, simultaneously, reliant upon one another to exist. Or, in a human context, competition drives us to the more true in science, the more beautiful in art, and the more good in life, when that competition is contained. Think, for example, of the fierce competition between scientists within the broader container of the scientific community, with its capacity to adjudicate truth claims via comparison of alternatives to the totality of relevant evidence. Or, more simply, think of the fierce competition between John Lennon and Paul McCartney that was situated in a relationship of care and concern oriented towards producing great music. Or even think of healthy competition between companies that compete on better serving their customers without falling into the trap of cutting corners. Competition only works in broader containers of mutualisms.
* Orientalism: Assumed Western culture's inherent superiority, justifying domination as enlightenment and “saving the heathens.”
Even brilliant critics who saw this pattern clearly ended up, in their later work, falling into the same trap. For example, Nietzsche exposed Christianity's life-denying tendencies aligned to giving up on life in service of an promised afterlife and detached God in The Gay Science, then proposed his own human superiority story—the Übermensch and "Will to Power"—in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The Technology Narrative
The Industrial Revolution created stories where progress means increasing power over nature through technology. This story has been re-imagined and retold in a range of forms by many thinkers such as Fukuyama, Hararri, and, in Silicon Valley today, Andreessen, Thiel, and others. This, despite evidence illustrating that, even at the time of the start of the Industrial Revolution, this dominance of technology was likely a fiction and how any narrative of technological progress requires one to focus in on only the part of life that is of interest. When one zooms out to see the unintended consequences of technological progress, these progress narratives come off as immature at best, without proper acknowledgement of externalities and other costs.
The common pattern: Humans (specifically Western humans guided by reason and capable of building technology) are evolution's greatest achievement because of our rational-technological capacities. Therefore, our purpose is developing superior rational-technological power.
The Deep Irony
Here's the profound contradiction: Elevating reason above everything else is proving deeply maladaptive.
When we use reason to examine our broader reality—drawing from indigenous wisdom, physics, ecology, neuroscience, and spiritual traditions rather than just Western science and technological cultural inheritance—we see how this teleology orients us toward competing for superiority while destroying the relationships that sustain us.
We're using our remarkable rational capacities to unravel the web of life we depend on. This is only "rational" within the narrow reality bubble that taught us we're separate from and superior to the rest of life. From the broader perspective we’ve cultivated across the podcast, it is deeply maladaptive.
A Different Pattern of Purpose
Does abandoning human exceptionalism mean life lacks purpose? Not at all, though I think it can be highly disorienting to a person raised in a Western/Occidental Culture. In my view, this is a plausible partial explanation for the rise in depression, social isolation, anxiety, or nihilism that so many people seem to be experiencing today. If we aren’t trying to be the top of the hierarchy, then what’s the point? We are struggling because we are confused with what our purpose is. There is an alternative purpose we can align to as individuals and humanity.
Across every way of knowing we've explored—indigenous wisdom, physics, ecology, neuroscience, psychology—a different pattern emerges: living in right relationship with all of life. We can measure success not by how much we dominate, but by the quality of our relationships within the web of life, contributing to what ecologists call "mutualism"—relationships where different forms of life support each other's flourishing.
What if this shift—from seeing ourselves as separate and superior to recognizing ourselves as participants in the larger community of life—is the fundamental reorientation humanity is navigating right now? What if this explains why so many civic, spiritual, and natural institutions feel like they're breaking down?
Understanding How We Actually Work
Instead of battling imaginary internal wars, Barrett shows us how we actually function. Your emotions aren't primitive impulses requiring control—they're sophisticated information systems helping you navigate reality.
Affect—your moment-to-moment sense of how you're doing—is, metaphorically speaking, your "body budget barometer." Pleasant or unpleasant, calm or agitated, these feelings provide crucial information about your internal state and relationship to your environment. Learning to read affect skillfully transforms it into a navigation system for healthy adaptation.
Barrett offers this critical insight: "Our nature requires nurture." We're not blank slates or fully determined beings. We're creatures whose nature is to be shaped by cultural and relational environments through ongoing cycles of interaction and co-regulation. Why? Because it makes us incredibly adaptive beings.
This reveals there isn't one human nature, but many. We can adapt to vastly different ecologies and develop different emotional repertoires based on the cultural cycles we participate in. This variability isn't a flaw—it's the feature enabling human communities to thrive across radically different circumstances.
