In Descartes’ Error, Damasio tells the story of asking one patient to pick one of two dates for his next appointment: “The behavior that ensued . . . was remarkable,” he writes. “For the better part of a half-hour, the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could reasonably think about concerning a simple date. . . . He was walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences.” On the surface, this endless analysis sounds like a failure of reasoning, but Damasio suspected that there was a deeper cause.
“All these people shared one common trait: their emotions were compromised,” Damasio continues. “They were flattened, compared to the way they used to be, and compared to what we normally expect from people. Social emotions—shame, embarrassment—were specifically compromised.” Damasio’s colleague Dan Tranel did experiments in which people were shown a series of emotionally powerful images—towns destroyed by earthquakes, people drowning in floods—and monitored their body’s autonomic response, which is partially regulated by the amygdala. Patients with damaged emotional centers had consistently flat responses while normal subjects showed distinct spikes in response to the gruesome images.
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Damasio built his theory around the idea of somatic markers. Somatic refers to something related to the body, as distinguished from the psyche. Somatic markers are analogous to marked cards buried in a deck. The markers come in the form of bodily responses: your gut tightening in fear, your shoulders convulsing with warm laughter. Events that trigger those types of rich bodily reactions are encoded in positive or negative memories that are largely subliminal and affect your intuitive responses to everyday situations. When confronting a given decision, the emotional system flags specific options as particularly inviting or repellent based on information encoded—or “marked” in Damasio’s language—by past emotional experiences. For example, as you eye that last slice of cake at a dinner party, your emotional memories of past experiences—perhaps the guilt or shame you felt after behaving selfishly—flash in your head unconsciously, and you decide to offer the slice to your host. The somatic markers steer you toward a specific decision. Without those guides you would either devour the cake without any hint of embarrassment or spend 30 minutes running through all the potential consequences of eating or not eating it.
In Damasio’s view, such instinctual emotional responses result in behavior that seems more rational, not less so. “It’s not that I’m saying the emotions decide things for you,” Damasio says. “It’s that the emotions help you concentrate on the right decision.” You still have to do some of the work, but the emotions give you a head start.
The body is not always a perfect guide, of course. The brain-damaged patient who was crippled with confusion when trying to choose an appointment date confronted another telling situation while driving home one stormy winter night. The car ahead of him hit a patch of ice and skidded into a ditch. Faced with the same circumstances, most of us would most likely feel an overwhelming gut instinct to slam on the brakes, a reaction that would deposit us in the ditch as well. But Damasio’s patient made a purely rational decision and drove straight through the ice patch. In this exceptional situation, his lack of emotions was advantageous. Nonetheless, he was unable to hold a job and lead a normal life.
Impaired emotions tend to have a devastating impact on an individual’s ability to make rational decisions. The question that fascinates Damasio is whether our emotions can adapt to the increasing speed with which modern society confronts us with difficult choices.
Damasio considers his argument for the role of the body in higher forms of cognition the most controversial insight of his career. “Ten, 15 years ago, people whom I very much respect said, ‘You can’t be serious.’ Now they say, ‘You were absolutely right.’” Indeed, some critics these days dismiss Damasio’s once revolutionary ideas as old news—an updated version of William James, who famously argued in the late 1800s that emotions were simply a readout of the body’s physiological state. But on a number of fronts, Damasio’s ideas differ substantially from James’s. One specific departure from the Jamesian model laid the groundwork for Damasio’s interest in the speed of modern life. It involves a step away from the body, in the brain’s “as-if body loop,” as he calls it.
The brain, Damasio says, learns from the body’s response to external stimuli, but the brain is also a master simulator, capable of building mock versions of that emotional reaction. “You don’t always need to go to the body,” he says. “Because you’ve associated things over time, you’re going to associate a certain triggering point in the frontal lobe or the basal forebrain and tell certain regions of the brain stem to adopt a state of activity as if it were receiving signals from the body that were consonant with emotion x. But you bypass the body altogether. You just go straight to the result.”
When we feel emotions, we’re taking a survey of either our actual physiological state or an “as if” simulation. “People hear this and say: ‘Oh, it’s the body,’ but this is not James’s idea at all,” says Damasio. “Of course, he probably would have had that idea if he’d had the knowledge that we now have of the brain. But in 1880 he didn’t have all that.”
What’s the advantage of the as-if body loop? Speed. Triggering bodily changes throughout the organism is, relatively speaking, a sluggish process. Hormones have to find their way to muscle tissue, which then has to send feedback to the brain. That’s fine if you plan to be in that state for a while—running from a predator in the classic fight-or-flight example—but if you’re merely trying on the emotion in a moment of reflection (“Would I like to take her out?”), it’s too time-consuming to wait for the body to react. Life is filled with split-second judgments enhanced by the brain’s ability to simulate the body’s reactions. You call up a friend to ask for a small favor, but before you get around to it, he complains about how overloaded he is with work. In your head, a rapid-fire simulation runs: If I were him and someone asked me for a favor when I was in such an overtaxed state, how would that make me feel? The as-if loop serves up the answer: stressed, on edge, maxed out. And so you decide not to ask the favor after all. In that moment, your body doesn’t execute an entire stress response; there’s not a flood of the stress hormone cortisol in your bloodstream. Instead, you get a flash of what it would feel like if your body were in a state of stress, and the flash helps you make a more considerate—and considered—decision.
