M412 

Emotion and Rationality 

Body and mind

In Descartes' Error.  Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain [i] neurologist Antonio Damasio attempts to bring together two aspects of human thinking that he says have traditionally been considered as separate neurological systems.[ii]

His experience over 20 years with many neurological patients has led him to the conclusion that a specific type of brain lesion causing an inability to experience emotional feelings is associated with a severe disability in decision-making capacities. In his own words, he says 'flawed reason and impaired feelings stood out together as the consequences of a specific brain lesion, and this correlation suggested to me that feeling was an integral component of the machinery of reason.' [iii] To illustrate his thesis he gives some fascinating medical histories of brain injured patients who, on recovering from damage to the forebrain, despite being physically fit and mentally rational and intelligent, were devoid of 'feeling and emotion', and were subsequently completely unable to make rational decisions.  People who had previously led successful and independent lives, working in responsible positions and managing their social and private affairs with sensitivity and skill had undergone permanent personality change simply through losing the emotional and feeling aspect of themselves.

The general pattern observed was of an inability by clients to make sensible decisions regarding what was good for themselves.  Becoming unreliable and therefore unemployable, unable to prioritise their use of time or choice of activities, and unable to satisfactorily plan their own future.  Losing all sensitivity for appropriate self-care behaviour, and sometimes losing awareness of what constitutes appropriate social behaviour, becoming 'uncouth'.  Damasio emphasises that such people appear quite fit and well, and are able to converse rationally and intelligently, but their emotional impairment makes them completely unable to live an independent life.

Up to this point, despite his fascinating thesis, one might consider that he had not moved far from Descartes' dualism of body and mind, as he is discussing two aspects of the physiological brain, emotion and reason; so-called 'low-level' and 'high level' brain functions, [iv] as though 'embodiment' were unimportant.  In fact his view is completely opposite as revealed in his subsequent explanation of what he means by 'feelings'.  Feelings, he says, rely not only on the limbic system (associated with the emotions) but also on brain sectors that 'map and integrate signals from the body'. [v]  He describes feelings as continuously updated information on the structure and state of our body as it operates and interacts.  He writes that because this sense of the body landscape is juxtaposed in real time to the perception or recollection of other things in the world, 'feelings' end up being qualifiers to these other things.  This seems to translate as - we read the world and 'the other' through the filter of our own body landscape and 'feelings' associated with it in the moment.  Embodied sensory perceptions are integral to human emotions, and emotions are integral to the ability to consciously and rationally organise one’s life.

William James proposed a similar thesis on 'feelings' in The Principles of Psychology first published in 1890.[vi]  In chapter 25 of volume 2 he writes that emotions are falsely considered as 'absolutely individual things' when in reality they are the products of more general causes.  He describes the general causes of human emotion as 'indubitably physiological' and quotes long extracts from other works demonstrating physiological effects and changes directly linked to emotional states.

He writes that the common assumption is 'that some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression.'  His theory 'on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.'  (his emphasis).  He continues with 'Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run;' but James believes this order to be incorrect.  'The bodily manifestations must first be interposed between.'  The body first reacts to a perceived fact, and we subsequently feel the emotion in response to the body.  'We feel sorry because we cry' because 'without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth.  We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run…., but we should not actually feel afraid' (his emphasis). [vii]

Damasio uses evolutionary explanations for this model of body/ mind.  He says long before 'humanity', beings were beings, and the organism survived through its sensory perceptions and physiological reactions, without thought.  Then an elementary consciousness began, and with it a 'simple mind'. We have now reached a level of great complexity in our conscious awareness and thinking ability, but this originates as it always did, from an embodied physiology. [viii]