Here’s why Elizabeth Koch, the daughter of a GOP megadonor, chose science over politics

Elizabeth Koch is obsessed with the self—not just hers, but yours and mine, too.

She’s the founder of a neuroscience nonprofit called the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, which aims “to understand the nature of consciousness and its place in nature.” There, researchers are working on figuring out the physical processes underlying the mental experience of existence. They’re trying to uncover the mechanics of mind and matter, asking how the two work together to produce a sense of self.

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To change, Koch had to train herself to care again, to pay attention to all that had been causing her pain and that she’d been trying to ignore. She had to learn how to rewire her brain so that it would predict differently and generate healthy emotions. In the process, she became aware of the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychology professor at Northeastern University who received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for her work on emotions and the brain.

In a 2017 Ted Talk with more than 2.5 million views, Feldman Barrett explained her conclusions after 25 years of scientific research: “[Emotions] are guesses that your brain constructs in the moment where billions of brain cells are working together, and you have more control over those guesses than you might imagine that you do.”

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