Construction of experience: There's something to pay attention to here
Lisa Feldman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made brought to my attention the science of construction of human experience. Namely, that emotions, concepts, and every other sensation/perception--and even movements--are actively constructed by the brain of the person experiencing them. I have two major dogs in this fight: The desire to understand my own human experience, and the desire to understand why arm pain patterns are frequently so confusing. Per Dr. Barrett: "Your brain uses past experience to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest." In other words, we are not simply passive recipients of sensory input from the world or even from our bodies. The nature of survival is such that our brains need to predict what might be coming next, based on past experience and the concepts we have developed....