M

Member

Speaking in the House of Lords on 13 May 2025

Debate

Employment Rights Bill

Contribution

A number of neuroscientists and psychologists over the last 20 years, mostly the last five, have identified what is happening and why we have this massive increase in people being sick long term. Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, a leading neuroscientist, has shown that our brains do not just feel emotions; they construct them from context. She tells the most extraordinary story of a young teenage girl who lives in a tribe abroad. She is in a culture—I am not for a second advocating this, but it is such a striking story about how the brain works—where the men treat the women very badly, and the girls and women all think they are pests. That is how they deal with it. They go about their lives. The girl is getting good grades at school, she is sleeping all night and is doing fantastically well to succeed. She then watches a Netflix documentary which tells her about domestic abuse, a concept which, in this tribe, had never come to fruition. It may well have done so, but in the context of the documentary, domestic abuse was shown to cause certain things. Guess what? Her exam grades dropped; she stopped sleeping and she became very ill. Her brain suddenly predicted from a different context that she should be feeling differently to how she was feeling before. That is what happens when we set the cultural context.

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