Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain [Paperback]

Dr. Damasio focuses on some basic points instead. One basic point that he spends over 100 pages illustrating is the distinction he makes between "emotions" and "feelings". The former word he applies to objective emotional experience, such as facial expressions, body postures, measurements of autonomic function and behavior in humans and animals, even fruit flies. The latter applies to human subjective emotional experience. OK, I think most readers knew the difference between objective and subjective before page 1, so what is all this except to introduce the reader to the particular way Dr. Damasio uses a couple of words? Eventually he advances the thesis that "feelings" are secondary to "emotions" something like perceptions are to sensation. Really? Why not the other way around sometimes? Why not something more complex? Certainly perception influences both "emotions" and "feelings". Is it always "emotions" before "feelings"? If that's the case with Dr. Damasio's brain, I might enjoy playing poker with him.

He spends nine pages on an anecdote resulting from treating patients with Parkinsonism by placing electrodes into the midbrain. In one patient, a fluke placement of electrodes produced a profound sadness when stimulated, the emotion ending about 90 seconds after the current is turned off. The patient experienced it as artificial, connected at the time to sad images and desires, but not to any part of her life before or after. OK, sham emotions can be produced in animals with brainstem stimulation. We don't usually do that to humans, but it is interesting to hear someone's subjective experience along with the objective. What does it mean about emotions in general?

Putting great importance on that is like pretending to understand an NFL kicker from having patients wiggle their feet in a doctor's office. We can make someone's leg move from stimulating their spinal cord. I'd bet, though, that the mechanisms that determine who can kick a field goal and who can't are considerably upstream from there.

Dr. Damasio correctly describes the complexity of perception, how the brain is not a camera, not a passive receiver of information. It has our expectations within it, other aspects of attention, as well as the overwhelming complexity of being the organ of our consciousness, as mysterious as that still is. Consciousness remains as necessary a precondition for a subjective visual image as transparent corneas. Yet when it comes to "feelings", Damasio leaves so much out. Where is imagination, inspiration, even the possibility of spiritual influences in the process?

Another thesis Dr. Damasio advances is that the entire brain primarily serves the same purpose as the part of it that regulates body temperature. He describes the entire brain as a homeostatic organ as he goes off into discussing the implications of that for society. Funny, the influence of the one organ in our body that makes us the most human doesn't seem to have kept our society static throughout human history, just the opposite. What is it, the influence of aliens perturbing our natural homeostasis? Devils maybe? Sure our brains keep us alive, but not for everyday to be exactly the same. What with time spent on semantics, inadequate data, and this sort of overreaching, there just isn't that much science in this book.

Spinoza comes up in many ways. The biographical portions of the book are interesting, but pertain to neuroscience mostly as a negative example, I think. Among many quotes here are two. One from page 11:

"Love is nothing but a pleasurable state, joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause."

The book ends on page 289 with:

"Hope is nothing else but an inconstant joy, arising from the image of something future or past, whose outcome to some extent we doubt."

Is this anything but someone who values intellectual experience over emotional experience by quite a bit? What mechanisms make some love and others not, some loved and others not? What distinguishes that which turns out to be true hope from false hope? It's not all cognitive, I bet.

Damasio isn't as bold as Spinoza, but he doesn't chasten him either. I'm disappointed. I've heard Dr. Damasio give a good neuroscience lecture to a neurological audience. He knows how to do good science. This book is not that.

While I do not agree with everything he says -
(specifically his evidence regarding the difference between 'feeling' and 'emotion' seems to me to point toward 'feeling' occuring earlier, at least in some form)
the science is there to be tried and tested.

The other thing I didn't like about it was the writing style was too much in the philosophical vein for my personal tastes... but then science is philosophy, and the style is conciously chosen for that reason.

Overall a great read, though. The ideas presented far, far *far* outweigh the minor complaints I have about the book.