Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience, Neurology, and Psychology at USC, directs USC's Brain and Creativity Institute, is adjunct professor at the Salk Institute and the Univ. of Iowa. He received many awards (several with his wife Hanna). (For his books I’ve read, click on his name.) This was a gift book.

Descartes’ Error was first published in 1994. Antonio Damasio is also author of two other widely acclaimed books – The Feeling of What Happens and Looking for Spinoza – in which he extends the ideas he introduces in Descartes’ Error. (I was given all three books but have only read Descartes’ Error.) The Penguin publication of Descartes’ Error has a 2005 Preface in which he summarizes and reflects upon the feedback he received on Descartes’ Error. This 6-pp Preface provides an excellent self-review, from which I quote extensively: “The main subject in Descartes’ Error is the relation between emotion and reason. Based upon my study of neurological patients who had both defects of decision-making and a disorder of emotions, I advanced the hypothesis (known as the somatic-marker hypothesis) that emotion was in the loop of reason, and that emotion could assist the reasoning process rather than necessarily disturb it, as was commonly presumed. Today this idea does not cause any raised eyebrows although at the time I presented the notion it startled many and was even regarded with some skepticism. On balance, the idea was largely embraced, so embraced that, on occasion, it was bent out of shape.” ...”I never suggested that emotion was a substitute for reasoning, but in some superficial versions of the work it sounded as if I was proposing that if you follow your heart instead of your reason all would be well. To be sure, on certain occasions, emotions can be a substitute for reason. The emotional action program we call fear can get most human beings out of danger, in shot order, with little or no help from reason.” …”Reasoning does what emotions do but achieves it knowingly. Reasoning gives us the option of thinking smartly before we act smart, and a good thing too; it is apparent that the emotions alone can solve many – but not all – the problems posed by our complex environment and that, on occasion, the solutions offered by emotions are counterproductive.”

“The new proposal in Descartes’ Error is that the reasoning system evolved as an extension of the automatic emotional system, with emotion playing diverse roles in the reasoning process.” …”When emotion is entirely left out of reasoning process, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions.” …”As for the knowledge used in reasoning, it too could be fairly explicit or partially hidden, as when we intuit a solution. In other words, emotion had a role to play in intuition, the sort of rapid cognitive process in which we came to a particular conclusion without being aware of all the immediate logical steps. It is not necessarily the case that the knowledge of the intermediate steps is absent, only that emotion delivers the conclusion so directly and rapidly that not much knowledge need come to mind. This is in keeping with the old saying which tells us that ‘intuition favors the prepared mind’.”

“The evidence that formed the basis for the somatic-marker hypothesis emerged over several years from the study of neurological patients whose social conduct had been altered by brain damage in a specific sector of the frontal lobe. The observations in those patients eventually led to another important idea in Descartes’ Error: the notion that the brain systems that are jointly engaged in emotion and decision-making are generally involved in the management of social cognition and behavior. This notion opened the way for connecting the fabric of social and cultural phenomena to specific features of neurobiology, a connection supported by powerful facts.”

Now for my comments: First, I found it most useful that his 4-pp Contents provide details of what’s covered in each of the 11 chapters. Second, his more technical discussions are flagged by a vertical line in the left margin, making it easy for readers who wish to skip technical aspects of neurobiology. Overall, Damasio carefully builds up his arguments from observations of patients in Ch 1-6. Ch 7 is Emotions and Feelings. Ch 8 is The Somatic-Marker Hypothesis. This is hard to define briefly, but I’ll give you a ‘taste.’ It is based in part on the “unpleasant gut feeling” when our mind raises a warning flag – this intuitive feeling increases the accuracy and efficiency of a decision process, so “somatic markers are a special instance of feelings generated from secondary emotions” that are based on our primary-emotional experiences. Ch 9 is Testing the Somatic-Marker Hypothesis. Ch 10 is The Body-Minded Brain. This is a good word choice, for the essence of his ideas is that mind, body, and brain work together as a unified system in which signals go from mind to body (and vice versa) using the brain; signals involve both brain neurons and body hormones. Ch 11 is A Passion for Reasoning. The “mind/body duality” of Descartes is wrong – Descartes’ error was to state “I think, therefore I am.” whereas Damasio makes the case in this book that it would be better to state “I am, therefore I think.” (But such one-liners seldom suffice.) Damasio uses the word mind but describes neither mind nor consciousness – words I and many others have a passion to understand. Some say (more one-liners) that “The brain is like computer hardware.” and “The mind is like computer software.” Since computer software can be stored in the computer’s hardware, I think that it would be a better analogy to say that “The mind is like computer software when it is actively running using the computer’s hardware.” This analogy of mind as activity is better, but it still doesn’t suffice for an adequate understanding.

Returning to his 2005 Preface: “The postscriptum of Descartes’ Error contained an idea which pointed the way to the future of neurobiological research: the mechanisms of basic homeostasis constitute a blueprint for the cultural developments of the human values which permit us to judge actions as good or evil, and classify objects as beautiful or ugly. At the time, writing about this idea gave me hope that a two-way bridge could be established between neurobiology and the humanities, thus providing the way for a better understanding of human conflict and for a more comprehensive account of creativity. I am pleased to report that some progress has been made towards building that bridge.” And I am hopeful that his two other widely-admired books will present this progress. As for Descartes’ Error, I’m convinced by his arguments for interactions between the brain’s emotional and reasoning parts, but I hunger for additional thoughts about a unified mind/brain/body system. I hope to learn his ideas about mind, self-awareness, and consciousness in his other two books I will read. As for Descartes’ Error, I highly recommend this well-written, stimulating, and insightful book by Antonio Damasio.