When Adaptation Gets Stuck
This adaptability creates challenges too. If you develop where hypervigilance was necessary for survival, your brain might continue constructing threat even in safer contexts. In contrast, if you develop in places of perceived abundance where you never need to know how your actions hurt others, then it is easy to get addicted to patterns that, from a broader perspective hurt others and, eventually, potentially even yourself. Cycles that created adaptive responses in one environment can become maladaptive when circumstances change, including changes that happen because of something that only can be seen as maladaptive after enough time has passed and the harms can really be seen and felt.
The hopeful insight: The same neuroplasticity that can trap us in outdated cycles can free us through conscious participation in new learning cycles. Barrett emphasizes that "over time you can change your trajectory" through patient engagement with new experiences and concepts.
Our Cultural Moment
Barrett's insights illuminate our broader challenges. We face unprecedented problems—climate change, biodiversity loss, social fragmentation—using prediction systems evolved for different contexts.
Our cultural inheritance provided concepts, norms, and institutions crystallized around the teleology that technology equals progress. These served some previous generations well (and greatly harmed others in their wake). Right now though? we need to address threats most of us haven't experienced directly, coordinate with billions of strangers, and think across timescales that dwarf individual lives.
It's like navigating 21st-century realities using conceptual software from the 1940s.
The Invitation Forward
The question before us: Can we use our genuine gifts—including complex reasoning aligned to healthy adaptation of all life—not to transcend our embeddedness in life, but to participate more skillfully within it? Can we shift from "How can we control?" to "How can we belong?" From "How can we win?" to "How can we contribute to the flourishing of the whole?"
This isn't about abandoning reason, nor is about returning to an imagined past. It's about integrating our rational capacities within a larger understanding of what it means to be alive, related, and responsive to the world that made us and sustains us.
Barrett's work suggests we're not doomed to repeat old patterns. We have capacity for conscious cultural evolution—deliberately updating our predictive models and the social realities they create through intentional cycles of learning, experimentation, and refinement. But that capacity can only happen when we consciously choose to use it as individuals and collectives.
Part 4: Practices for Conscious Adaptation
If we're architects of experience living in a world requiring new forms of adaptation, how do we participate consciously in reality construction?
Barrett's work provides scientific foundation for practices that meditative and contemplative traditions have explored for centuries. I've found the most transformative approaches integrate what Barrett calls emotional granularity with what I term "Spirit's Way"—approaches to knowing that create space for questions like: What else might be true? How do you know? What concepts aren't serving well? What response options exist here?
Below is a brief summary of 6 practices, three focused on what you can do as an individual and three oriented toward what we can do as groups, to consciously facilitate cultural evolution of our social reality.
Individual Practices
Practice 1: Expanding Perceptual Range
Barrett's emotional granularity research confirms what contemplative traditions have long fostered: expanding capacity to distinguish subtle internal states enhances adaptive flexibility.
This practice involves both learning new emotional concepts and developing embodied sensitivity through meditation, yoga, or mindful movement. The goal isn't just cognitive sophistication but lived capacity to feel the full spectrum of signals available to you. Like learning music or sports, this requires sustained practice across cycles of attention and refinement. For insights on how to do this, I invite you read the end of Barrett’s book, How Emotions are Made.
Practice 2: Compassion For Self and Others
I use "bubble" as metaphor for what Barrett calls your affective niche—signals you perceive, concepts you use to interpret them, actions you believe available, and pressures you feel from context.
When you notice anxiety, depression, or reactivity, the practice isn't judging these as wrong but compassionately investigating: Given my history, current context, and inherited concepts, how is this response rational within the reality I'm experiencing?
This isn't about excusing harmful behavior but creating internal conditions for adaptive shifts. Conscious adaptation requires freedom from defensive prediction patterns, which compassion helps provide.
This bubble awareness work extends outward, learning to see others "on their own terms." When someone's actions trigger your prediction errors, the practice becomes: How can I understand their bubble in ways that honor both who they are and who I am?
If our veteran's comrade had simply said "You're wrong" rather than offering the alternative concept "children," the moment might have unfolded differently. Instead, he participated in expanding conceptual possibilities without attacking existing predictions.
For guidance on how to do this, I recommend Dr. Frank Roger’s excellent book, Practicing Compassion, and, in particular, his PULSE technique, which includes focus both on self-compassion and compassion for others to create, in my words, a shared bubble of reality.
Practice 3: Nurturing the Four Immeasurables
Buddhism's Four Immeasurables—compassion, loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—offer structured retraining of your affective niche, shifting default predictions from ego-centered to life-centered orientations.
These practices literally rewire the neural cycles that generate social reality construction, creating space for more inclusive and adaptive collective meanings to emerge.
