I’ve been reading Damasio “backwards”. One of the first books I read three years ago to try to understand the neuroscientific view of consciousness was Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness published in 1999. That gave me a solid grounding in Damasio’s view of embodied consciousness, which has become a foundation of my thinking. Later, I came across Damasio’s paper on the somatic marker hypothesis, which powerfully rejects the idea that abstract thinking can take place without a direct connection to the body’s bio-regulatory processes.

With this context, when I finally read Descartes’ Error, (probably Damasio’s most cited book), it had some of the characteristics of a quaint, historical document, making the case for embodied cognition as though it were a radical new idea: “Surprising as it may sound, the mind exists in and for an integrated organism.” I guess that shows the enormous impact Damasio himself (and others such as Edelman, LeDoux, etc.) have had in changing perceptions about consciousness in a mere fifteen years. Thanks to these ground-breaking neuroscientists, “we’ve come a long way, baby.”

I can only agree with the array of distinguished names that cite Descartes’ Error as a key book for understanding human consciousness. Through Damasio, Phineas Gage has become a household name (in certain households!) – the emblematic tragic figure whose prefrontal cortex was severely damaged in 1848, and whose consequent experiences paved the way for the neurological understanding of the prefrontal importance in regulation of emotion, complex decision-making and general executive functioning.

I think there are two fundamental take-aways from Damasio’s classic: (1) the mind is embodied and without this foundation, no approaches to higher cognitive functions or theories of consciousness have much validity, and (2) the prefrontal cortex (pfc) is the crucial mediator between our “innate regulatory circuits” and our self-aware consciousness, with its attributes of reason, willpower, symbolization, abstraction, etc.

Damasio’s work is a significant resource for my research project. However, an initial impression of my thesis of “the tyranny of the pfc” might be that it’s incompatible with Damasio. After all, if the pfc is the key bridge between bodily regulation and self-awareness, how can there be a “tyranny” of the pfc? And what sense does my distinction of conceptual and animate consciousness make if conceptual consciousness is fundamentally connected with animate consciousness? In fact, though, my approach is not only consistent with Damasio, it relies squarely on the work of Damasio and others for its evidence.

My argument is not that an individual’s prefrontal cortex is, by itself, a “tyrant” of our consciousness, but that our Western cultural milieu, imposed on an infant’s perceptions before s/he has even learned to speak, shapes the individual brain in such a way that our sense of identity and values give an inappropriate priority to pfc-mediated attributes (such as planning, reason, abstraction, logic, etc.) at the expense of a balanced self-identity emphasizing such attributes as integrated mind/body experience or full awareness of the present moment.

Here’s a key passage from the book which relates to my notion of a split between animate and conceptual consciousness:

From an evolutionary perspective, the oldest decision-making device pertains to basic biological regulation; the next, to the personal and social realm; and the most recent, to a collection of abstract-symbolic operations under which we can find artistic and scientific reasoning, utilitarian-engineering reasoning, and the developments of language and mathematics. But although ages of evolution and dedicated neural systems may confer some independence to each of these reasoning/decision-making ‘modules,’ I suspect they are all interdependent.

What Damasio describes as the “collection of abstract-symbolic operations” is essentially the same as my idea of “conceptual consciousness.” As he pointedly emphasizes, they are “interdependent.” But Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes and the whole momentum of Western civilization have idealized the conceptual consciousness as “the soul,” as the proof of our very existence, and as the foundation for science and civilization. It’s only when we begin to re-balance our values to give equal import to our bodily existence that we can begin to move towards a ‘democracy of consciousness.’

So thanks, Antonio Damasio, for your ground-breaking classic. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in gaining a serious understanding of human consciousness. ( )

30 November 1999
I know Tony Damasio slightly from the NINDS Advisory Council; he is always well-dressed and coiffured. His argument in this popular work is that the ability of the brain to judge emotional states and motivations of other individuals is the work of the prefrontal cortex. The lack of this ability contributes to the problems that frontal lobe injured patients have in making decisions. He argues that the mechanisms of reasoning must include a reference to, or integration of, information in the brain on the body states that represent the emotional and physiological responses to various decisions. In this way the brain can establish a hierarchy of significance of actions before taking appropriate decisions. Damasio proposes that this integration of emotional body states and logical decision trees is done in the prefrontal cortex. The argument seems, often, self-evident, and his data are largely anecdotal, but this is a very interesting book. ( )

1 - Somatic-marker hypothesis posits that emotions/feelings are integral to reasoning, not an obstacle or impedence to it.

2 - Hints that the self, broadly understood, is predicated upon emotions/feelings as defined by Damasio

3 - Emotions defined as body-states (somatic states, e.g. heart rate, skin temperature) that broadly indicate danger or health to the organism

4 - Feelings are conscious monitoring of emotions; draw correlations between emotions and external circumstances

Does not cite Julian Jaynes but would be curious to read of the extent to which these very different theories are compatible or contradictory. ( )

Damasio's hypothesis is that the process of reason is deeply linked and influenced by our 'feeling' and by the processes ongoing in our body. ( )

This book poses a wonderful hypothesis, in opposition to the views espoused by purists of reason in ages past (Plato and Descartes among them): that not only are emotion and feelings quite inextricably interlaced with reason and rationality, they are also essential to reason's proper functioning.

Damasio introduces the reader to the issue at hand by providing case histories like that of Phineas Gage, the famous 19th century railroad worker whose personality underwent profound change on account of a horrific accident in which an iron rod was driven through his skull, resulting in the destruction of a portion of his brain somehow responsible for making sense of critical events arising in the social and personal spheres of his life. Damasio compares Gage with a modern counterpart, a man named "Elliot" who is able "to know but not to feel" (p. 45). Elliot, like Gage, made disastrous decisions, and his life, like that of his 19th century counterpart, spiraled out of control.

What is it that causes such subjects to lose control of their lives? How is it that one can retain one's knowledge, memory, intellect, and power to reason, yet find one's decision-making ability in ruins? How is it that the destruction of neural substance more concerned with "emotional" matters can so profoundly affect "intellectual" ones?

Damasio's central thesis deals with "somatic markers": as neural images of scenarios resulting from potential decisions on our part arise in our minds, unconscious feelings ("background feelings") accompany those images, disposing us to positively or negatively consider the images and the scenarios they represent (see p. 173). The resulting marking narrows our list of potential scenarios by allowing us to discount various options outright, or by strongly encouraging us to pursue various others.

Much of Damasio's book comprises the development of the neural machinery to support this hypothesis, the testing of the hypothesis through experiments performed on Elliot and others with brain damage like his, and the erecting of defenses against possible attacks on the hypothesis.

I've not found this book as engaging as the one that led me to it (Stanislas Dehaene's "The number sense"), but it's been an interesting read nonetheless.

On a personal note, I'm saddened that I most likely won't make it through many more books before Spring Break is over! ( )