“The as-if body loop allows you to play fast and loose with emotional states in relation to ideas,” Damasio says. “And where you see that most of all is in reactions of empathy. When somebody tells you about something, and you feel a response—everything from real empathy to schadenfreude—it’s a simulation. That can happen at an incredibly high speed—100 milliseconds instead of the long route from the body, which might take more than a second.”
As fast as it is, the system requires a supply of somatic markers, past emotional experiences that serve as guides for the present decision. If your brain is incapable of drawing upon those emotional cues—as Damasio’s brain-damaged patients demonstrated—then all that speed is useless, because there’s nothing to ground the process, no memory of what shame or stress feels like. This is where the accelerated pace of modern life becomes interesting.
The trouble with forming somatic markers is that they take time—maybe too much time for an age of pure speed. “Events register faster and faster and more and more remotely, and you’re not even given time to let them sink in,” Damasio says. “For example, the lovers immortalized in the works of Jane Austen or George Eliot had a much longer experience of their feelings than we have today in a lot of circumstances. These days, by contrast, we have Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Your feelings for your wife—my feelings for my wife—those feelings that develop slowly are still very different; they’re an island of safety. But on the news, things are shown one after another. No matter how terrifying, images are shown so briefly that we have no time to sense emotionally the horror of a particular event.”
It’s not an accident that we’re talking about these issues while surveying one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. I’ve paid a visit to the Damasios at the pied-à-terre that they keep on the Upper East Side of Manhattan: a prewar apartment opened up with spare, loftlike furnishings and sliver views of Central Park. Riding the subway uptown, I’d thought how much faster the physical environment of the metropolis is, compared with the slower world of Iowa City, and so when I arrived I asked Damasio if he’d ever thought about the neurological effects of urban life. He nods as if the question was already on his mind. “The city was the beginning of acceleration. You think of the gentlemen farmers and their lives versus the speed of 19th- and 20th-century urbanization. Now, of course, you can get that acceleration anywhere because of the media. But the city was the beginning.”
On the face of it, the idea that the speed of modern life will lead to cognitive overload is a familiar complaint: Cultural critics like David Shenk and the late Neil Postman have warned of the dangers of an accelerated society. But Damasio has a twist. He’s not saying that the brain can’t keep up with it. He’s saying that part of the brain can’t keep up with it, while another part thus far has been game to go along for the ride.
“We really have two systems that are totally integrated and work perfectly well with each other but are very different in their time constants. One is the emotional system, which is the basic regulatory system that works very slowly, with timescales of a second or more. Then you have the cognitive system, which is much faster because of the way it’s wired and also because a lot of the fiber systems are totally myelinated, which means they work much faster. So you can do a lot of reasoning, a lot of recognition of objects, remembering names in just a few hundredths of a second. And in fact it has been suggested that we’re optimizing those times—we’re working faster and faster. Certainly people that are younger are now capable of working at faster rates.” You need only watch a teenager running 15 simultaneous instant messenger chats to see how certain brain functions can, with adequate training, reach astonishing velocities.
But other brain functions may have fixed ceilings. “There is no evidence whatsoever that the emotional system is going to speed up,” Damasio tells me. “In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that the emotional system, because it is a body regulatory system, is going to stay at those same slow time constants. There’s this constant limit, which is that the fibers are unmyelinated. So the conduction is very slow.” In a sense, this is an engineering problem. The system that builds somatic markers—the system that encodes the stream of consciousness with value—works more slowly than the system that feeds it data to encode. The result is not a danger that our cognitive machinery will short out. We can in fact process all that data, and perhaps more. The danger comes from the emotional system shorting out.
“The image of an event or a person can appear in a flash, but it takes seconds to make an emotional marking,” Damasio says. “So it stands to reason that we’re going to have fewer and fewer chances to have appropriate somatic markers, which means we’re going to have more and more events—particularly in our early years—that go by without the emotional grounding. Which means that you could potentially become ethically less grounded. You’d be in an emotionally neutral world.”
Emotional neutrality sounds like something from a daytime talk show, but for Damasio, these are strong words. He’s seen firsthand the damage done to a person’s life when those somatic markers can’t be formed. “The risk of emotional neutrality becomes greater and greater as the speed of cognition increases,” he explains. “There will be more and more people who will have to rely on the cognitive system entirely, without using their emotional memory, in order to decide what’s good and what’s evil.” The danger of our high-speed society in coming generations is not that they’ll be overloaded by the data; it’s that they’ll become like those patients Damasio started seeing back at Iowa years ago: brilliant on all the intelligence tests but ethically rudderless.
“They can be told about good and evil,” Damasio says with a wry smile, “but good and evil might not stick.”