For valuable practices on how to do this, I’d invite you to engage with Thupten Jinpa’s book, A Fearless Heart,and, in particular, look to the intention/dedication practices.
Collective Practices
Practice 4: Creating Trauma-Informed Containers
Barrett's research on mutual body budgeting reveals why social contexts profoundly influence individual adaptation. People's "difficult" behaviors often represent adaptive responses to unsafe conditions applied in contexts where those responses have become maladaptive.
Creating healing containers means establishing explicit agreements honoring everyone's needs for safety, belonging, and dignity while recognizing that people's prediction patterns were shaped by unique histories requiring different forms of support for healthy adaptation.
One option that I’ve appreciated is Staci Haines’ Self-Paced Course.
Practice 5: Compassionate Critique
This practice focuses on engaging differences without falling into essentialist thinking that labels perspectives as simply right or wrong.
Rather than debating who's correct, conversations become: For any given situation, when, where, and for whom might this perspective be beneficial, harmful, or irrelevant?
This honors Barrett's insight that all predictions are contextual while creating space for collective wisdom to emerge through cycles of respectful exploration.
For more details about this approach, which I co-created with my colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Eikey, please see these posts on the negotiating reality substack page: one about compassionate critique, another about the origins of compassionate critique, and a third about bubbles.
Practice 6: Re-constructing our Cultural Norms, Structures, and Institutions
This final practice is critical but, to be honest, I don't have a clear single reference to point you to. Instead, I want to offer a curated list of explorations organized around our epistemic structure: the Objective Way, Spirit's Way, and Nature's Way.
Objective Way
These efforts help diagnose the issues and are part of the solution, much like this episode and season. Key works include:
David Graeber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" makes the case that cultural variability was historically the norm, not the exception. They make the case that humanity has recently become stuck when three forms of power aligned: violence, charisma, and bureaucracy.
There's also the work I reviewed in episode one—James Davison Hunter, Neil Howe, and Timothy Snyder—which I invite you to review for more details.
Daniel Schmachtenberger's Consilience Project demonstrates how our technological progress narratives are immature.
Finally, several trusted friends point me to James Ritchie-Dunham's recent book "Agreements," though I haven't engaged deeply with this work yet.
Nature's Way
We have insights from ecology via Rob Dunn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others as already mentioned, plus a wealth of wisdom from Indigenous peoples and scholars. This isn't surprising—Graeber and Wengrow made the case that Enlightenment shifts in Europe occurred partly through dialogue with Indigenous peoples from Turtle Island, offering Europeans a different vantage to shift away from feudalistic structures.
Critical Indigenous offerings include:
Robin Wall Kimmerer, already mentioned throughout this podcast.
Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez's "Restoring the Kinship Worldview" draws together Indigenous scholars, elders, and traditions, articulating the dominant Western worldview while offering a Kinship Worldview alternative with cultural shift suggestions.
Tyson Yunkaporta'sRight Story, Wrong Story and Sand Talk provide strategies for decentering human exceptionalism narratives and offer Aboriginal wisdom.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira'sHospicing Modernity challenges us to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth. She's created a chatbot trained on this tradition for dialogue.
Spirit's Way
I'll focus on efforts I have personal relationships with—not because they're the only way, but because I have intimacy with their value and alignment to these ideas.
John Kesler'sIntegral Polarity Practice Institute,which is prototyping a course on culturing mature leadership for collective flourishing next year, which I plan to take.
My colleague Kabir Kadre leads Open Field Awakening, which is working towards creating a Wisdom Cohort to help humanity navigate this moment.
My friend Richard Flyer's lifelong work on Symbiotic Culture, described in his recent book, pursues living guided by divine and transcendent love—particularly valuable for Christians.
Moving Forward
This area is ripe for continued exploration, connection, synthesis, and curation—particularly inviting these different ways of knowing to commune and strengthen one another. If you have other resources or ideas, I'd love to hear them! I'll definitely return to this in continued discussions this season and future seasons of Negotiating Reality.
Integration: From Individual to Collective Cycles
These practices align with Barrett's research on brain function while drawing from contemplative traditions that have functioned as "laboratories" for consciousness development across centuries from prior traditions including, from the above, Buddhist, Christian, and Indigenous practices.
The key insight: Individual and collective adaptation aren't separate processes but different aspects of the same dynamic flow. As you develop greater internal emotional granularity, you contribute to collective capacity for nuanced social reality construction. As you participate in creating trauma-informed collective containers, you provide contexts that support individual healing and growth.
And with this,"Beings Adapt" completes our three-part metaphysical framework:
"Life Breathes" established our foundation in a living, exchanging universe where cosmic and geological processes create conditions for biological emergence.
"Islands Sculpt" revealed our embeddedness in webs of relationship where every context shapes us while we shape it back.
"Beings Adapt" shows our unique capacity to participate consciously in ongoing reality construction while attuning to life cycles operating at every scale.
Together, these three aphorisms, coupled with the suggested practices, offer an alternative to essentialist and Newtonian thinking. Instead, we discover a process-based worldview where life continuously breathes, islands continuously sculpt, and beings continuously adapt—all within larger cycles that honor both individual expression and collective flourishing.
Recap
TL;DR: We don't perceive reality as it is—we construct it together through prediction and social agreement. This capacity is both our greatest evolutionary advantage and our most significant responsibility. In this moment, we are being called to shift our individual and collective social reality bubbles from ones that have been oriented towards human superiority towards, instead, living in right relationship with each other and all of life.
Part 1: How Your Brain Actually Works
The Vietnam Veteran Example: Same visual input, completely different constructed reality—demonstrating that brains work exactly as it is set up to do through prediction.
Key Discoveries:
* Your brain is set up for body budgeting through prediction, not accurate representation
* Brains act first and sense second to ensure survival while solving for massive metabolic constraints
* Concepts are reality construction tools—without them, you're experientially blind
* Cultural inheritance provides the conceptual toolkit that shapes possible experiences
* Response-ability: We can't control what we inherit, but we can influence what we do next
Part 2: Creating Social Reality Together
Barrett's 5 C's: Creativity, Communication, Copying, Collaboration, and Compression enable human social reality construction.
How Social Realities Build: From family → community → ethnic → national identity, each layer creates new subcategories that profoundly impact lives.
Emotional Concepts: Emotions aren't hardwired—they're cultural concepts learned through language. Higher emotional granularity leads to better adaptation.
The Danger: Social realities can become destructive when misaligned with mutual flourishing, but this means we can consciously create different ones.
Part 3: Understanding Adaptation
Dismantling the Rational-Emotional War: Barrett's research shows rationality and emotion operate through the same neural networks. The "triune brain" theory is scientifically debunked.
The Cultural Pattern: The rational-emotional war is part of a broader teleological orientation in Western culture that elevates human reason and technology as evolution's apex. This appears rational within Modern cultural reality but reveals itself as maladaptive when viewed from integrated perspectives offered across this season of Negotiating Reality that drew from a range of disciplines and perspectives.
How We Actually Function: Emotions are sophisticated information systems. Our "nature requires nurture"—we're shaped through ongoing cultural interaction cycles.
The Path Forward: Replace the teleology of human dominance with living in right relationship with all life and the consciously start to recreate our social reality bubble to make it easier for us as individuals and collectives to live in right relationship with each other and all of life.
Part 4: Practices for Conscious Adaptation
Individual: Expanding perceptual range, compassion for self and others, Four Immeasurables
Collective: Trauma-informed containers, compassionate critique, re-imagining our institutions, structures, and norms
Connecting the Three Episodes
* "Life Breathes": We're embedded in a living, exchanging universe
* "Islands Sculpt": We're always in relationship, shaping and being shaped
* "Beings Adapt": We consciously participate in ongoing reality construction
Together: A process-based worldview where life continuously breathes, islands continuously sculpt, and beings continuously adapt within larger cycles of emergence and renewal aligned to living in right relationship.
The Larger Invitation
What we've explored today is my contribution towards our collective responsibility of evolving humanity towards beings that live in right relationship with all of life. Healthy adaptation requires attunement not just to individual and cultural cycles, but to the full spectrum of life cycles we're embedded within.
Humanity exists within cycles of individual development, social institutions, ecological communities, geological processes, and stellar evolution. Our current cultural moment represents a transition between cycles—what Kimmerer and the 7th Fire prophecy called the time of choosing between the green grass and the scorched earth.
This doesn't require abandoning what's valuable from previous cycles. It's about learning what to nurture and what to compost to enable us to grow, together, into new cultural options aligned with living in right relationship with all of life.
The practices we've explored are tools for this larger work of conscious cultural evolution. They help us develop the response-ability needed to navigate transitions between cycles with wisdom rather than reactivity, creativity rather than rigidity, love rather than fear.
Thank you for joining me on this journey. Adapt consciously. The cycles of life we are reliant upon depend on our healthy participation together.
- Kabir Kadre provided critical review and feedback on earlier versions of this episode.
